The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday, we tried to characterize the forces that permeated Greece and Rome in order to obtain an idea of the influences that have been carried over from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantean age, and we gave some indication of where we have to look today for signs of continued activity of the forces of the fourth post-Atlantean age. I want to ask you now to turn your attention once again to our description of the civilizations of Greece and Rome.

In the way it developed, the civilization of Greece was a source of great disappointment to the luciferic powers. One can, of course, only say these things out of imaginative cognition, and this will also be true of what is to be presented to you today. The development of Greek civilization was a great disappointment to the luciferic powers because they expected something quite different from it. Think what this means. They had expected the civilization of Greece, the fourth epoch of post-Atlantean times, to bring into being for them all they had striven for during Atlantean times. On Atlantis they had developed certain activities, certain influences and forces and they had expected to see the fruits of their labors appear in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. What was it they were really looking for?

To speak of such a matter lets us look right into the luciferic soul. We come to know this luciferic life that continually strives, hoping that certain results may ensue, but that continually meets with fresh disappointment. A logician would naturally ask, “Why do not these luciferic powers stop trying? Why do they not see that they must be forever and repeatedly disappointed?” Such a conclusion would be human, not luciferic, wisdom. At any rate, the luciferic powers have yet to come to this conclusion. On the contrary, it is their practice to redouble their efforts whenever they experience disappointment.

What was it, then, that the luciferic powers expected from this fourth post-Atlantean age? They wanted to obtain mastery of all the soul forces of the Greek people, those soul forces that were, as we have seen, directed to carrying over the ancient imaginations of the Chaldean-Egyptian period, and to incorporate them into the creations of their own fantasy. The luciferic powers made it their endeavor to work so strongly on the human beings of the Greek civilization that their imaginations, refined and distilled to fantasy, should fill their whole being. The Greeks would then have lost themselves in a soul world, in an everyday thinking, feeling and willing that would have consisted entirely of those subtle imaginations that had become complete fantasy.

If the Greeks had developed nothing in their souls but these imaginations refined to fantasy, if these enticing imaginations had come to fill their souls completely, the luciferic powers would have been able to lift the Greeks and a great part of humanity out of human evolution to place them in their own luciferic world. This was the intention of the luciferic powers. From the Atlantean epoch on, it had been their hope to achieve in the fourth post-Atlantean age what they had failed to do in Atlantis. Humanity, at the stage it had then reached, would have been incorporated into the cosmos. They wanted nothing less than to create for themselves a separate world where earthly gravity did not exist, but where human beings would dwell with absolute super-sensible lightness, entirely given up to a life of fantasy. It was the hope of the luciferic beings to create a planetary body, which would contain those members of humanity who had reached this highest development of the fantasy life. They made every endeavor to lead the souls of the Greeks away from the earth. Had they succeeded, these souls would gradually have forsaken the earth. The bodies that still came to birth would have been degenerate. Egoless beings would have been born, the earth would have fallen into decadence and a special luciferic kingdom would have begun. This did not come to pass. Why?

This condition did not come about because, mingled with the “self-deifying madness” of Greek poetry, to quote Plato, was the genius and greatness of Greek philosophy and wisdom. The Greek philosophers—Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—saved Greek civilization from being completely spiritualized in a life of fantasy. They kept the Greeks on earth, providing the strongest forces that kept Greece within earthly evolution. In considering the course of history, we must always take into account the forces that lie behind physical reality and are the true causes of all that happens. It was, then, in this way that Greece was preserved for earthly evolution.

Now, the luciferic beings would have been unable to achieve anything at all without the help of the ahrimanic beings. In all their intentions and hope they reckoned on their support. Indeed, it must always be that two forces strive together in this kind of working. Just as the luciferic beings were disappointed in Greece, so were the ahrimanic beings disappointed in Rome and the way it developed. The luciferic beings wanted to lead Grecian souls away from the earth-planet and the ahrimanic beings wanted to contribute their efforts to the end that the Roman civilization would assume a particular form. The ahrimanic beings exerted their strongest efforts in Rome, just as the luciferic beings did in Greece. They calculated that a certain hardening would arise on earth brought about by an entirely blind obedience and subjection to Rome. What did the ahrimanic powers want to accomplish in Rome? They wanted to establish a Roman Empire that would extend over the whole of the then known world, embracing within it every human activity. It would be directed entirely from Rome with the strictest centralization and the utmost development of the rule of might. They sought to establish a widely flung state machinery that would include and make subject to it all religious and artistic life. Its goal would be to stamp out all individuality. Every people and human being would comprise merely some small part of this mighty state machine.

Thanks to the clarity of its philosophers, however, Greece was not lulled into the luciferic dream, nor could Rome be hardened as these ahrimanic powers desired, because in Rome, too, something was working against them. This was described in the last lecture as Roman ideals, but the legal, political and military ideals that were then developing could not have withstood Ahriman alone. Within the Roman civilization the ahrimanic powers gathered for a stupendous onslaught. That attempt was like a repetition of their attempt made in Atlantean times, and it developed infinitely strong powers and forces. It was only from another side that Ahriman's intention was hindered. It was, at first, prevented by something that, at first sight, might be regarded as a lower trait in the Roman character, but that was not the case. As a matter of fact, the Romans had need of what I may have seemed to describe in the last lecture with some antipathy. They needed their ruthlessness, stubborn egoism, that continuous stirring up of emotions, to be able to march against the ahrimanic powers. Roman history—I beg you expressly to note this—is not a revelation of the ahrimanic powers. Although they stand in the background, it is a fight against them. If it is all confused and self-seeking, seeming to tend more and more toward a politicalization of the whole world, it is because only in this way could Ahriman's mechanizing be resisted.

All this alone, however, would not have been of much avail. Rome had also received Christianity, which in Rome would have assumed a form that would have given Ahriman a splendid opportunity to achieve his aim since, through the spiritual decline of a Roman rule that had been transformed into a papacy, the mechanizing of culture could have been accomplished. So another external power had to be brought against Ahriman, who works with much more external means than Lucifer. Ahriman, as we have seen, diverted the forces of Christianity to his own service. Another power had to be brought against him. This was the onslaught of the Germanic tribes caused by the migration of peoples in Europe. Through this onslaught on Rome, the mechanizing of the world under a single, all-embracing Roman Empire was hindered. If you will study all that took place in the migration of these peoples, you will find that you can get a true insight into it when you see it from this point of view. Whenever the migration of peoples occurs in the Roman world, Roman history is not thereby brought to an end, but the ahrimanic powers, combated throughout their history by the Romans, are repelled.

Thus did Ahriman meet with his disappointment, as Lucifer had met with his. But they will take up their tasks again in the fifth post-Atlantean age with all the more determination. Here is the point at which we must gain an understanding of the forces that are operative in our age, insofar as such an understanding is possible today.

The fourth post-Atlantean age extends both backwards and forwards from its central point in 333 A.D. It ended about 1413 A.D. and it began about 747 B.C. These are of course, approximate dates. I have just told you that the disappointment of Lucifer and Ahriman in the forms the Greek and Roman civilizations had assumed, has led them to make still stronger efforts in our fifth post-Atlantean age. Their efforts are already at work in the human forces that have been active from the fifteenth century. It does not matter whether something occurs a few decades earlier or later. In outer physical reality, which takes on the form of the “great illusion,” things are sometimes misplaced.

The fact that the Roman civilization could be retained in the evolution of humanity as it was due to the events brought about by the migrations of the peoples. If Rome had developed in such a way that a great all-embracing mechanized empire had arisen, it would only have been habitable for egoless human beings who would have remained on earth after Lucifer had drawn out their souls on the path of Greek culture and art. You see how Ahriman and Lucifer work together. Lucifer wants to take men's souls away and found a planet with them of his own. Ahriman has to help him. While Lucifer sucks the juice out of the lemon, as it were, Ahriman presses it out, thereby hardening what remains. This is what he tried to do to the civilization of Rome. Here we have an important cosmic process going on—all due to the intention and resolve of luciferic and ahrimanic powers. As I have said, they were disappointed. They have continued their efforts, however, and our fifth post-Atlantean age has yet to learn how strong these attacks are. They are now only beginning but they will become stronger and stronger. This age must learn, too, that the necessity to understand these attacks will become ever greater. At the beginning of an age the backward beings cannot work strongly. As yet, we are only in the beginning, and even though it became manifest only later, the luciferic and ahrimanic powers began to exert their forces before the expiration of the fourth post-Atlantean age.

To understand how these powers work in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we must turn our attention for a moment to what is intended for man in the right and normal course of his evolution. It is rightfully intended that he shall take a further step forward. The step taken by humanity in the fourth post-Atlantean age is revealed in the culture of the Greeks and in the political development of the Romans, and it was through the battle with Lucifer and Ahriman that what was intended actually came about. These opposing forces are always such that they fit into the progressive plan of the world. They belong to it and are needed there as opposing forces. But what special qualities are the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age, our own, to develop?

We know that this is the age of the development of the consciousness soul and that, to accomplish this, a number of forces—soul and bodily forces—must be active. First, a clear perception of the sense world is necessary. This did not exist in earlier times because, as you know, a visionary, imaginative element continuously played into the human soul. The Greeks still possessed fantasy but, as we have seen, after fantasy and imagination had taken possession of humanity, as it did of the Greeks, it then became necessary for men to develop the faculty to see the world of external nature without the illumination of a vision standing behind it. We need not imagine that such a vision has to be a materialistic one. That point of view is itself an ahrimanically perverted perception of sense reality. As indicated before, observation of sense reality is one task incumbent upon the human soul in our fifth post-Atlantean age.

The other task is to unfold free imaginations side by side with the clear view of reality—in a way, a kind of repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean age. To date, humanity has not progressed too far in this task. Free imaginations as sought through spiritual science means imaginations not as they were in the third post-Atlantean age, but unfettered and undistilled into fantasy. It means imaginations in which man moves as freely as he does only in his intellect. That, then, is the other task of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The unfoldment of these two faculties will lead to a right development of the consciousness soul in our present epoch.

Goethe had a beautiful understanding of this clear perception, which, contrary to the materialistic point of view, he described as his “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen). You will find that this has been dealt with at length in Goethe's writings, and I have spoken of it in my explanation of the primal phenomenon. His is a clear, pure perception of reality and of his primal phenomenon. Goethe not only gave the first impulse for perceptions free of any visions but also for free imaginations.¹ What he has given us in his Faust, even though it has not yet gone far in the direction of spiritual science, and in comparison with spiritual science is still more or less instinctive, is nevertheless the first impulse to a free imaginative life. It is no mere world of fantasy, yet we have seen how deep this world of fantasy really is that develops in free imaginations in the wonderful drama, Faust.

So, over against this primal phenomenon, we have what Goethe calls typical intellectual perception. You will find it described in detail in my book, The Riddle of Man. This mode of thought must continue to develop. The men of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, must not merely behold reality. They must be able to live with reality. They must get busy, like Goethe, and, working in quite a different way from that of the materialistic physicists, really make such use of their laboratory apparatus that it produces the primal phenomenon for them. They will then have to devise some way of getting the primal phenomenon into practical life. As you know, it is at home in, and holds sway throughout, nature. The intentions of humanity that come from free imaginations will have to be included in this primal phenomenon of nature. On the one hand, men will have to direct their gaze quite selflessly to the outer world to work in it and to gain knowledge of it. On the other, by powerful application of their personalities, they will have to bring it all into inner movement in order to find the imaginations for outer activity and outer knowledge. Gradually, the consciousness soul and its culture will achieve this transformation.

There will certainly be one-sidedness in this cultural epoch. That goes without saying. Our cognition will direct its efforts only outwards, as in Bacon, or only inwards, as in Berkeley. We have already spoken of this. The imaginative life welling up from within will not unfold without all manner of disturbing influences. But even now we can point to moments in this development when someone feels this free imaginative life springing up in his soul. In these beginnings it is still in great measure unfree, but we may see how so significant a man as Jacob Boehme, quite soon after the fifth post-Atlantean age began, felt how it was trying to develop in his soul. He brought this to expression in his Aurora, and we can feel as we read it how imaginative life was working within him. It must become free; Boehme still feels it to be a little unfree. Nevertheless, he knew it was a divine creative thing that was working in him. So Boehme was, in a sense, at the opposite pole to Bacon, whose endeavor always directed his attention to the external world. Jacob Boehme, however, was entirely engrossed in the world within, and described this world beautifully in the Aurora:

“I declare before God,” he says because he is speaking of his inner soul, “that I do not know how it comes to pass in me.” He means by this how the imaginations arise in him. “Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write.”

This is how Boehme speaks of the uprising of imaginations in himself. He detects the beginning of forces that must grow continually stronger in the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

“I declare before God that I do not know how it comes to pass in me. Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write. The spirit dictates to me in a great and marvelous knowledge what I write, so that often I do not know whether I am in this world with my spirit, and I rejoice exceedingly that sure and continuous knowledge is thus vouchsafed to me.”

Boehme describes the instreaming of the imaginative world. We can see that he feels harmony and rest in his soul, and he describes how men's souls shall, in the normal and right progress of their evolution, let themselves be taken hold of by these inner forces, which are to grow stronger in them in the fifth post-Atlantean age. But one must take possession of them in the pure inner being of the spirit and thereby avoid devious paths. In the seventeenth century one had to speak of these forces much in the way that Boehme, who spoke as a man completely and utterly devoted to divine righteousness, did.

The entire aim in the work of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers in the fifth post-Atlantean age, concerning both the perception of the primal phenomenon and the development of free imaginations, is to hinder these forces from arising in man. The luciferic and ahrimanic powers are working in this fifth post-Atlantean age to disturb these forces in the human soul, to employ them to a wrong end, thus bringing men's souls out of the earth sphere to establish a new sphere of their own. Many things must work together to disturb the right, quiet and slow unfolding of these forces. Note well that I say the quiet and slow unfolding because the entire period of 2,160 years, starting in 1413 A.D., should be used for the gradual unfoldment of the forces I have named, that is, free imaginations and the gradual development of working with primal phenomena. At intervals—by fits and starts, as it were—the luciferic and ahrimanic powers throw the whole weight of their opposition against this right evolution. When we bear in mind that everything is prepared for by the world beyond the earth long before it happens, we shall then not be surprised to find preparations being made to bring the strongest possible forces of opposition against the normal evolution of humanity.

We have already seen how the luciferic and ahrimanic powers poured what they had developed in Atlantean times into Greece and Rome. Now, in an altered form, they have tried to repeat these efforts before the arrival of the fifth post-Atlantean age. You will not be surprised when I say that for this fifth post-Atlantean age, too, a powerful impetus had to be present bearing along with it the after workings, in a luciferic and ahrimanic sense, from Atlantis. We know that the Atlantean influences spread out from a region that was called Atlantis even by Plato. Let us make a diagram and imagine Atlantis here, then over here on the right would be Europe and Asia, and here on the left would be America. The old Atlantean forces, including the old luciferic and ahrimanic forces, spread out from Atlantis. Some part of these Atlantean forces, however, was held

back, and it came to work in our fifth post-Atlantean age as luciferic and ahrimanic forces. That is, some part of the good forces, which were good and right in Atlantean times, have been carried over to our time to become luciferic and ahrimanic forces. Only the center was transferred to another region.

Atlantis, as we know, is gone and the center transposed to Asia. You must imagine it on the reverse side of my drawing and the effects of the old Atlantean culture spreading out from it as a preparation for the fifth post-Atlantean age.

Its intent was to lucifericize and ahrimanicize it. It was actually the descendants of the old Atlantean teachers who were now working from a place in Asia. A priest there had been educated to behold—to have a belated vision, as it were, of what the Atlanteans called the “Great Spirit,” and to receive his commands. These the priest communicated to a young man of remarkable energy and strength who, by virtue of this authority, received the name “The Great Ruler of the Earth” from his community. This was Genghis Khan. The Great Spirit, through his follower and through that priest, gave to Genghis Khan the command to summon all the powers of Asia to spread the influence that would lead the fifth post-Atlantean age back into a luciferic form. These forces—and they were far more powerful than the forces established in Greek culture—were all employed to this end. Free imaginations were to be changed into old, visionary imaginations. Every effort was to be made to lull the soul of man to sleep in a dim and dreamy experience of imaginations instead of a free experience filled through and through with clear understanding.

With the help of the special forces that had been preserved from Atlantis, it was the intended purpose to carry an influence into the West that would make its culture visionary. Then it would have become possible to separate the souls of men from the earth and to form a new continent, a new planetary body with them. All the unrest and disturbance that came into the evolution of modern man through the Mongolian invasions, everything connected with them that has gone on working into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—all this unrest, which was prepared long ago, is nothing more than the great attempt that is being made from Asia to bring about a visionary European culture. It would cut it off from the conditions of its further evolution and lead it altogether away from the earth, just as the East has experienced again and again this feeling of being filled with vision and of wanting to be estranged from the earth.

Something was needed to counterbalance this tendency. An opposite trend had to be created as a counterforce that moves in the direction of the normal evolution of mankind. The influence of Genghis Khan's priest was intended to bring about a kind of buoyancy and lightness in the human race that would draw man away from the earth. Over against this, a corresponding heaviness had to come to man from the weight of the earth; this was provided through the discovery of the western world. America, with all that it holds, was discovered and thereby earth heaviness, the desire to remain on earth, was given to man. The discovery of America and everything connected with it, and the way man carried his life into the many new places of the earth, all this, when seen in wider connections, shows itself as a counterbalancing force to the activity of Genghis Khan. America had to be discovered so that man might be brought to grow closer to the earth, to grow more and more materialistic. Man needed weight and heaviness to counterbalance the spiritualization that was the aim of the descendants of the “Great Spirit.”

Along with this normal process whereby the scene of action of man's life was extended to America, we find the other forces, the ahrimanic powers of the “Great Spirit,” intervening again. An influence came from America to Europe, and another came to permeate America from Asia. Thus, normal forces developed through the discovery of America and also powerful ahrimanic onslaughts. They worked less strongly at first, but will continue to work in our time and on into the future. We must learn to recognize these ahrimanic forces.

What Rome had achieved in the Church and in the ecclesiastical state was grasped by the ahrimanic influence. While it is comparatively easy to see how the luciferic influence worked on Genghis Khan—we have exact knowledge of the fact that a priest was initiated by the follower of the “Great Spirit”—it is much more difficult to say how the ahrimanic spirit worked. This is because the ahrimanic influence is dispersed and scattered. But you need only study how Spain, strictly Roman Catholic as it was, was fascinated by all the treasures of gold that were discovered in America. What a hold it had upon her! You can observe how strong the specter-like working of the old Romanism still was in such a ruler as Ferdinand of Castile or Charles V, the ruler of the kingdom over which the “sun never set.” Study the reaction of Europe to the gradual discovery and opening up of America and you will see what temptations came from that direction. Taken all in all, it is a history of temptation woven in with a history that runs a normal course.

Please do not go about saying that I have presented the discovery of America as an ahrimanic deed. In reality, I have said the very opposite. I have said that America had to be discovered and that the entire event was necessary to the progress of the world. Ahrimanic forces entered, however, and set themselves in violent opposition to what was happening quite rightly in the normal course of progress. Things are not so simple that we can say, “There is Lucifer, and there is Ahriman; they act and behave in such and such a way, and divide the world between them.” Things are by no means so simple as that.

We find, therefore, many forces working together when we set out to listen to them in their field of action behind the physical plane. These forces take possession of other forces. They try to seize the forces in man that have continued on from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in order to distort them and make them serve their ends. Look at a man like Machiavelli. You will find in him the symbol for the politicizing of thought that begins in the Renaissance. He is a veritable revelation of the whole process. He was a great and powerful spirit but one who, under the onslaught of the forces of which I have told you, brings to a new life again the complete attitude of thought and mind that has its source in the heathen Rome of ancient times. You have a true picture of Machiavelli when you study the history of his time and see him, not as a single personality, but as the outstanding expression of many who think in the same way. In him you can observe these forces trying to charge forward with all speed, bringing to their assistance the atavistic—and thus luciferic—forces that have been left behind. Had things gone as Machiavelli intended, all of Europe would have become nothing but a political machine. Opposing the violent onslaught of such forces are the forces that work in the normal direction. Over against a figure like Machiavelli, who was purely political and turned all man's thought into political thinking, we can place another great figure, Thomas à Kempis, who was also Machiavelli's contemporary. He stands entirely within the slow and gradual evolution, working slowly and gradually. He was anything but a man of politics.

So we can follow the several streams in history. We shall find normal streams, and we shall also find currents that flow from earlier times and are made use of by the forces of which I have told you. Many forces work together in history and it is important to observe and study their connections. A man like Jacob Boehme felt free imaginations rising within him. We can say of such a man that he fortified himself against the attacks of Lucifer and Ahriman through the whole character of his life of soul and succeeded in going undisturbed along the straight path of evolution.

East of Europe, however, in all the culture of the East, we find an untold number of people who suffer greatly under the disturbing influence of Lucifer. His influence is, as we know, to draw man again and again away from the earth, to draw him right out of his physical body so that he shall perpetually fall into a state where he becomes no more than a vision of himself and is completely soul. That is the tendency that has been grafted onto Eastern Europe.

The feeling of being drawn in the other direction was given to the West. The world of imagination was pulled down into the heavy physical body so that what should rightly be free imagination working merely in the soul becomes instead something that rams the soul down into the organism, thereby causing the organism also to live on imaginations. You can hardly find a more telling description of what I mean than in the words of Alfred de Musset in which he attempts to give us a picture of the condition of his soul. De Musset is one who feels the presence of the imaginative life in himself, but he also feels the onslaught upon this life of imagination that seeks to thrust it right down into the bodily nature. This life of imagination, which does not belong in the bodily nature but should develop freely, hovering in and existing purely as a thing of the soul, is there taken hold of by earthly gravity and by what belongs to the body. In his book, Elle et Lui, which he was led to write from his relation with Georges Sand, you will find a fine description of his soul life. I would like to quote here a passage that will serve to show how he feels himself to be placed within an imaginative life that is the scene of conflict and dispute. He says:

Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly. Weeping, and restraining myself with difficulty from crying out, I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing. If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. It would be better for me to forget it and wait for another. But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppress me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, really physical pains that I am quite unable to define. Such is my life when I let myself be ruled by this giant artist who is in me.

Note the contrast with Boehme, who feels the God in him. With de Musset it is a giant artist.

It were better that I live as I have resolved, committing excesses of every kind in order to kill this gnawing worm, which others modestly call inspiration and I quite often openly call illness.

Almost every single sentence of this quote can be matched with a sentence in our quotation from Boehme. How singularly typical! Remember what I said just now, that normal evolution seeks to progress slowly. We shall have more to say about this tomorrow. Here, as described by de Musset, it is a Wild charge; it cannot be fast enough. The picture he gives us as he surveys himself is marvelous. “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me atremble,” he says, because this to will go faster and faster and comes storming in upon him from the ahrimanic side, disturbing what is still trying to progress slowly.

“Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.” Here you have the whole psychology of the man who wants to live in free imaginations and is distressed and vexed by the onslaught of ahrimanic forces.

“Weeping and restraining myself with difficult from crying out...” Think of it! The imaginations work so physically in him that he feels like crying out when they find expression in him.

“I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing.” This because it comes from his organism and not from his soul!

“If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. Better I forget it and wait for another.” Here he wants perpetually to go faster, faster than normal evolution can go.

“But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppresses me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, actual physical pains that I am quite unable to define.” Then, when he beholds this giant artist that works within him, he says he would rather follow the life he has marked out for himself; that is, have nothing to do with this whole imaginative world, because he calls it an illness.

Now take by way of contrast, the saying of Jacob Boehme, “I declare before God, I myself do not know how it comes to pass in me.” Here you have an expression of joy and bliss. Confusion and bewilderment, on the other hand, can be heard in the words of de Musset, “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.”

With Boehme all is of the soul and, when he wants to write, he does not feel as though a giant artist, who makes him unhappy, were dictating to him, but a spirit. He feels that he is transported into the world where the spirit dictates to him. He is in this world and he is supremely happy to be there because a continuous stream of knowledge is given him that flows slowly and steadily on. Boehme is inclined to receive this slow stream of knowledge. He does not find it too slow because he is not overwhelmed by the swift attacking force I have described to you. On the contrary, he is protected from it.

If time permitted, we could present many more instances of ways in which individual human beings are situated in the world process. The examples I have selected are from those whose names have been preserved in history but, in a sense, all of mankind is subject to these same conditions in one way or another. I have only chosen these particular examples in order to express what is really widespread, and by taking special cases I have been able to give you a description of it in words. If you will try to make a survey of what we have been saying, you will then be able to understand much of what has come about in the course of evolution.

It would be quite possible in this connection to study many other phenomena of life. If, however, we confine ourselves today to the spiritual life, and moreover to that special region of the spiritual life comprising knowledge and cognition, we shall be able to find in it qualities that are characteristic of modern man, the recognition of which will make many things in life comprehensible. Since it is not possible to say much about the external life of today, owing to the existing prejudices and because men's souls are so deeply bound up with the conditions of the times in which they live, you will readily understand that it is only in a limited way that I can speak of the things that are carrying their influence right into the immediate present. It cannot be otherwise, as I have frequently made clear to you. I would like, however, to indicate certain phenomena of our time that are less calculated to arouse passions and emotions. Let me describe some phenomena that I will select from the life of cognition and feeling. I think you will find them underlying all I have been saying about the forces at work in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We will first consider these phenomena in a purely historical way in order afterward to see their relation to these forces.

Let us take first a phenomenon in which we all necessarily feel the deepest interest. The kind of understanding men have of the nature and being of Christ is of great significance, and so we will select examples of various kinds of understanding of His nature and being that lie near at hand. We have first of all a modern instance in Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus, which appeared in the 19th century and went rapidly through many editions. I believe the twentieth appeared in 1900 after his death. Then we have The Life of Jesus, which is really no life of Jesus at all, by David Friedrich Strauss. Then we have—we cannot say, a life of Jesus, but coming from the east of Europe it is a view and conception of Christ that is of deep significance. It is not a life of Jesus but an understanding of Christ that culminates in what Soloviev wrote about Him and His part in the evolution of the earth. How significant are these three expressions of the spiritual life of the nineteenth century: The Life of Jesus by Renan, The Life of Jesus by Strauss, which is no life of Jesus at all and we shall presently hear why, and Soloviev's conception of the meaning of the Christ event in the evolution of the earth, for it is true, at any rate, to say that all of his work culminates in the Christ idea.

What is the fundamental premise of Renan's description of Jesus' life? If you want to appreciate rightly Renan's book, to understand it as a document of the times, then you must compare it with the earlier presentations of Jesus' life. Nor do you need to read only the literary accounts of His life; you can also look at the paintings of artists. You will find that the representation of the life of Jesus always takes the same path. In the early centuries of Roman Christianity, it was not only Christianity that was taken over from the East but also the manner in which Jesus was presented. The Greek art of pictorial representation was there in the West, as we know, but the ability to portray the Christ remained with the East. The Jesus countenance that is characteristic of Byzantine art was found repeatedly in the West until, in the thirteenth century, national impulses and ideas began to arise—those national ideas and impulses that later work themselves out in the way I have indicated in these last lectures.

Owing to the national impulse, a gradual change came about in the traditional stereotyped Jesus countenance that had been portrayed so long. Each of several nations appropriated the Jesus type and represented Him in its own way, and so we must recognize many different impulses at work in the different representations. Study, for example, the head of Jesus as painted by Guido Reni, Murillo, and LeBrun, and you will see how strikingly the national point of view steals in. These are only three instances that one could select. In each case there is a strong desire to represent Jesus in a national way. One has the impression that in Guido Reni's, paintings, to a far greater degree than was the case with his predecessors, we can detect the Italian type in the countenance of Jesus; similarly, in Murillo's representations, the Spanish; in LeBrun's, the French. All three painters show evidence as well of the working of church tradition; behind every one of their paintings stands the power of the Church.

Contrarily, you will find a resistance to this far reaching power of the Church, which we recognize in the art of Murillo, Lebrun, and Reni, in the works of Rubens, van Dyck, and Rembrandt—a resistance to it and a working in freedom out of their own pure humanity. Considering art in respect of its representations of the Jesus countenance, you have here direct artistic rebellion. You will now see that there is no standing still in this progression in the representation of Jesus because the forces that are at work in the world work also right into this domain. We can see how the breath of Romanism hovers over the paintings of the nationally minded LeBrun, Murillo, and Reni, and how in Rubens, van Dyck, and especially Rembrandt, the opposition to Romanism comes to such clear expression in their paintings of faces, not of Jesus alone but also of other Biblical characters. So we see how all the spiritual activities of man gradually take form among the various impulses that make themselves felt in human evolution.

Similarly, you would find that in the times when painting and representative art have given place to the word, for since the sixteenth century the word has had the same significance in such matters as pictorial representation had in earlier times, you will find that the figure of Jesus, of the Christ, is again continually changing. It is never fixed and constant but is always conceived according to how the various forces flow together in writers. Standing there before us as the latest products, let us say, we have the Jesus of Renan, the Jesus of Strauss, who is no Jesus, and the Christ of Soloviev. These are the latest products and how vastly different they are!

The Jesus of Renan is entirely a Jesus who, as a man, lives in the land of Palestine as a human historical figure. Palestine itself is marvelously depicted. With the aid of the best of modern scholarship it is described in such a way that one has before one the complete Palestinian landscape with its people. Wandering about this realistically rendered landscape and among its people is the figure of Jesus. The attempt is made to explain this Jesus figure on the basis of this landscape and its inhabitants; to explain how he grows up and becomes a man, and to explain how it was possible for such a man to arise in this land. The outstanding character of Renan's description will only be revealed when we compare it with earlier accounts and representations. These take the inner course of the events described in the Gospels and place them in a landscape that is really nowhere in particular. The facts as they are described in the Gospels are simply related over and over again and the landscape in which they occurred is totally disregarded. It is depicted in such a way that it might be anywhere.

Renan, however, goes to work to portray the Holy Land in a realistic, detailed way so that Jesus becomes a true Palestinian in this Holy Land. Christ Jesus, who should belong to all of mankind, becomes a Jesus who lives and walks in Palestine as an historical figure who is to be understood in relation to the Palestine of the years 1 to 33 A.D., that is, understood from the customs, views, opinions and landscape of the country—a right proper, realistic description. For once, Jesus was to be shown as an historical person and was to be described as any other in history. For Renan, it would have been meaningless to portray an abstract Socrates who might have lived anywhere, anytime, and it would have been equally meaningless for him to portray an abstract Jesus who might have lived anywhere on earth. In complete accord with the science of the nineteenth century, he sets out to depict Jesus as an historical figure living between the years 1 and 33 A.D., and made absolutely comprehensible by the conditions prevailing in Palestine at that time. Jesus lived from the year 1 to 33 A.D. He died in 33 A.D., just as any other man might have died in this or that year. If He continues to work in the world, it is in the same way any other dead person might have continued to work. Fitted completely into the modern point of view, Jesus was an historical personality accounted for by the milieu in which He lived. That is what Ernest Renan gives us in his Life of Jesus.

Now let us turn to the Life of Jesus that is in reality no life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. I have said it is no life of Jesus. Strauss also works as a highly cultured and learned man. When he sets out to investigate anything, he does so with thoroughness akin to that of Renan in his domain. Strauss, however, does not turn his attention to the historical Jesus. He is, for him, only the figure to which he attaches something quite different. Thus, Strauss investigates all that was said of Jesus insofar as He was the Christ. He examines what is said about His miraculous entry into the world, His wonderful and miraculous development, His expression of great and special teachings, and how He undergoes suffering, death and resurrection. These are the accounts in the Gospels that Strauss selects for investigation.

Naturally, Renan, too, used the Gospels but he reduced them to what he, from his detailed and exact knowledge of Palestine, could conceive of the life of Jesus. This approach has no interest at all for Strauss. He tells himself that the Gospels relate this or that concerning Christ, who lived in Jesus. Then he sets out to investigate the extent to which what is related of the Christ has also been living as myth in other parts of the world, for instance, how the story that is told of a miraculous birth and the development of Jesus Christ is to be found in various other folk myths, as is also the Mystery of Golgotha, which is referred now the one god and then to another. Thus, Strauss sees in the figure of the historical Jesus only the opportunity for concentrating the myth forming activity of mankind into one personality. Jesus does not concern him at all. The only value He has for Strauss is that the myths, which are distributed all over the world, are concentrated in this single man Jesus. They are all hung on Him, as it were. These myths, however, all spring from a common impulse. All of them bear witness to the myth forming power that lives in mankind. Where does this myth forming power arise?

As Strauss sees it, in the course of mankind's earthly development, from the times of the first beginnings of the earth to its final end, mankind has and always will have a higher power in it than the merely external power that develops on the physical plane. A power runs right through mankind that will forever address itself to the super-earthly; this super-earthly finds expression in myths. We know that man bears something super-sensible within him that seeks to find expression in myth since it cannot be expressed in external physical science. Thus, Strauss does not see Jesus in the single individual, but rather the Christ in all men—the Christ who has lived in and through all men since their beginning, and who has brought it about that myths are told of Him. In the case of Jesus it is only that His personality gives occasion for the myth forming power to develop with extreme force and strength. In Him it is concentrated. Strauss, therefore, speaks of a Jesus that is in reality no Jesus, but he fastens upon Him the spiritual Christ force that lives in all humanity. For Strauss, mankind itself is the Christ, and He works always before and after Jesus. The true incarnation of the Christ is not the single Jesus, but the whole of humanity. Jesus is only the supreme representative for the representation of the Christ in mankind.

The main thing in all this is not Jesus as an historical figure, but an abstract mankind. Christ has become an idea, which incarnates in and through all mankind. That is the kind of highly distilled thought that a man of the nineteenth century is able to conceive! The element of life in the idea has become the Christ. He is conceived entirely as an idea and Jesus is passed by. This is a life of Jesus that is no more than a record of the fact that the idea, the divine, incarnates continually in all humanity. Christ is diluted down to an idea, is thought of merely as an idea.

So much for the second life of Jesus, The life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. So we have Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus. which sets forth the historical figure of Jesus amidst the individuals around Him as well as by Himself. Then we have in Strauss's book the “idea of Christ,” which runs through all mankind. In this highly distilled form, however, it remains a mere abstraction.

When we come to Soloviev, behold, Jesus is no more, but only the Christ. Nevertheless, it is the Christ conceived as living. Not working in men as an idea, with the consequence that its power is transformed in him into a myth, but rather working as a living Being who has no body, is always and ever present among men, and is, in effect, positively responsible for the external organization of human life, the founder of the social order. Christ, who is forever present; a living Being who would never have needed a Jesus in order to come among men. Naturally, you will not find this so radically expressed in Soloviev, but that is of no account. It is the Christ as such Who stands always in the foreground—the Christ, moreover, as the living One who can only be comprehended in imagination, but by this means can be truly understood as a real and actual super-sensible Being working on earth.

There you have the three figures. The same Being meets us in the nineteenth century in a threefold description. The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, completely realistic; realistic history a fortiori; Jesus as an historical figure; a book that is written with all the learning of the nineteenth century. Then came David Friedrich Strauss with this idea of mankind, working on, running through all mankind, but remaining an idea, never awakening to life. Lastly, Soloviev's Christ; living power, living wisdom, altogether spiritual.

A realistic life of Jesus by Renan; an idealistic life of Jesus by Strauss that is also an idealistic presentation of the Christ impulse; a spiritual presentation of the Christ impulse by Soloviev.

Today, I want to place before you, side by side as three expressions of modern life, these three ways of cognizing the figure of Jesus Christ. Tomorrow we shall see how they take their place among the various impulses that we have recognized as working in mankind.

• 1. This distinction between pure perception free of memory pictures and visions on the one hand and an objective imagination which begins with brain-free thinking on the other is developed in Boundaries of Natural Science, Anthroposophic Press, 1983

It is extraordinarily difficult to speak of the conditions that were alluded to in the previous lecture because, in more recent times, in our age of materialistic thinking, the ideas and concepts for doing so are largely lacking. They must first be acquired through spiritual science. The information that can be given is, therefore, more in the nature of indications. Moreover, there is a further reason, which is determined by the whole development of our modern culture. This further reason that causes certain difficulties in treating conditions that are hidden behind the threshold of knowledge from modern man is that, on the whole, he has become somewhat lacking in courage. If one wishes to avoid actually using the word cowardly, one cannot say it differently. He has become weak in courage. The modern person much prefers his knowledge to give him nice pleasant feelings, but that is not always possible. Knowledge can fill us with inner satisfaction even when it does not convey exactly pleasant matters, because these—well, unpleasant things belong to truth. In every case one should find satisfaction in truth since even regarding the most terrible truths one can experience a kind of feeling of upliftment. As I have said, however, modern man is much too weak in courage for that; he wants to feel uplifted in his own way. This, too, is connected with secrets of modern existence that will become clearer in the course of such studies as we are now undertaking.

The particular faculties of which we have spoken, namely, the unfolding in our thought and deed of free imaginations and an attitude toward the world based on the primal phenomenon, can only be acquired by modern man when a veil is drawn over certain processes that are occurring, when they don't easily reveal themselves. Thus, it is also a necessary part of the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that man does not understand certain things that thrust themselves into our sense world from the subsensible and super-sensible worlds. Most important events that are enacted around us before our very eyes are, in fact, not understood at all by modern man. In a way, he is protected from understanding them because he can only properly evolve the two faculties mentioned above under this protection. Foundations for his understanding of these events, however, have already begun to be laid. They have now progressed so far that evolution cannot continue to advance without reference being made, with a certain care and caution, to these matters.

Modern man, with his experience of what happens around him and of what he himself does and sets going, has but feeble reflections of what is surging and welling up in his own subsensory nature. At best, it emerges from time to time in frightening dream pictures, but they, too, are only feeble. What is happening in the subsensible is unknown to the man of today, and under normal circumstances he knows little of the super-sensible. Beneath what we modern people experience in the soul lies something that one can only describe as eruptive forces. It can be compared precisely with the world one experiences when standing on volcanic ground; you only have to set fire to some paper to have smoke burst out everywhere. If through the smoke you could see what is swirling and bubbling down below, you would then indeed realize what sort of ground you were actually standing on.

It is the same with modern life. We observe that Ernest Renan writes his Life of Jesus, and we see it as we see a solfatara or volcanic landscape. We see what David Friedrich Strauss writes, and we describe it as calm and peaceful. We see what Soloviev writes and we describe that too as calm and peaceful. All of this is written calmly as if we have not yet lit a piece of paper to see the eruptive impulses of humanity living and working beneath the soil.

A great deal has really been said with these few words. It only needs to be systematically thought through and you will see that it is so. What we described at the end of our observations yesterday we see is like living over a volcano. It is, however fully in accord with the purpose of evolution to see things so peaceful and harmless. That is good because beneath this peacefulness and harmlessness the very faculties that we need in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch are being developed. In most people they are not developed consciously, though in spiritual science the endeavor must be made to do so. Hence, it becomes necessary from time to time to indicate with care and caution the things one becomes aware of when one kindles that little piece of paper. Why is all this so? In the first place, because the ahrimanic powers have something quite different in mind for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the fourth post-Atlantean culture they were greatly disillusioned through the Roman evolution, as we described in the last two lectures. They did not attain their goal and therefore have prepared still worse onslaughts for our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, for they mean to try again to achieve their purpose.

Now I have already mentioned that something is coming to expression from two sides, even geographically, that will burst like a storm into our calm and peaceful evolution in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, predisposed as it is to calm and peace. I pointed to one of these directions when I told you how Genghis Khan was inspired by the priest who had seen a descendant of the “Great Spirit” of old Atlantis. I also indicated how a certain ahrimanic attack was launched from the West through all that followed the discovery of America. It has been overcome in a certain respect but continues to live on in it as a resistant force. One must not think that things that are not seen are not there. Because what the ahrimanic powers took in hand in the Western Hemisphere did not come to outer physical earthly reality, our fifth post-Atlantean culture has been saved from the first attacks. But it goes on living in a sort of spectral form. It is there and impresses itself into men's impulses. People know nothing of it, however, and are unaware that it lives in and inserts itself into their impulses. Now it is only through placing pictures side by side that I can really lay a foundation for concepts that you must gradually create and form for yourselves in meditation. It would not be easy to find concepts in the present fund of ideas to explain what actually lives in the urges and impulses below the threshold. They push up, to be sure, into the ordinary soul life but they are normally covered over and unperceived in modern normal life.

Upon the soil of the Western Hemisphere that was now trodden through the discovery of America, quite special conditions had gradually been taking shape in the course of past centuries. The general population inhabiting those parts was far from attaining the qualities that had meanwhile been developed in the Eastern Hemisphere of Europe and Asia. A people lived in the West who stood far removed from the intellectual capacities that had evolved in the Eastern Hemisphere, but among them were a great number of individuals who had been initiated into certain mysteries. Before the discovery of America, there were mysteries of the most varied kind in the Western Hemisphere and they had a large following for the teachings that came from them. Like a single central power whom all followed and obeyed, a kind of spectral spirit, a descendant of the “Great Spirit” of Atlantis, was revered. This spirit had gradually assumed an ahrimanic character because he still worked with forces that had been right in Atlantis or were already ahrimanic there.

When the Atlantean spoke of his “Great Spirit,” he expressed it, as we have seen, in a word that sounded something like the word “Tao,” which is still preserved in China. An ahrimanic, caricatured counterpart appeared in the West as opponent of the “Great Spirit Tao” but he was still connected with him. He worked in such a way that he could only be made visible through atavistic, visionary perception but whenever they desired his presence, he always showed himself to those persons connected with the widespread mysteries of this cult so they could receive his instructions and commands. This spirit was called by a name that sounded something like Taotl. Taotl was thus an ahrimanic distortion of the “Great Spirit”—a mighty being and one who did not descend to physical incarnation. A great many men were initiated into the mysteries of Taotl but the initiation was of a completely ahrimanic character. It had a quite definite purpose and goal, which was to rigidify and mechanize all earthly life, including that of humans, to such a degree that a special luciferic planet, which has already been referred to in these studies, could be founded above earthly life. The souls of men could then be drawn out to it, by force and pressure.

As we described yesterday, what the ahrimanic powers were striving for in the civilization of Rome was only a feeble echo of what those who, under the leadership of Taotl, set out to attain, and this in much fuller and wider measure by means of the most frightful magical arts. The goal they aimed to achieve was to make the whole earth a realm of death, in which everything possible would be done to kill out independence and every inner impulse of the soul. In the mysteries of Taotl the forces were to be acquired that would enable men to set up a completely mechanized earthly realm. To this end, one had, above all, to know the great cosmic secrets that relate to what works and lives in the universe and reveals its activities in earthly existence. You see, this wisdom of the cosmos is fundamentally in its wording, always the same, because truth is always the same. The point is, however, whether or not it is received in such a way that it is employed rightly.

Now this cosmic wisdom, which was intrinsically not evil but held holy secrets hidden within it, was carefully concealed by the initiates of Taotl. It was communicated to no one who had not been initiated correctly by the Taotl method. When a candidate had been initiated in the correct way, the teaching concerning the secrets of the cosmos was then imparted to him. Now, it was necessary for him to receive these secrets through initiation in a quite definite mood of soul. He had to feel in himself the inclination and desire to apply them on earth in such a way that they would set up that mechanistic rigid realm of death. It was thus that he had to receive the secrets. Nor were they communicated except on one special condition. The wisdom was imparted to no one who had not previously committed a murder in a particular manner. Moreover, only certain secrets were communicated to the candidate after the first murder, but further and higher secrets were imparted to him after he had committed others.

These murders, however, had to be committed under quite definite conditions. The one to be murdered was laid out on a structure that was reached by one or two steps running along each side. This scaffold-like structure, a kind of catafalque, was rounded off above and when the victim was laid upon it, he was bent strongly back. This special way of being bound to the scaffold forced his stomach outward so that with one cut, which the initiate had been prepared to perform, it could be cut out.

This kind of murder engendered definite feelings in the initiate. Sensations were aroused that made him capable of using the wisdom later imparted to him in the way that has been intimated above. When the stomach had been excised, it was offered to the god Taotl, again with special ceremonies. The fact that the initiates of these mysteries lived for the quite specific purpose that I have indicated to you, imparted a definite direction to their feelings. When the candidates to be initiated had matured on this path and had come to experience its inner meaning, they then learned the nature of the mutual interaction between the one who had been murdered and the one who had been initiated. Through the murder, the victim was to be prepared in his soul to strive upward to the luciferic realm, whereas the candidate for initiation was to obtain the wisdom to mould this earthly world in such a way that souls would be driven out of it. Through the fact that a connection was formed between the murdered and the initiated—one cannot say “murderer,” but “initiated”—it was made possible for the initiated to be taken with the other soul; that is, the initiated could himself forsake the earth at the right moment.

These mysteries, as you will readily admit, are of the most revolting kind. Indeed, they are only in accord with a conception that can be called ahrimanic in the fullest sense. Nevertheless, certain feelings and experiences were to be created on earth by their means. Now, naturally, the evolution of the earth would not continue if, over a considerable part of its surface, mankind and an interest in mankind should completely die out. The interest in humanity, however, did not quite die out even there because other and different mysteries were founded that were designed to counteract the excesses of the Taotl mysteries. These were mysteries in which a being lived who did not come down to physical incarnation but also could be perceived by men gifted with a certain atavistic clairvoyance when they had been prepared. This being was Tezcatlipoca. That was the name given to the being who, though he belonged to a much lower hierarchy, was partly connected through his qualities with the Jehovah god. He worked in the Western Hemisphere against those grisly mysteries of which we have spoken.

The teachings of Tezcatlipoca soon escaped from the mysteries and were spread abroad exoterically. Thus, in those regions of the earth, the teachings of Tezcatlipoca were actually the most exoteric, while those of Taotl were the most esoteric, since they were only obtained in the manner described above. The ahrimanic powers sought to “save” humanity, however—I am now speaking as Ahriman thought of it—from the god Tezcatlipoca. Another spirit was set up against him who, for the Western Hemisphere, had much in common with the spirit whom Goethe described as Mephistopheles. He was indeed his kin. This spirit was designated with a word that sounded like Quetzalcoatl. He was a spirit who, for this time and part of the earth, was similar to Mephistopheles, although Mephistopheles displayed much more of a soul nature. Quetzalcoatl also never appeared directly incarnated. His symbol was similar to the Mercury staff to be found in the Eastern Hemisphere, and he was, for the Western Hemisphere, the spirit who could disseminate malignant diseases through certain magic forces. He could inflict them upon those whom he wished to injure in order to separate them from the relatively good god, Tezcatlipoca. The powerful onslaughts were thus prepared in the West that were to be made upon the world of human impulses.

Now at a certain time a being was born in Central America who set himself a definite task within this culture. The old, original inhabitants of Mexico linked the existence of this being with a definite idea or picture. They said he had entered the world as the son of a virgin who had conceived him through super earthly powers, inasmuch as it was a feathered being from the heavens who impregnated her. When one makes researches with the occult powers at one's disposal, one finds that the being to whom the ancient Mexicans ascribed a virgin birth was born in the year 1 A.D. and lived to be thirty-three years old. These facts emerge when, as stated, one examines the matter with occult means. This being set himself a quite specific task.

At this same time in Central America another man was born who was destined by birth to become a high initiate of Taotl. This man had in his previous earthly incarnations been initiated as described above and through the fact that he had many, many times repeated the procedure involving the excision of the stomach, which has been described to you and which there is no need to recapitulate, he had been gradually equipped with a lofty earthly and super-earthly knowledge. This was one of the greatest black magicians, if not the greatest ever to tread the earth; he possessed the greatest secrets that are to be acquired on this path. He was faced directly with a momentous decision as the year 30 A.D. approached, namely whether or not, as a single human individual, to become so powerful through continuous initiation that he would come to know a certain basic secret. Through knowledge of this secret he would have then been able to give such a shock and impetus to the coming evolution of man on earth that humanity in the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epochs would have been thrown into terrible darkness, with the result that what the ahrimanic powers had striven for in these epochs could have come into existence.

Then a conflict began between this super-magician and the being to whom a virgin birth was ascribed, and one finds from one's research that it lasted for three years. The being of the virgin birth bore a name that, when we try to transpose it into our speech approximates Vitzliputzli. He is a human person who, among all these beings who otherwise only moved about in spirit form and could only be perceived through atavistic clairvoyance, in actual fact became man, so the story goes, through his virgin birth. The three year conflict ended when Vitzliputzli was able to have the great magician crucified, and not only through the crucifixion to annihilate his body but also to place his soul under a ban, by this means rendering its activities powerless as well as its knowledge. Thus the knowledge assimilated by the great magician of Taotl was killed. In this way Vitzliputzli was able to win again for earthly life all those souls who, as indicated, had already received the urge to follow Lucifer and leave the earth. Through the mighty victory he had gained over the powerful black magician, Vitzliputzli was able to imbue men again with the desire for earthly existence and successive incarnations.

Nothing survived from these regions of what might have lived on if the mysteries of Taotl had borne fruit. The forces left over from the impulse that lived in these mysteries survived only in the etheric world. They still exist subsensibly, belonging to what would be seen if, in the sphere of the spirit, one could light a paper over a solfatara. The forces are there under the covering of ordinary life, which is like the surface crust of a volcano.

So, on one side, what came from the inspirer of Genghis Khan entered into the forming of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and, on the other, what worked on as the ghost or spectre of the events that had taken place in the Western Hemisphere. No more than a feeble echo was left of this when the Europeans discovered America. But it is even known in ordinary history that many Europeans who set foot on Mexican-American soil were murdered by the decadent priesthood, which, though no longer as evil as in earlier times, still cut out the stomach, as I described. This was the fate of many Europeans who trod the soil of Mexico after the discovery of America, and the fact is even known to history.

In Vitzliputzli these people revered a Sun being who was born of a virgin, as I have said. When one investigates it occultly, one finds that he was the unknown contemporary in the Western Hemisphere of the Mystery of Golgotha. One can, indeed, also describe these things superficially as modern people like to do to avoid giving pain. If, however, one desires real knowledge, the one must cast a fleeting glance upon these concrete facts of the past, as we have done today. Yes, when we regard this modern human soul, we see how below, in the direction of the subsensible, and how above, in the direction of the super-sensible, it is exposed to great and serious dangers, and how forces play in that remain unknown. Yet it is good that they remain unknown because it is only in this way that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch can develop. The veil must be lifted now so that consciousness may be added to what still remains unconsciousness, because enough time has passed since America has been discovered. Otherwise, if consciousness did not gradually enter, these forces would become paramount, and the relatively beneficent conditions of the time of unconsciousness would turn around and become the curse of humanity. After all, many things, which in the way they have made their appearance have proved a benefit, bear the inherent tendency to become a curse to mankind.

I wished to indicate to you by means of this description the sort of things that are surging and seething beneath the surface. Now let us leave this sub-earthly region and again consider the earthly, but without trying to make any immediate connections in thought between the two realms; we can do that later. Let us consider the question as to how that most remarkable and brilliant Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan was written in such a way that Jesus is depicted as a man who went about on earth as I have described. Such a gifted personality as Renan was not conscious of the ground on which he wrote precisely this life of Jesus. Such a work was written out of quite definite impulses but they remain in the unconscious. The impulses out of which this book was written can be considered collectively as one fundamental impulse or instinct that so far has produced only what is good—within certain limits, relatively good—because it is an excellent work of its kind. Many other things have been done out of this same instinct. I have only chosen this one example in the sphere of knowledge but one could also choose examples from life. Here, however, one would come into spheres where people are easily irritated.

Renan's book is written out of a fundamental impulse that tries to attain a specific object, namely, to observe purely externally what we know as man, to view him solely as he is when placed out into the world. I have chosen this example of the life of Jesus because, actuated by this instinct, Renan here approaches the most sacred personality of humanity and describes Him in such a way that He stands before us only as outer personality. Should it go on increasing indefinitely, where would this natural impulse eventually lead us? It would lead to a point where men would no longer be inclined to look into their own souls when they observe the world. Renan has gone so far that he no longer trusts himself to look into his own inner self when he speaks of Christ Jesus. He speaks only of the historic figure and endeavors to perceive Him externally. This comes from the instinct to lose oneself gradually in mankind and so come to see each person in the world only outwardly, no longer responding to what is reflected into one's soul from another human being.

Here, the natural impulse of primal phenomenon perception is carried to an extreme: The outer world is to be perceived without stirring the inner life in any way. The one-sided perfecting of this impulse aims at a human society in which people only see each other externally when they meet. In many respects the immediate present shows us how far the impulse has gone because it is already assumed today that people are to be understood less and less from their inner qualities of soul and more and more purely externally. The false cultivation of the idea of “nation,” in particular, stamps a man with nationality—an external condition when compared with the inner soul nature. He is then judged in accordance with this nationality and is thereby moulded in life so that he comes to be regarded only as belonging to a certain nation rather than for his own character and qualities. This is one of the forces that does great service to his natural impulse. By these means earthly humanity would tend to be enclosed increasingly within national boundaries, which would become impassable in the future. Thus, out of this first impulse, the picture of each human being arises as he stands merely externally in the world.

Now let us look at the other impulse. It would be such that through it one would consider inner experience only, paying no attention to the external man and perceiving only what can be lived through inwardly, what can be directly felt in the soul. If one makes this impulse a criterion of knowledge regarding the figure of Christ Jesus, then interest in the Jesus figure would naturally decline and would center only on the Christ being. Should this impulse spread, there would be no interest in Jesus as an historical figure but only in study of the Christ being. It is the opposite of the other impulse and it, too, is now striving to become general in earthly humanity. Should it succeed, people would pass one another by, each brooding inwardly over himself in a rich life of soul. They would pass each other without even feeling the need to understand the individual character of those around them. Everyone would only desire to live in the home of his own soul, as it were. In the sphere of knowledge this impulse inspired Soloviev in his treatment of the most sacred Being of humanity. He had interest only in the Christ and not for the historical Jesus.

You see the two extremes toward which modern man is tending. The one is the impulse, the instinct, only to view the world from outside, to carry the primal phenomenon to an extreme. The other is to conceive of the world only inwardly in free imaginations. All this is in its beginnings and up to the present has developed in admirable, beneficent ways, but it also has a strong tendency to become the reverse. Just as Renan's Life of Jesus is a masterpiece of external description, so are Soloviev's representations of the Christ Being the highest that could have been created in this sphere in the present day. They are wholesome impulses. Nevertheless, they represent the urge that, in its one-sided cultivation, would drive back each man into his own house.

In contrast, a knowledge must arise through the science of the spirit, a knowledge that can be embraced in two statements that I should especially like to inscribe into your souls today. The first is: A man can never come to a really good, upright, strong personal inner life without having the warmest interest in other men. All inner life that we seek remains false and seductive if it does not go hand in hand with a kindly interest in the character and qualities of other people. We ought straightway to take it for granted that we find ourselves inwardly as man when we take an interest in the characteristics of others. Entering with love into the individualities of other people, which is at times united with a deep experience of the tragedy of life, is what can bring us to self-knowledge. The self-knowledge we seek through delving into ourselves will never be true. We deepen our own inner nature by meeting other people with full interest. But this statement as it has now been expressed here, implies something that cannot be directly carried into effect because it must interact with the other statement.

The other statement is: We never gain a true knowledge of the outer world if we do not resolve to examine the universally human in ourselves and learn to know it. Therefore, all natural science of modern times will be a purely mechanical science and knowledge, not true but false, inverted, unless it is based on the knowledge of man. In the science that was described by me as “occult science” in the book An Outline of Occult Science, the knowledge of the outer world was sought for together with the knowledge of the human being. We find the inner through the outer, the outer through the inner.

I will bring forward next time what remains to be said regarding certain present-day phenomena as they come to light in other works such as the so-called Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. Today, I should only like to add that when, twice seven years ago, our impulse to form a theosophical movement began to work—the movement later became anthroposophical—the intention was that all the activity that went on in this movement would be founded on these two principles: The without should kindle self-knowledge; the within should teach knowledge of the world. In these two statements, or rather in their realization in the world, lies true spiritual insight into existence and the impulse to real human love, to a love filled with insight. A realization of what lies in these statements should be sought for through our Society. If in these twice seven years all had come to pass that has been striven for, if the opposing powers in our time, had not been strong enough to hinder many things, then today I should have been able to speak of certain secrets of existence quite differently from the way in which it is possible to do so. Then this Society would have become ripe enough for things to be said in its midst today that could be spoken nowhere else.

In that case, there would also be a guarantee that these secrets of existence would be safeguarded in the right way. What has happened in our Society has shown, however, that it is precisely in the matter of safeguarding things that it fails, fails through all manner of contrary interests that have attached themselves to the movement. There is really no longer a safeguard today—at least, no thorough safeguard that what is said among us is not made use of, and, as frequently has happened, clothed by many persons in such feelings, in any way they please in the outer world. Since this is so, when we examine the Society, we find that, in looking back over the twice seven years, in many respects it has remained behind. Such introspection should not lead to a loss of courage but it should lead us to be discontent with revelling in the possession of a certain degree of knowledge, and also to developing that deep earnestness in life that will lead us to accept truth in the form in which it must be communicated in our age. When it is possible for outstanding members of our movement who are writers to think in the manner revealed recently, then it is clear that other and deeper impulses must now awaken within the souls of those who find themselves in our Society than have awakened hitherto. We do not join together merely to possess agreeable facts of knowledge. Rather should it be that we unite together in order to carry on a sacred service to truth in the interest of mankind's evolution. Then, indeed, the right knowledge will come to us. Then these facts will not be restrained by all sorts of prejudices.

At any rate, let us receive at least into our hearts this ideal that perhaps even yet such a Society may arise as is necessary in the wide world of prejudice—a Society that permeates and interpenetrates our times. What I am saying is naturally not directed in the slightest degree toward anyone in particular, nor toward any single soul among us. Its intention is solely to emphasize the ideal of knowledge of our epoch, the ideal of the service of mankind we should recognize as necessary. With the same warmth with which I spoke here about eight days ago. I should like again today to stress what must not be forgotten in our circle, namely, that it is essential to modern humanity for a group of people to exist to whom it is possible to speak in the most open and candid manner of the whole content of truth that needs to be revealed today without stirring up prejudicial emotions! We must accept it as our Karma that enmity has lifted up its head in our circle, enmity from out of the unintelligent feelings, ideas and customs of the time. We should not be deceived for a moment: this is our karma. Then, from the very recognition of it the impulse for the right will arise. In particular, we must not so often forget as quickly as we do what we receive, nor let so much of what is put into concise sentences embracing truths separately explained, merely pass over us. Rather, let us preserve it all in our hearts. In our circle the longing to forget often what is most important of all, is widely diffused. So we have not yet become the living organic Society that we need, or rather that humanity needs. To achieve this it is necessary above all that we should acquire a memory for what we can learn through life in the Society.

As our friends who are present for the meeting of the Building Association have not heard the recent lectures held here, I will not continue today with the subject that has now occupied us for some time. Instead, I will digress and speak during these days of things that can contribute to a wider understanding of what has already been presented but that can also be understood to some extent by itself. I want to touch quite briefly upon a leading thought that has been brought forward. It is, indeed, somewhat comprehensible from the whole character of spiritual science, but it is deepened when one adds to one's understanding the facts that have been presented in our recent studies. This thought can be expressed as follows. Human history can only be considered in its true reality when one learns to know the individual forms of the actuating spiritual powers that stand behind it, just as one can only get to know nature when one knows in its true form what works and lives behind sense perceptions.

We have frequently emphasized that the science of the spirit is related to what is commonly called science today much in the following way. Modern science, which has been pursued by mankind—rightly and for good reasons—for three or four centuries, resembles a description of single letters that are printed or written on a sheet of paper. At best, it resembles the phonetic or grammatical rules by which these letters are grouped into words or united to form sentences. What we call the laws of nature can be compared with phonetic or grammatical rules. Thus, if we were to examine a printed or written page and say that we can see first a stroke upwards to the right, a stroke going down to the left and so on, and then describe the other letters and perhaps even the rules pertaining to phonetics or grammar, this way of relating ourselves to a printed or written page would resemble what is correctly called science today. But if we were to do no more than observe in this way, our relation to the printed or written page would be completely inadequate because we can also read. Here, we pass on from mere observation and description of what is on the page to the meaning of the words. We can only learn to know this meaning when we advance from describing what meets the eye to what our faculties—our mind and its power—can make of it. By these means, we unite ourselves with the spirit that is ruling and working within these little beings that we call letters.

In contrast to ordinary science, spiritual science seeks to read the facts of the world, not merely to describe what is seen. When we have learned to do so, both the facts of nature and history, inasmuch as they first show themselves to us in forms that we can describe in movements or inner laws, are, figuratively speaking, like letters that can be read. In this domain the meaning of existence is revealed, that is, the meaning of life and all human activity insofar as the revelation is necessary to man. We also seek in this way the meaning of historical evolution and the concrete forces that stand behind it, conjuring it out of itself, as it were, just as a writer conjures forth from his thoughts what we afterward read from the dead characters set down on the written or printed page.

Now, we have tried to study the fundamental meaning of this modern age, which we describe as the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. We know that it begins approximately in the period that is also described by external history as the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. With the exception perhaps of its very last centuries, but including the fourteenth and perhaps part of the fifteenth, we look upon this period of the Middle Ages as belonging to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, calling it the Greco-Latin in accordance with the fundamental character of its spiritual and material life. It begins in the eighth century before the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we consider the evolution of humanity only in the way that ordinary history does—this, too, has often been spoken of here and elsewhere—we then easily arrive at the idea that human evolution, to the extent that it can be spoken of at all, has always consisted of man as we know him today and has always progressed more or less in the same way. When one looks back, one imagines that one sees historical evolution in such a way that the human being remains unchanged and just about the same. Such a view does not hold good for a real spiritual observation of history, as we know. The truth is that humanity changes considerably as time passes. The man of the tenth or twelfth centuries of the Christian era differed more radically from the man of the present time than is believed today when people are so little inclined to look into mankind's evolution. If one considers the whole configuration of the social life of the soul, the way of thinking and the very manner of life, then this difference becomes manifest not only among the educated in whom problems of world conception, science and knowledge play a part, but is also seen in the simplest, most primitive men. Although the world knows little of it, the simplest farmer today is, in his whole configuration of soul, an essentially different being inwardly from the man of the eighth, ninth and tenth Christian centuries.

Again, we can say of the modern age also, which, as it has evolved from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, bears essentially the character of the present, that it completed the first small segment of its course approximately in the middle of the nineteenth century. As we have often mentioned, this is an important point in time. I have frequently drawn attention to a saying that is used incessantly, yet is completely false when understood in the way it is usually meant. Nature, it is said, knows no leaps. In reality, however, we see how life makes leaps everywhere. It really only progresses through leaps. Speaking in the Goethean sense, it is a leap when, through metamorphosis, the leaf of a plant develops from the root, the flower petal again from the leaf and the organs of the fruit from the petal. It is, however, conveniently prejudicial to believe that human history proceeds without leaps. Such is not the case. Human history advances in great undulating waves that do not simply follow the one upon the other. Rather, at certain times what comes later places itself abruptly beside the earlier. Men, however, are not accustomed to observe things accurately or it would strike them that in the sphere of evolution powerful forces are to be observed that by means of breaks and periods, with wave-like depressions and elevations, bring evolution forward.

One could say that the conclusion of a particular evolutionary process was reached in the year 1840, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the period from the fifteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, humanity was evolving quite distinct faculties that were not present in the same way in an earlier period. One is entirely mistaken if one believes, for instance, that the Copernican world conception or the art of printing could just as well have appeared in human evolution in an earlier century than the one in which they did. The progress of human evolution is just as organic as individual human development. Just as the child of twelve or thirteen lacks the capacity to do things in the world that might be done by a man or woman of thirty five, just as faculties must evolve in the life of an individual in accord with his age, it is also the same with humanity. The special faculties that came to the fore in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and later in the scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did not formerly exist. In fact, they correspond to a particular period of human evolution that falls within those centuries. The Greeks or Romans could not have looked at the world similarly because the faculties for doing so were simply not in existence in their time. The individual human would not be perfected if he did not gradually evolve faculties suited to each period of life; neither would humanity become complete in its way if faculties, whose foundations already exist in man's general nature, did not gradually emerge. That these faculties develop, that mankind gradually puts forth what lies within its being is the fundamental fact of human evolution.

Now, what is the nature of these special faculties that evolved in man from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries? They are mainly the forces making possible an intellectual grasp of the world through reason. Nowadays, people on the whole believe that the Ptolemaic world conception belonged to the Middle Ages. Then came the Copernican. We believe we have made wonderful progress. Those in the Middle Ages were really quite foolish to accept anything so imperfect as the Ptolemaic world conception and now we, at last, have the true view.

As a matter of fact, those people think but little in accord with reality who are not willing to admit that when we are as far removed in time from Copernicus as Copernicus was from Ptolemy, men will again have a different concept of the heavens. The development of humanity is in constant flux and by that time, the Copernican system will be regarded just as the Ptolemaic system was regarded by the Copernicans. Even though it gives the impression today of being pure nonsense when one says another world conception, which will differ as much from the Copernican as the Copernican from the Ptolemaic, will replace the Copernican world conception in future, this truth is nevertheless quite evident to those who have an inner comprehension of what lives and weaves in the growth of humanity. The special method of applying merely the intellect to natural phenomena in an external way, which has created the natural science of the last three or four centuries, represents the faculty that belongs to those centuries. It is clear to those who know how humanity advances that mankind was actually ripe from the middle of the nineteenth century on for the gradual development of other faculties. But man must increasingly take his own affairs in hand. More than in any previous age he is given the task today of doing something toward adding fresh faculties to those gained in the last three or four centuries. Why have these faculties arisen that can keenly, penetratingly and logically master the outer surface of phenomena so that they can then be expressed in natural laws? For what purpose have these faculties appeared that penetrate so little below the surface of things, yet observe so meticulously and scientifically all that lies on the surface? They have appeared because only by their means can man go through a certain stage of his development.

In earlier ages man had other faculties. When we go back in historical evolution, we find that the further we go the more possible it was for man to look into the spiritual world. But the faculties he then had were not such that he could use them in freedom. They were more or less involuntary. The force enabling him to reach a certain knowledge came over man in earlier ages somewhat in the way in which the desire for sleep overtakes a man. It was, however, a force that entered the spiritual world. In order for man to take a step forward toward achieving the faculty of making free decisions and developing freedom, he had to be separated from the forces that, in earlier times, brought him nearer the spiritual world but also allowed him less freedom. Man had to pass through a period of development in which he was shut off as by a veil or sheath from the spiritual world so that he might become freer. To be sure, this development is still far from complete but a first stage reached its conclusion in the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who know something of the spiritual life behind the sensory life recognize that since that time it is a growing necessity for other forces to be added to those of observation and knowledge based on mere intellect. These other forces slumber in the human soul and must be developed, even as the forces have evolved that have brought humanity to achieve the great advances of the last three or four centuries.

Thus, it is for the sake of freedom that humanity has gone through the intellectual development of the last three or four centuries. This intellectual development has led to a conception of the world that is materialistic in a far-reaching sense. It is a materialistic conception that is still in full force wherever a conception of the world penetrates extensively or intensively into world affairs. However much it may be said in scientific circles that materialism has already receded, those who imagine it to have withdrawn often do not have the least idea how deeply and firmly they themselves are still held in materialistic concepts. The materialistic outlook, which is in its way admirable, has emerged in the last three or four centuries. It is not to be criticized because man has need of it, but it can, however, never advance beyond a grasp of the dead and lifeless. Were the intellectual conception of the world alone to hold sway in human earthly evolution, man would only understand the dead and lifeless. All understanding of life and the living, to say nothing of the spiritual, would be lost. The lifeless alone can be the object of the kind of scientific study that has made such magnificent progress in the last three or four centuries. Those individuals, however, who know what is necessary for humanity have gradually become fewer during this time. They understand why it is that since the middle of the nineteenth century a certain longing has arisen, as if through some inner process in man, to know something about the spiritual worlds. The peculiar thing is that this longing took a form that was in harmony with the materialistic feeling of the age. Man wanted to learn to know the spirit in a materialistic way, since habits are lost far less rapidly than longings. It was along materialistic lines that man wished to find the spirit, and this materialistic knowledge of the spirit was often fostered and generously bestowed even by those who really know what is necessary for humanity. Hence there arose the various materialistic branches of science that set out to prove that spiritual activity lies behind the sense world. All that has been set going in order to arrive at knowledge of the spiritual through the hypnotic element, the element of suggestion, and even through spiritism or spiritualism, as it is called, is nothing but an attempt to research the spirit by materialistic means.

Humanity had become accustomed to recognize as true only what had been verified by means of investigation in a laboratory or clinic. Now, in the same way, through external operations following precisely the pattern of the natural scientific method, a method was elaborated that should give manifest proof of the spirit. Important results have undoubtedly been attained on this path. In addition, of course, there has been a good deal of charlatanism and swindling. Indeed, we know that certain learned men and scientists who must be taken seriously have devoted themselves to these matters because they have felt it necessary to show man, who must otherwise fall prey to materialism, that a spiritual world exists, surrounding us just as does what we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands. So, in the course of human evolution after the middle of the nineteenth century, we have these efforts to make men understand that there is a spiritual world around us just as there is a world that we perceive with our senses.

We have spoken many times of the value of knowledge that is obtained by dulling the forces of mind and soul that are right for our age, so that man is made into an instrument in a mediumistic way for letting all sorts of spiritual realities and facts enter the sense world. As I say, we have repeatedly spoken of the worth—or lack of it—of these methods. Today I want to make clear what meaning it had for historical evolution for men to wish to kill off and cripple just what it is right for them to possess in this present time; that is, full conscious insight into the spiritual world, and, turning from this, to become an instrument through which what is really around us spiritually emerges in the physical world. It corresponds to a deep necessity in historical evolution because conscious thinking, through what it had to become in the last three or four hundred years, had been one sided in its development. Thought had become attenuated and consequently also powerless because it had to stop short at the surface of things in order to create human freedom. But for this reason thought was quite unable to penetrate below the surface.

It was the intention to drive out thought and to guide the human soul back to its primitive constitution, in this way meeting the difficulty of the thinking that had become powerless in the new age and could no longer find strength to penetrate into the spiritual world. As a result, something arose that is far more widespread than the ordinary person imagines, that is, the search for the spirit along materialistic paths. With the expulsion of conscious knowledge in which, regarding the spiritual world, they had lost confidence, men wished to dip down into the spiritual world through a subconscious knowledge and a lowering of consciousness. There were always, however, other persons who did not enter into this phenomenon of the time merely instinctively as did the ordinary scientists and most spiritists or spiritualists, but who knew, nevertheless, what was going on. Such persons have always existed. They had great expectations of the movement just described. In general, one can say that those persons who have preserved an exact knowledge of the spiritual world during the last three or four centuries, and even up to today, fall into different groups. There are those who expected nothing from such a materialistic way of research into the spiritual world; but there are also those who hoped that from it men would come to the conviction that a spiritual world does exist in our environment. Nevertheless, none of this group was sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to see why this approach must be in vain.

Those students of spiritual science who expected nothing from this materialistic approach had good reasons for this, which have been justified by the consequences that have arisen from this entrance—rather, this hoped for entrance—into the spiritual world. Take all that has come about on this path, go through all that has come to light from the most primitive beginnings of amateur mediums and mediumistic seances to the subtlest things that certain scholars have brought about in this sphere—go through all this and you will find that by far the greatest part of what has happened consists in the fact that experiences have been gathered of which those through whom the experiences were gained said they had received them from the spirits of the dead. Far and away the greater number of the experiences were described as emanating from the spirits of men who had died. Little is to be found that has not been described as originating in this way. This was certainly a great surprise to those acquainted with spiritual knowledge who had looked on this development with good will. That the mediums should say that what they brought to light was obtained from the spirits of the dead was something that must have caused the greatest surprise because it was the last thing one would expect when one really considered the evolution of humanity. Something quite different would have been expected.

What was to be expected was that by these means a knowledge would come about of the spiritual world that, at the present time, surrounds us while we are alive. That is what one might have expected to find by making experiments, for example, as to how one man affects another, how the men of the present are linked together by secret threads invisible to ordinary science, how in one soul things arise that originate from quite another soul. In reality, a network of spiritual connections is drawn from soul to soul. Inasmuch as we stand within the world—if, for instance, we are standing here, then we do not merely see the light, the surroundings, people as they are externally and physically, but inasmuch as we are in the world, spiritual threads or currents pass every moment from soul to soul in the most varied manner. One gets nowhere if one speaks in general terms of some sort of connection between souls that is distinguishable by the senses. The solution is to be found by thinking of individual threads or streams between all the different souls. We are actually surrounded by a spiritual world just as we are by a physical one. That this should emerge is what might have been expected, but little indeed has come out concerning this. Throughout the sixty or seventy years during which attempts have been made to enter the spiritual world by materialistic paths, least of all has been learned about the living connections linking men with one another. The mediumistic manifestations and revelations have always referred to the spirits of the departed. Nor, in truth, could anything else happen by this method. Why? What, then, had actually been happening through this attempt to enter the spiritual world?

As a matter of fact, nothing had been achieved other than the knowledge of what comes to light if one expels the best qualities of the new age from human consciousness and leads man back to earlier times, to subconscious conditions of soul. The remains of this subconscious condition that had carried over into the new age were now laid bare. It was this that was revealed. Just consider, then, that a quite definite consciousness had been prepared and developed in the last three centuries. This consciousness had veiled the spiritual world and by so doing had taken away the power of direct connection with it. But nothing had been done toward developing new forces for new connections with the spiritual world. Nothing had come out but the old connections, which went in the direction of that to which they had been linked earlier. They did not unite with what was living in the contemporary environment but with death, with the lifeless. This was so because the direction of man's evolution in the last three or four centuries and more has so determined the character of his soul that it is really particularly adapted for the knowledge of the dead and lifeless. Here in the material world, through the kind of knowledge that belongs to modern times, one learns about the lifeless. Through the forces that one draws up from the deep underground of the soul, one does not know about the living but the dead. Thus, all these experiments did not open up a path to the living men of the spiritual, but to what is dead, to what one finds as dead in the spiritual world.

What is the nature of this dead element? It is not human beings, that is to say, the souls who, speaking spiritually, are our contemporaries. So, if we take such an experiment as has been described, undertaken in 1870, let us say, it would not, through laying bare the subconscious soul forces, have given a connection with the living present. In fact, it would not have made a connection with the living souls of 1870, but only with what had remained behind from these living, progressing souls—in other words, with the loosened remnants that were gradually disintegrating in earthly existence but that were still active. To be sure, the mediums always interpreted things in such a way that they claimed relationship to the dead who were spiritually still living. That was, however, a misinterpretation. In reality, it was not a matter of the souls as they then were, but of what they had been in ages past, or, respectively, what they had become after these remnants had been long ago loosened from the souls. Recollect how I have explained what Goethe represents in the Lemurs scene and you will know that much of what is released from the soul at death continues to exist. It was only with what is really dead and does not live on with the living soul that one could connect oneself with the spiritual world through that materials [materialistic] pathway.

If, through contemporary science, one reached a knowledge of the material, the lifeless, the dead, so also through this spiritual longing that had to be satisfied along materialistic paths one reached nothing but a knowledge of the dead though, to be sure, it was a knowledge of the super-sensible. Contemporary materialistic science found only the external dead. This apparently spiritual but, from their methods, actually materialistic science found the super-sensible dead. From this one could learn something immensely significant, that in the middle of the nineteenth century an age had closed; that humanity needed new forces of development if it would enter the truly living; that for a period of time only those forces had been brought to their zenith that lead to the dead, lead in all fields to the lifeless and to knowledge and worship of the lifeless.

One only gives such things their rightful place if one does not merely let them work on the soul abstractly and intellectually, but when one receives them in their deep moral significance and lets them make a sort of moral impression on the soul. Indeed, we are shown that although these intellectual powers with which man has made such splendid progress have brought him to a certain summit of attainment. Yet, they are only fitted for approaching the lifeless. The content of human soul life could gradually only be directed to what is dead. To him who can perceive the course of man's evolution, it is unquestionably clear how the foremost currents of modern thought lead more or less directly to a cult and worship of the lifeless; the working that is felt in respect of the outer material natural order where such wonderful progress has been made is but a cult and worship of the dead. Why are people so gripped by the last cantos of Hamerling's Homunculus? Because, after Hamerling has shown how modern mankind is really hastening into a sort of homunculus era, he shows what it signifies for man, in respect of the great cosmic mysteries, to try to lift himself above gravitation through purely mechanical forces. His last canto shows us the dirigible, the Zeppelin before it existed, and all that was still in the future. At the same time, he makes us aware of what is linked with this extreme mechanizing, which is to say, the killing, the homunculizing, of life in the development of human civilization.

Spiritual knowledge, however, has never died out; it is always safeguarded somewhere, and there are individuals in every age who are able to obtain it. It was saved even through the period in which it counted for least, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, being preserved like a fine thread. Those of whom I spoke as holding no expectations from the materialistic path into the spiritual world perceived something else as well. They were of the opinion that our modern way of feeling and thinking, as it has developed in the last centuries, can be further trained and developed so that out of clear-headed materialistic methods a knowledge then can develop gradually that which can even work in a sufficiently penetrating way to get under the surface of things and into the spirit. That is what the real method of spiritual science ought to be—to enter into the spiritual world along the same path that man has entered into nature during the last three or four centuries. All that is necessary is a further development of the scientific habits that mankind has evolved in this period. The point is that in a corresponding way, through a real exertion and effort, avoiding indolence, man has to develop further the thinking habits already evolved.

But now it may be asked why there are so many who, in spite of knowing something of the spiritual world, have remained silent concerning it. It must be repeatedly emphasized that spiritual knowledge was always there. Although it had to be developed in different ways in different ages, it has always existed. Why, then, have so many people been afraid to impart this spiritual knowledge? It has been disseminated in our circle because the recognition of the need to do so outweighs everything. In fact, however, only certain portions of spiritual knowledge can be imparted, as you know, and that only on quite definite grounds. You see, spiritual knowledge was also in existence in another and more unconscious or subconscious form before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then, man was connected with the spiritual world in a more instinctive way than is possible for him without injury today. Moreover, a great portion of mankind was omitted because the way to the spiritual world was only open to those who received fitting preparation. These individuals were prepared in a way that would not occur to those who speak of a preparation for science consisting of intellectual knowledge.

Today men are of the opinion that the moral qualities of one who is to receive instruction are of secondary importance and that knowledge does not depend on moral qualities. In ancient times, this was absolutely different. Then, when knowledge was communicated through the mysteries, it was imparted only to those who had undergone a special and strict moral discipline. Nothing beyond at most mathematical knowledge, with which one can do but little harm, or literary knowledge could be reached without undergoing strict moral discipline. Things were only imparted to those deemed to be fitted for them after they had undergone a certain severe moral test. First came the training toward virtue and then the communication of wisdom. Training in virtue and, in particular, the training of moral courage was an absolute necessity and it was held to be of paramount importance. Owing to lack of time, I cannot enlarge upon this today, but there was a conviction that knowledge can only benefit the world when what can be done by a man who knows, is done only by one who is good. However improbable it seems to people who look on earlier ages as barbaric and think that nowadays we have made such wonderful progress—so wonderful, in fact, that thousands are bathed in blood every week—in those earlier ages there was a conviction that no one should be allowed to make use of knowledge in what they did until he had undergone the strictest moral discipline. Those who had not were to live merely instinctively, led by those who had undergone the moral training and discipline.

The modern age is not adapted for directly applying such a principle. Just imagine how such a principle might be realized today when everyone says what he knows as soon as possible—or even has it published—and no one can prevent it. It would be illusory to think that anything, social institution or whatever, could stop it. Today is the day of publicity. What, then, must replace this older principle of only allowing men who had undergone moral discipline to attain Knowledge? It must be replaced with the assurance that the imparted knowledge itself must contain a certain force that brings forth good through itself, actually and really to bring forth of itself what is good.

The entire spiritual scientific movement must aim at achieving this. All knowledge entering the world through the science of the spirit must be so ordered that it engenders the good through itself and its own force. You will say that the efforts that have been made in modern times with the treasures of knowledge inherent in the science of the spirit have not yet completely realized this goal. No, because everything has to work its way through its various hindrances. The hidden feeling of the good in spiritual science has, however, been the reason that it has been fought not only with logic but also hatred. You will ask, “But do not all reasonable people really desire the good?” As it is generally understood nowadays, one could say, “Yes, all reasoning people desire the good.” But what really counts is not that someone thinks he would like the good or that he desires it, but that he wills it, that he absolutely will have it. That is the point. If one considers the achievements of modern civilization from the point of view of their moral defects, those moral defects that work in the lifeless, one will find that the world needs a wisdom that, along with being wisdom, also causes good. Materialistic science, however, is indifferent to good and evil. It uses what it creates from matter just as well for good as for evil, serving one just as willingly as the other.

Here, again, we have a point where, if we look at the world as a whole and its course of development, we can perhaps see the necessity for the science of the spirit. It is not enough to shut ourselves away in a little circle and form a world conception. The smallest circles are surrounded on every side by the great network of human evolution. Let us look at the manifest results of European civilization in the last three years. If we do not follow an ostrich policy but with truly throbbing hearts enter lovingly into our surroundings, we shall see these results and grasp what they are bringing us. Because the one or other of us is protected from what rages against Europe today is no reason for turning away from the terrible state into which modern civilization has been hurled. It is there, as present fact.

It may be useful at this point to comment on a new publication. A book, good of its kind, has lately been written that endeavors to judge from the standpoint of human feeling and moral perception the problems that have agitated the world during the last two years. It is a good book, recently published, that tries to show with a certain all embracing survey how man can escape from the evil network of blood and hate in which modern civilization finds itself. It was written by a Chinese author whom I mentioned to some of our friends four or five years ago as an important personality when his first book on European conditions was published. This new book by Ku Hung Ming, a highly cultured Chinese, is good and contains much that is objective. It reveals a man who avoids the mistakes that many make; a man who stands aloof from these errors.

Many people have opinions today; many give vent to one or another opinion about the conditions of our age. The greater part of what is presented, however, is not said in order to give expression to what people really think but to deafen themselves to what actually exists. We see streams of hatred flow over the world. Why are they set going? Why is this or that said? Do you imagine that those who say, “The Pope should excommunicate a whole nation,” and energetically demand it, think that they have really reached this conclusion from objective events? Do you believe that these people possess the calm of objective knowledge? They say it to deafen themselves so as not to have to admit to themselves what should be admitted. A great part of what is said today is intended to close one's ears. Some people will not admit to themselves what they really ought to admit. They say one thing or another merely to avoid saying what they ought to say.

This Chinese, Ku Hung Ming, does not proceed in this way. He says, “When one sees what has developed in Europe, what has happened there and the forces that are at work, one can do nothing but admit that things had to come about as they have. In its one sided cultivation the materialism that developed in the nineteenth century was bound to lead to these consequences and it is bound to lead even further, ending in the final downfall of European culture.” Ku Hung Ming is quite convinced that European culture must go under if Europeans refuse to become like the Chinese and if Chinese conditions do not spread over Europe. The only salvation for European culture, so he says, is for Europeans to become Chinese, that is, become Chinese in their souls. Much of what he says is deeply impressive. One should not take it lightly that a wise man of today can find no way out for European culture other than finally merging it all—everything in it that has led it ad absurdum—in good Chinese principles. I will not elaborate Ku Hung Ming's ideas on the methods for making Europe Chinese. Of course, we should see at once that we cannot become Chinese or return to the position of Chinese culture, but if there were no other way out than the one Ku Hung Ming sees, then that would be better than to continue on the path that European culture has taken. It would definitely be better. It would be better to become Chinese than to proceed further on the course that materialistic civilization has pursued thus far, because disintegration would be inevitable. Do not believe, however, that it can be prevented by any of the old means and methods.

As a matter of fact, spiritual science has always been somewhat in agreement with the opinion of Ku Hung Ming—not regarding Chinese civilization but rather the first part of his statement. It therefore fosters, as its great ideal, drawing knowledge from the spiritual world that leads back into it, and that also can make men good through its own force; that is, a knowledge working morally through its own force and engendering moral impulses. So, as scientists of the spirit our answer would not be, like Ku Hung Ming's, to “become Chinese,” but rather to seek by paths of spiritual science to bring about the fructification of European culture because that is actually the only way it can be brought about. This striving toward new sources of human knowledge and activity is absolutely necessary for European humanity. The bitterest tears could be shed over much that meets one today when a book such as that of Ku Hung Ming is read, for these times of ours are more grave than many believe. There are many things in human life that separate man from man, and it is from this separation of souls that all the frightful conditions we are experiencing come. This separation will only be overcome through a knowledge that conceives of the human being beyond all divisiveness, through a knowledge that is for every single human being. All those divisions upon which men build their feelings today are actually only valid here in the physical world. When one sees the sympathy and antipathy poured out today, and when one sees that they come only from the unspiritual, then in all this outpouring of sympathy and antipathy one also recognizes the denial of the spirit.

All racial hatred, for instance, is really also a fight against the spirit. Because this age of ours is so strongly inclined to fight against the spirit, it therefore possesses this talent for racial hatred. Here is one of the deepest secrets of our present spiritual culture; the only way out is through the living grasp of the spirit.

Just think how, the moment we fall asleep and our ego and astral body leave behind our physical and etheric bodies, we are in a world where all that leads to sympathy and antipathy simply does not exist. In the moment that follows falling asleep we are united with those whom we look upon from the consciousness of our time with the deepest antipathy. We must pass through their souls in the realm of interpenetrability. We can rage as we will and hurl tirades of hatred against this man or that, but as soon as we fall asleep and enter the realm where all interpenetrates, we must pass through the souls of those we hate. The facts concerning such actual realities must now be made known. What I have just said is elementary, but if one enters more and more into the knowledge of actual reality, then the very entering possesses the force to create the impulse of the good. One only learns to know the real significance of hatred and unfounded antipathy in the world when one sees their effects in the spiritual world. He who knows what hate is in the spiritual world ceases to hate lest he put himself straight into the service of certain evil powers.

Since a larger number of friends than usual is gathered here for the meeting of the Building Association, I especially wished to speak about these earnest matters today. Those who have heard my last lectures will be able to connect what has now been said with what we studied before. Even if it has been no more than a digression, it can nevertheless throw light on many impulses that are being enacted in the world historical evolution of the present time.

As a continuation of yesterday's lecture, certain things must be said that are connected with subjects spoken of here a week ago. As a number of friends who were not then present are here for a special meeting, I will repeat certain matters in the lectures still to be given. This may be useful, because from remarks that have been made to me, it is obvious that important points have been misunderstood.

At the very outset let us be quite clear that the course of evolution as we have learned to know it in connection with great cosmic happenings proceeds both in these great cosmic phenomena and in the phenomena of human historical development. The so-called fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during which the Greco-Roman culture developed and attained its greatness, must be of particular interest to us in our age. As you know, from the standpoint of the science of the spirit this fourth epoch lasted until the beginning of the fifteenth century A.D. With the dawning of the fifteenth century, trends began to manifest in European culture of which we heard, for instance, in yesterday's lecture.

When we picture the nature of the Greco-Roman epoch, it appears to us as a kind of recurrence or revival of what spread over the earth as human culture during the period of Atlantis. It has often been said that the thoughts, the perceptions, and also the social life of the Greeks become intelligible when we regard this fourth post-Atlantean culture—although Atlantean culture was, of course, much more elemental and instinctive. It assumed a more spiritual form in the culture of Greece and Rome. What had been direct experience in Atlantis was transposed into reality in Greece through fantasy, imagination and thoughts, and through the will, which, in turn, was inspired, by fantasy and imagination. We must realize that this Greco-Roman culture constituted a deep disillusionment for the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic and ahrimanic powers of the hierarchy standing nearest to the human hierarchy, desired that the Atlantean culture, as it had been in Atlantis, should simply re-appear in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. In other words it was the intention of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers that everything that had constituted the essential nature of Atlantean culture should be merely repeated during the Greco-Roman age. (You can read about this in An Outline of Occult Science or in the book, Cosmic Memory.)

This plan was frustrated inasmuch as humanity was raised to a higher stage consistent with the post-Atlantean era. What was essentially new and great in Greek and Roman culture constituted a spiritual disillusionment for the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. Through their different influences these powers desired to educate the Greeks and so to develop their powers of fantasy that the souls of men would gradually have become weary of the earth, would lose their inclination to incarnate further on the earth, and would tend to withdraw, as souls, from the earth in order to found a realm and planet of their own. The effect of this influence was annulled through the leadership of those powers we call the normal hierarchies, whereby the quality of fantasy and imagination in the Greeks, which also influenced their social life, was transformed into joy in the earthly. The Greek received into his nature such a joy in the life of earth and of the senses that he had no desire to live merely in the world of imagination where his soul would be alienated from earthly existence, but inclined rather to the attitude expressed in the well known words, “Better to be a beggar on the earth, than a king in the realm of shades.” This joy in life between birth and death enabled the normal powers to avert from the Greeks the danger inherent in the plan of the luciferic powers, namely, to lead away the souls of men so that the bodies still to be born on the earth would have gone about without egos, and the souls would have departed to a special planet of their own.

In Roman culture, on the other hand, Ahriman's aim was to help Luciferic by shaping the Roman Empire and what followed it in such a way that it would have become a great earthly mechanism for ego-less human beings. In this way he would have been of assistance to Lucifer. Whereas Lucifer's desire was to extract the juice of the lemons for himself, as it were, Ahriman, working in the Roman Empire, set out to thoroughly squeeze the lemons and to create an entirely mechanistic state organization. Thus do Ahriman and Lucifer play into each other's hands. The plan was frustrated by the development in a preeminently egoistic sense in the people of the Roman Empire of the concept of Civis, the citizen. Human egoism, be it remembered, can only develop in physical existence on the earth. Thereby Ahriman's plan to make men into ego-less beings was frustrated. It was precisely the bleakness, the lack of fantasy in Roman culture, the egoism in Roman politics and system of rights that thwarted Ahriman's plan.

The Greek and the Roman epochs were a great disillusionment for Ahriman and Lucifer. Once again they had not attained their goal. The destiny of Ahriman and Lucifer is that they work with their forces in earth evolution and repeatedly make the greatest efforts to hold back the wider progress of evolution; they try to establish a realm for themselves, and have again and again to suffer disillusionment. As I have said before, to ask why Lucifer and Ahriman are unable to perceive that their strivings will ultimately be of no avail is to judge the spiritual by human standards. Lucifer and Ahriman have a faculty of judgment different from that of man. We cannot judge from the human standpoint what is observed in the spiritual world. If we do so, we should soon be considering ourselves much cleverer than a god, or a being belonging to some higher hierarchical order. As we know, Lucifer and Ahriman, although they are retarded spirits, belong to a hierarchical order higher than that of man. It is therefore understandable that they are repeatedly disillusioned, but their strivings always begin anew.

Then came the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which has definite tasks in the stream of progressive spiritual evolution. Whereas the Greek life of fantasy, and the egoism of Rome were to develop in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the task of the fifth epoch was to develop the gift of material perception. I have characterized this by calling the ideal of material perception, in the sense of Goethe's “primal phenomenon,” the pure perception, the pure beholding of external reality. This faculty could not operate in earlier times because then the perception of material reality was invariably mingled with what came from atavistic clairvoyance. Men did not see the pure phenomenon, and they did not see pure external, material existence as such. They saw external existence veiled in the phantasmagoria of visionary clairvoyance. If people would observe a little more closely they would realize, even from history, that this is so. Plato did not consider sight as being so passive a faculty as we consider it in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Plato, the Greek, says expressly: Sight consists in a kind of fire going out from the eye to the objects. Plato, therefore, still knew something about the activity in sight. This activity had to be laid aside, forgotten, lost, in order that a different faculty belonging to the fifth epoch might arise. This faculty of the fifth epoch, which lasts from the beginning of the fifteenth century until the fourth millennium, consists in the development of the gift of free imagination that arises in complete inner freedom. On the one side, the primal phenomenon; on the other free imagination.

Goethe spoke of the primal phenomenon and also of free imagination. References to what he says in Faust have been made on many occasions. Here we have the beginnings of what must engross evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The fifth epoch will thereby receive its stamp. But in this same epoch human beings will have to battle against attacks of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers that will be stronger than those launched in the days of Greek and Roman culture. Again in this later epoch the aim of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers is to alienate the souls of men from earthly life on the one hand, and on the other so to mechanize earthly life itself, to make its outer form so entirely mechanistic, that it would be impossible for the ego of man to live in the social order of the earth. He would therefore take leave of it to enter a life apart from the earth upon a separate planet.

When we speak of the attacks of luciferic and ahrimanic powers, such things as are here indicated are prepared long beforehand. These attacks begin actually to operate first during the fourth or fifth century of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but behind the curtains of world history, even before the beginning of this fifth epoch, complete and intense preparation was made by the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. Their plan was to bring all human faculties and human forces of will under the sway of a longing to be alienated from the earth, to leave the earth and build up a separate planetary body, while the earth was to be deserted and left desolate. As I say, the very strongest attacks have been undertaken. Think of what gave to culture its basic tone in the epoch of Atlantis. Lucifer and Ahriman wish, during the post-Atlantean period, to interpose the old Atlantean culture everywhere so that the faculties imparted by the progressive powers are rendered primitive for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and human beings will desire to depart. The attempt, therefore, consisted in placing everything that developed into a service of a world beyond the earth, as I have indicated. Thus, from two sides, from that of Lucifer and that of Ahriman, the spirit reigning in ancient Atlantean life was to be revived in order that the impulses connected with that ancient life might enter into the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

You will remember that in Atlantean times the impulses within the souls of men were turned to the Great Spirit who was designated by a word or sound of which an echo still exists in the Chinese Tao. Such was the designation of the Great Spirit in the time of Atlantis. The luciferic and ahrimanic striving consists essentially in bringing what had come later and what was still to come, into the service of the Tao, into the service of the Great Spirit. This was not, of course, the Great Spirit as he had reigned in Atlantis, but a being who had come after him, a kind of little son. Lucifer and Ahriman strove to resuscitate Atlantean impulses by reckoning, not with the normal powers of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but with the impulses that had remained behind in the service of the Great Spirit Tao. The only possibility of achieving this end was to transfer the impulses that had worked in the culture of the now submerged Atlantis to the regions that had emerged after the Atlantean flood. Thus a part of what had succeeded the Great Spirit passed over to the East, to Asia, as it were, where certain mystery cults were gradually established during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D.

These mystery cults assumed a certain character inasmuch as they were a renewal, a revival, of the ancient cult of Tao in its original form, not in the form in which it still exists among the degenerate Chinese who have intellectualized it. These mystery cults in Asia were a revival of that kind of initiation that led to actual perception of the elemental spiritual, living and weaving beneath the material world of the senses, and to actual perception of the One Great Spirit. Certain priests of these Asian mysteries were initiated into the ancient Atlantean cult, which naturally led to delusions because it was unsuited to this later epoch. One of these priests had attained such an advanced stage in his initiation in Asia that he possessed full knowledge of the nature of the Atlantean impulses and was able to hold actual converse with the successor, the unlawful successor, of the Great Spirit Tao. It was he, who, in Asia, transmitted the inspiration he had received through the Great Spirit, to an external, worldly power, to a pupil who then became known in history as Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan was the pupil of a priest who had been initiated into these Asian mysteries, and he instilled into Genghis Khan the following. The time has now come for divine justice to scour the earth. The charge has been laid upon you to put this divine justice into operation, and you must now place yourself at the head of all those men who, starting out from Asia, can enact divine justice all over the earth. Similar attempts modeled on the campaign of the Huns and so forth, had failed, but now, essentially through the impulse given by this Asian priesthood, the Mongol campaign was set in motion. This campaign was intended to carry into European culture influences that would have caused the souls of men to believe in divine justice, to fall under its sway, and gradually to take leave of the earth without any inclination to return. So the culture of the earth would have been destroyed. This was the inner purpose of the Mongol onslaughts that spread from Asia, and which, as you know, were not overthrown by physical deeds.

Remarkably, at the battle of Liegnitz in the thirteenth century, the Mongols were not conquered but remained the victors. Then, quite inexplicably, they turned back toward Asia without advancing further into Europe. So here too there is actual external evidence that a counterstroke, manifesting in a spiritual way, was put into operation. As has been said, the Europeans had not conquered the Mongols in Silesia; the Europeans had themselves been conquered. Although the Mongols were the victors, they turned back to Asia. But, in a sense, just because the purely external onslaught did not come to pass, or did not go very far, the impulses remained in Europe in the state of distillation in which they would have to operate in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. So, in the cultural impulses that came over from the East, there is clearly and yet to be perceived what was intended to be brought to Europe as an aftermath of the mysteries of the Great Spirit.

Another part of the mystery culture of ancient Atlantis made its way, not toward the East, but toward the West, to the lands of America discovered later on by the Europeans. There the more ahrimanic part of the irregular post-Atlantean culture lived itself out. Whereas the luciferic part lived on more in Asia, the ahrimanic part worked more in America. Within America impulses were to arise that could then percolate from the West. Just as those other impulses could work from the East, so these could infiltrate from the West in order that the ahrimanic attack might be made in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

Hence, in the West, the more ahrimanic side of the outlived Atlantean mystery culture was promulgated. This led to the establishment of mysteries that inevitably make a most repulsive impression upon those who have grown up in the tender culture of modern times, and do not like to hear the truth but only blessedness, as it is often called. These post-Atlantean mysteries developed especially on the soil of Mexico. Mysteries were established there, but they spread over a large part of the America the Europeans had not yet discovered. If their impulses and workings had been victorious, these mysteries would have driven souls away from the earth. By this means the service performed by Ahriman, the squeezing out of the lemons, would have become effective. The earth would gradually have become desolate, having upon it only the forces of death, whereas any living souls would have departed to found another planet under the leadership of Lucifer and Ahriman.

In order to execute the ahrimanic part of this task, it was necessary for the priests of those ahrimanic Atlantean mysteries to acquire faculties possessing the highest degrees of control and mastery over all the forces of death in earthly working. These forces would have made the earth; together with physical man—for the souls were to depart—into a purely mechanistic realm, a great dead realm in which no ego could have a place. These faculties would have had to be connected also with mastery of the mechanistic element in everything living, of the mechanistic elements in all life. For this reason these mysteries had to be instituted in a truly devilish form because such forces as would have been needed for the powerful aims of Ahriman can only arise when initiations of a special kind are attained. Such were these initiations of the ahrimanic post-Atlantean era in America. Everyone who was to attain a certain degree of knowledge was made to realize that this knowledge is acquired through certain faculties of perception that can only be engendered through an act of murder. Thus nobody whom had not committed murder was admitted to a certain degree of this initiation. The murder was performed under special circumstances. Steps led up to a kind of catafalque, a scaffold-like structure. The one to be murdered was tied to this and his body bent in such a way that his stomach could be excised with a single cut. This operation, the excision of the stomach, had to be performed with great dexterity. Certain experiences arose from the act of having cut into the living organism with such consummate skill, and under such special conditions. These experiences had to be acquired and through them a certain degree of knowledge concerning the mechanization of the earth could then be attained. Every time higher stages of initiation were to be reached, further murders had to be committed.

This cult was dedicated to the successor, the son of the Great Spirit, in the form he had assumed in America, and who was designated by a sound that approximates Taotl. Taotl is an ahrimanic distortion of the successor of Tao. This being, Taotl did not appear in a physical body but only in an etheric form. His arts, which were essentially impulses for the mechanization of earthly culture and of all earthly life, were acquired through these initiations I have described to you.

Now these initiations had a definite purpose. As has been said, the initiate acquired actual powers of black magic, the application of which would have led to the mechanization of the culture of the earth and to the expulsion of all egos, so that the bodies born would no longer have been capable of bearing an ego. But as forces in the world are in perpetual interaction, he who possessed such powers would also have become earth-bound; the initiate himself would have been permanently fettered to the earth forces. His act bound him to forces of which you will be able to learn something tomorrow at the performance of the scene from Faust, if you will follow attentively what the Lemurs represent. By these practices the initiate united himself with the earth forces and with everything that causes death on the earth. Thereby, he would himself have lost his soul. He saved himself from this fate by bringing it about that, as a result of the excision of the stomach, the soul of the one whom he murdered had lost his desire to come to the earth again and also the soul of the victim was enabled, through the intention of the murderer, to draw the murderer's soul into the realm that was to be founded beyond the earth. The soul of the initiated murderer was thus also to be drawn into the kingdom of Lucifer and Ahriman.

Many opposing sects were founded with the object of countering this devilish cult. One such sect was that of Tezcatlipoca. He too was a being who did not appear in a physical body but who was known to many of the Mexican initiates, in spite of the fact that he lived only in an etheric body. Tezcatlipoca was a being akin to Jahve or Jehovah. The aim of his cult, working in opposition to those of Taotl, was to establish a Jahve religion suited to the terrible conditions prevailing in Mexico. Tezcatlipoca was a spirit akin to Jahve.

Another sect venerated Quetzalcoatl. He, too, was a being who lived only in an etheric body. Quetzalcoatl was a being of whom we may say that he was connected with the Mercury forces. He was connected with medical art of a certain character. Such beings are always described by those who can perceive them through clairvoyance in such a way that the description conveys the impression of the actual reality. When Quetzalcoatl is described as a figure with a serpent-like body, as a green feathered serpent, this indicates to those who understand such matters that he was an actual being, but one who appears only in an etheric body. This cult continued through many millennia. It was widely practiced, not in public but within the precincts of certain Mexican mysteries, in order that the necessary post-Atlantean cultural impulses might be developed in secret in an ahrimanic form.

A third movement also developed in those regions. Counter-movements were necessary, and had there been none, the influences of these forces upon the culture of Greece and Rome, and later upon the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, would gradually have become so strong that they would have proved invincible to the progressive powers. Thus, a further counter-movement developed as a result of the birth of a being who lived in a physical body in contrast to those beings who only manifested in etheric bodies. The name given to this Being may be expressed by a combination of syllables that approximate Vitzliputzli. Vitzliputzli was a human being, a being who appeared in a physical body. In Vitzliputzli the spiritual individuality lived who, within a human body, took up the fight against the mysteries I have been describing. Among the Mexicans it was said of Vitzliputzli that he was born of a virgin who had conceived by the heavenly influence of a bird having drawn near to her. If by occult means, so far as it is possible, we investigate the life of Vitzliputzli in the Western Hemisphere we find this remarkable fact. He lived at the time when, in the Eastern Hemisphere, the Mystery of Golgotha was taking place, namely, between the years 1 and 33 A.D. That is the remarkable fact. Vitzliputzli was able to make short shrift of the most important initiates of the Mexican mysteries against whom he waged violent war.

It was human being, an initiate, not one of the three spirits, but an initiate, against whom Vitzliputzli fought. Vitzliputzli, a super-sensible being but in human form, battled with every means at his disposal against the initiate who had been responsible for the greatest number of murders, who had attained the greatest power, and of whom it can be said that if his aim had been realized, it would have betokened the victory of this ahrimanic post-Atlantean culture. Vitzliputzli fought against him and—as already said, this can only be discovered by occult means—in the year 33 A.D. succeeded in causing this mightiest black magician to be crucified. Thus, in the other hemisphere of the earth, an event parallel to the Mystery of Golgotha took place, inasmuch as the greatest black magician of all was crucified by the action of Vitzliputzli who had appeared on the earth for this purpose. As a result, the power of these mysteries was thereby broken so far as the fourth post-Atlantean epoch was concerned. It was subsequently revived, however, and history tells of the fate suffered by numerous Europeans who went to America after the discovery of that continent. Many Europeans met their death at the hands of Mexican priest-initiates who bound them to scaffold-like structures and cut out their stomachs with expert skill. This is a matter of historical knowledge, and it was an aftermath of what I have been describing to you.

By these means the ahrimanic impulse was inculcated into the etheric nature of the Western world. As I have said, this impulse in the fourth epoch was broken as a result of the crucifixion of the great initiated black magician by the deed of Vitzliputzli. Nevertheless, so much force remained that a further attack could have been made upon the fifth epoch, having as its aim so to mechanize the earth that the resulting culture would not only have culminated in a mass of purely mechanical contrivances but would have made human beings themselves into such pure homunculi that their egos would have departed. The Europeans were meant to acquire knowledge of this world, and indeed the modern age begins with the people of Europe being drawn to America. Whereas on the one side the campaigns of Genghis Khan and his successors were to have executed as it were a divine justice, on the other side, there was prepared an atmosphere of wild, ahrimanic, elemental forces into which the Europeans were to enter. In such matters complete cooperation takes place between Ahriman and Lucifer. For example, the Europeans were not to go over to that other world with disinterested, unselfish feelings but with hankerings and greed for something concerning which they gave way to all kinds of delusions. Later on it was possible to coarsen what was at first clothed in wonderful fantasy, inasmuch as the discovery by the Europeans of the wealth of external nature in America gave an intense stimulus to their hankerings and greed. But to begin with this was to take a more idealistic form. Thus, here again we have an example of cooperation between the luciferic and ahrimanic forces that always work hand in hand.

A successor of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, had settled in China as a ruler after the Mongols had stormed over to Europe. To Kublai Khan in China there came from Europe a Venetian, Marco Polo. At the court of Kublai Khan, who was himself under the influence of the initiation I have previously described, Marco Polo was deeply and fundamentally influenced. He wrote a book of just such a kind as to excite the imagination of the Europeans concerning the Western Hemisphere. Marco Polo's Travels spoke of a magic land in the West, which stirred up longings to discover it. It was this book that induced Christopher Columbus to set out on his voyage to America. So you see how greed was guided into a world of fantasy. Things work together with extraordinarily clever foresight. You must realize that there is plan in world history in which the evil powers also come into the picture, and that the methods with which history is studied today enable us merely to observe historical life from the external aspect. The only possibility of acquiring real knowledge is to connect the right facts in the light of the science of the spirit, such as the discovery of America at a definite point of time, and the stirrings of desire for a land of fantasy, this desire being, in its turn, an impulse capable of attracting souls away from the earth.

The fitting mood for discovering America at a definite epoch is created by the description of this land of fantasy associated with the stirring up of desire. It is a mood that worked especially upon the subconscious forces in the souls of men, and it was able to work on further in the cultural life. We must think of Marco Polo and his book as being definitely connected with what instigated Christopher Columbus to travel to the West. It is well known that his wish was to discover the magic land; indeed, this is mentioned in ordinary history.

I have here described how the ahrimanic and luciferic impulses work in order to make their attacks upon the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Now, this fifth epoch is such that the human beings lives in a middle sphere of the life of soul. Man's life of soul in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must be protected from direct perception of the ahrimanic forces. True, man must learn through the science of the spirit to enter their domain, but external life must be protected in order that the powers that were mentioned both yesterday and today may unfold. These forces that have been brought to the earth in the concrete way that has been described, work below the level of the ordinary normal consciousness. Knowledge of man's life of soul is not attained by saying, as a generalization: There is a realm of consciousness, and there is a realm of subconsciousness, and natural urges and impulses work upward out of the subconscious. It is necessary to know how these urges and impulses are brought into existence on the earth, and to understand the concrete facts. In many domains we see aftermaths in the consciousness that is unfolded by the human soul in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We can picture the ahrimanic forces that originated in the way described as being active below the threshold of consciousness like lava, like volcanic forces under a soil that emits smoke if one sets fire to paper above it. This shows that beneath the soil there are terrifying forces that pour from every aperture under such circumstances. So it is with the forces of the soul. Beneath what is known to consciousness there are forces that have been influenced by what I have described. Then they press upward. Sometimes they reveal themselves only slightly, but at other times they force their way upward. In the super consciousness the luciferic forces are discharged into the soul as lightning and thunder discharge when the air is to be purified. There is little consciousness of these luciferic forces in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; during this epoch man's consciousness functions in a middle realm.

Investigations into what is thus working in the subconscious reveal that ahrimanic and luciferic attacks come from two directions, and that culture is really created by an interworking between the normal progressive hierarchies and the luciferic and ahrimanic forces. Now just because culture acquires a specific character in this way, human beings in the several regions of the earth are led in different ways to the great problems of life. I shall speak further of the aspect of knowledge and what then passes into the sphere of the social life.

We may assume that certain ahrimanic forces flow into the European culture from the realm of the subconscious in the wake of the impulses of which we have heard. These ahrimanic forces guide in a definite direction impulses that, in their turn, proceed from the good and progressive powers. It can be said that problems of two kinds, strivings for knowledge of two kinds, have arisen. But we must not say that human life has taken on a certain coloring as a result of the ahrimanic forces alone because interworking has taken place between the ahrimanic forces and the normal progressive forces. The minds of men were directed primarily to two problems. First, the problem of natural urges and impulses and second, the problem of birth. These expressions are derived, of course, from the most conspicuous phenomena. A great deal is embraced by these problems but I shall speak only of certain matters.

Let us think of the problem of natural urges and impulses. Under the influence of the forces I have described, human contemplation and striving is directed to a perception, to an experiencing, of man's natural urges and impulses. The mind is directed to these impulses and a certain view of life gradually unfolds. The problem of natural urges and impulses transforms itself into the problem of happiness or prosperity, which assumes a definite character. Hence in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, especially in the culture of the West, you find strivings in connection with the problem of prosperity, strivings directed to the creation of prosperity in life. Such striving is influenced by the forces I have described. Investigations are made, for example, into what can be done in order that the life of human beings on earth may be as happy and prosperous as possible. The establishment of earthly prosperity becomes an ideal. I do not say that ahrimanic forces alone are at work here; the good progressive forces are also present.

Thought about happiness and prosperity is, of course, quite justified. But under the influence of Ahriman it has assumed a certain character as a result of a really devilish tenet. This tenet defines the good in such a way that the good is a said to manifest actually through happiness or prosperity, through the happiness indeed of the greatest number, and connected therewith is the misery of the minority, just as if one were to describe an organism by suggesting that it develops only to the knees and dies off from there down. In such identification of happiness with the good, with virtue, there is an ahrimanic impulse. The Greeks, as represented by their greatest individuals, were impervious to such identification of the concept of prosperity with that of the good. But ahrimanic influences produced a mentality in humanity in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that seeks for the good in prosperity, in happiness. It is from this point of view that you must study the philosophy of Saint-Simon, and all the different efforts to discover principles of national economy, especially in Western Europe; only so will you be able to understand them. Even the thought of Rousseau is not free from this impulse. Such matters must be studied concretely and objectively.

Side by side with the problem of natural urges and impulses is that of sensory existence, existence in the material world of the senses. In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the culture resulting from sensory existence ought, in reality, to be ennobled, but the ahrimanic powers desired to get this culture under their own control. Hence, their aim to produce a mentality that considers truth to be found in sensory existence alone. To this extent ahrimanic impulses are active in all that is embraced in the problem of sensory existence, of existence in the world of the senses. This problem of sensory existence is closely connected with the problem of birth, just as the problem of happiness and prosperity is connected with that of natural urges and impulses. In order to vindicate sensory existence and to cause men, through instinct, to regard all evolution as a material process, the genesis of the human being in birth was related directly to the evolution of the animals. There you can see the thread leading over to the problem of birth. Thinkers and seekers in the fifth epoch since the fifteenth century, have been deeply engrossed in the question of the birth processes of the human being. Those who understand the connections know the implications of the problem “How does man enter the earth?” Thought has been directed to the question of whether the soul passes over as soul from father and mother to the child, or whether the soul is implanted by super-sensible powers. To tackle the problem of birth in the widest sense is the task of the post-Atlantean era; it is a problem that arises in complete conformity with normal and regular progress, but it became ahrimanic by being made materialistic, inasmuch as man was placed at the apex of the animal world and, compared with the importance attached to sensory existence, the soul was left out of consideration.

Thus we see streaming in from the one side impulses that strive to distort the problem of natural urges into the problem of prosperity in a way that does not accord with the forces of the good and the moral. To make the problem of natural urges into the problem of the good and the moral would be to work in the direction of the normal forces of progress, for to develop the good and the moral in its full range out of the problem of natural urges would be to discover how to spiritualize this problem of man's natural urges and impulses. That is the normal task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It should rightly be worked out in great imaginations, of which examples are to be found in Goethe's Faust. Also as a result of ahrimanic influences, the problem of birth was diverted to study of evolution in the world of the senses alone. The problem of natural urges was diverted to the problem of material prosperity, and the problem of birth to the problem of evolution in sensory existence.

Bearing all these things in mind, we see how the ahrimanic powers stream into the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I have already said that because ahrimanic forces stream in on the one side, and luciferic forces on the other, the strivings of men become specialized. If things had happened otherwise, four great problems would have filled the feelings of men in all their work and productive activity down to the very tilling of the soil. The first of these problems is that of natural urges and impulses; the second the problem of birth; the third the problem of death, which is concerned not only with how the human being comes to the earth through birth but also how he leaves the earth through the gate of death. The fourth is the problem of evil.

That man's concern with these four problems has not been equally distributed over the fifth epoch is due to the fact that on the one side Ahriman has diverted the problem of natural urges into that of prosperity, and the problem of birth into that of material existence in the world of sense, thereby averting the true solution of these problems. Again, on the other side, Lucifer has directed the thought of the culture that is more Eastern in character to the problem of death and the problem of evil. You can see how fundamentally the whole of Russian spiritual life is dominated by the problems of death and evil, just as the spiritual life of the West is dominated by the problems of natural urges and of birth. In the writings of Soloviev, the most powerful Russian thinker of modern times, it is everywhere apparent that his mind is concerned on the one side with the problem of death, and on the other with the problem of evil. Just as the problem of the natural urges becomes that of prosperity, so in considering the problem of evil, man's thought is turned to the question of sin, of the sinful life. Hence the problem of sin, of redemption, of cleansing from sin, has nowhere been tackled so profoundly as it has been tackled in the East. But at the same time there has been something irregular in the endeavors made to solve this problem. The problem of evil and the problem of sin have been used by luciferic powers in order that, by directing thought to sin, and to sin in the bodily carnal life, the souls might be alienated from earth life.

Whereas in the West, Ahriman makes every effort to enchain man in sensory existence on the earth, to found a kingdom where the good is thought to lie in prosperity, and where the natural urges of men therefore find satisfaction, from the East comes abhorrence of sin, as a result of which souls are to be diverted from the earth, alienated from the earth by Lucifer. From the East attention is directed to the problem of sin and the problem of death. Hence, much contemplative thought in the East is directed to how death is overcome by what came to pass in Christ Himself. Impulses for life are sought in the Resurrection. Implicit in what I said a week ago, that the East turns more to the Christ and the West more to Jesus, there is this truth: that the East has need of the Risen One, the Spirit who is not made manifest in material existence but who overcomes material existence. This is the problem of death. In a treatise that is probably one of the most beautiful writings of Soloviev, he says that if death as a physical phenomenon, a physical fact, were to signify an end of human life, man would resemble all the other animals; he would not be man at all, he would be an animal. Through death the human being resembles the animals. Through the evil of which he is capable, he becomes even worse than the animals. This is a direct indication that Soloviev's thinking is influenced by the problem of death, and by the problem of sin and evil. But we find everywhere contemplation about knowledge concerning the soul, such as how the soul is not affected by death, and external life is arranged in such a way that, even in its justifiable expressions, it tends to take a path leading away from the earth. That is why in the East there are so many sects that subdue and mortify the bodily nature, which flood the body with death, as it were, striving to lead the life of natural impulses and the act of birth ad absurdum, through leanings to sacrifice and the like.

In the West there is the danger of becoming enchained within the life of the senses, whereby this life would become egoless. For if prosperity alone were to be established on the earth, the ego would never dwell there. If the good could only be established by the spread of prosperity over the earth, a state of things would arise such as came to pass in old Atlantis. In the middle period of Atlantean culture, too, great impulses were given that would have led to a state of prosperity in their further course. In the form and effects of what men first felt as an impetus of the good, they perceived a vista of prosperity, and so they gave themselves up to prosperity, devoted themselves wholly to it. The earth had to be purged of Atlantean culture because men had preserved from the good the element of prosperity alone. In the post-Atlantean era, Ahriman strives by direct means to institute a culture of mere prosperity. This would mean pressing out the lemon, the doing away with it! Egos would no longer be able to live if prosperity were the only aim pursued by culture. In short, prosperity and the good, prosperity and virtue are not concepts that can be substituted for one another.

We are gazing here into profound secrets of life. A justified element in the founding of culture, an element that inevitably leads to a certain form of prosperity among men, is so distorted that prosperity per se is set up as the goal. And a culture that would certainly enable the human soul, even in life, to rise above and to know both death and evil is distorted in such a way that contact with what can produce death and evil is avoided from the outset, and the bodily nature is shunned. This was to satisfy the aims of Lucifer.

In this way we must endeavor to understand how real and concrete forces work in human existence, and what is at work beneath and above the conscious life of soul in the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. If you recognize this leitmotif you will be able to understand many things. Only you must not give way to the delusion that everything luciferic and everything ahrimanic must for these reasons be avoided. That would be the very way to succumb to these forces! Everyone who lives together with humanity must realize that Lucifer and Ahriman have been granted their places in the world. If errors could not take place, the human being would never reach inner freedom; freedom could never come to man if he were incapable of forming the erroneous conception that prosperity and the good are identical; he would then have no opportunity of rising above this error. If man were incapable of living under the delusion that through subjugation of the external, earthly life, victory can be snatched from death and from evil, he would never in reality overcome death and sin. It is necessary for these things to pass into the life of man.

We must see to it that the woeful doctrine, “Ah! that is luciferic and must be avoided; that is ahrimanic and must be avoided,” does not obsess us, but that we confront these powers in the right way knowing that it is not for us to steer clear of Lucifer but to conquer his forces for progressive human culture. Nor must we simply steer clear of Ahriman, but conquer Ahriman's forces for the progressive culture of humanity. For into our culture these forces must be received. The battle lies in the fact that Ahriman's aim is to snatch the souls away. The task of humanity is to receive Ahriman together with his strong forces—all those forces of intellect, for instance, which are preeminently forces of intellect but they can also assume a form that is more akin to feeling—those forces that have been applied, for instance, to the problem of how a state is established. Think of the numbers of people who have wrestled with this problem, some more theoretically, some more practically. The most intense efforts have been made to solve this problem. Such forces must be wrested into the good service of humanity, and must not be made ahrimanic by resolutions to have nothing to do with Ahriman, or refusals to be concerned with what, in social problems, for instance, is alleged to proceed from Ahriman. That would lead to nothing.

It is the same as regards Lucifer. The impulse of perception, of feeling, given us by the science of the spirit must help us to confront in the right way the forces that are actually present in the world. Those who are unwilling to do this are like a man who says, “Evil elements! Oh no, I don't like them; I don't like them at all!” Of course, both attitudes are one sided, but we must remember that the working together of the evil and the good, the union of the evil and the good, make the elements fruitful in the state of balance we must bring about in life by learning to be master of the ahrimanic and the luciferic forces. In this state of balance lies the impulse that must be inculcated into life, and that it is the task of the science of the spirit to transmit.

As far as is possible, we shall speak of these things again tomorrow.

We have been occupied in showing how those spiritual forces that we call the luciferic and ahrimanic powers play their part in the historical growth of mankind. We have seen how what is to be carried over from one age into another in the course of world evolution is carried over through such powers, and we have been at pains to show how in the desires, instincts and strivings for knowledge, in the impulses, too, of man's social life, something is present that can only be grasped concretely when one recognizes those super-sensible forces that underlie world historical evolution. We have seen how what must come to expression in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch has been in preparation since the fifteenth century. We have seen what new faculties of mankind have evolved in the whole European cultural life since that time.

If we wish to find a spirit who has brought to expression in the most concentrated and clearest manner what the impulses of our time ought to be, then we can look to Goethe. We have already observed that equally in his conception of nature and in his imaginative world, Goethe has expressed something that can form the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I must remind you today how I have often pointed out that Goethe has expressed in intimate fashion in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he regarded as the right impulses of culture, knowledge, feeling and will; that is, what he was obliged to look upon as necessary for the activity of man in the future. He has concealed in his fairy tale what he knew of the spiritually hidden active forces at work in mankind since the fifteenth century, and that will be at work for about two thousand years more. You know, too, how in our Mystery Dramas we have sought to bring to life in all possible detail what Goethe saw when he composed this Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The intention was to bring to expression, in the way in which it can again be brought to expression today, a hundred years later, what inspired Goethe and is to inspire the entire fifth post-Atlantean culture as the highest spiritual treasure. Such depths of soul underlying so great and powerful a work as the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in spite of its being symbolic, and such great impulses underlying Goethe's Faust as a poem of mankind, point again and again to forces lying deep below the surface of consciousness. All this worked in such a soul out of the depths of old cultural impulses. Today I should like to speak a little about such cultural impulses in connection with yesterday's lecture, and of how they went through a kind of spiritualizing process in Goethe.

We must go back to that age in which the impulses for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were first laid down in germ, back before the fifteenth century because things that are to develop spiritually must be prepared long beforehand. One can only recognize how in the European life of soul, as well as in the European social life, in the striving toward the True, the Beautiful and the Good, the normally progressive divine-spiritual forces intermingle in our age with luciferic-ahrimanic powers when one goes back into the time when the earliest impulses were given. We learned about these first impulses of earlier ages yesterday. Today, we will learn about a similar impetus from the middle of medieval times, and come to know how certain spiritual tendencies were born out of human evolution. In doing so, we will no more than indicate the historical background since nowadays one can read about it in any encyclopedia.

In order to describe the configuration of the cultural impulses that underwent a certain spiritualization in Goethe, I must refer to the age in which the impulse of the Crusades arose out of the European will: in fact, out of the Christian impulses of the European will. At the time when the will to visit the Holy Places originated in the civilized inhabitants of Europe there were bitter conflicts in the life there between what are called the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. That is to say, into the progressive, good, truly Christian impulses those other powers worked in, as it were, from the direction that was described yesterday. They worked in the way in which they are permitted by the wise guidance of the world. Thus, what happens in the wise guidance of the world may be duly influenced by other impulses working from the past and interpenetrating the impulses of the present in the way we have described.

When we consider it, among much that brings rejoicing to the soul, among much that originated soon after the Crusaders won their first successes, we see the founding of the Order of the Knights Templar in the year 1119 A.D. Five French knights united under the leadership of Hugo de Payens and, at the holy place where the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, they founded an order dedicated entirely to the Mystery of Golgotha. Its first important home was close to the place where Solomon's Temple once stood, so that the holy wisdom from most ancient times and the wisdom of Solomon could work together for Christianity in this spot with all the feelings and sentiments that have arisen from entire and holy devotion toward the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer. In addition to the religious vows of duty to their spiritual superiors usual at that time, the first Knights Templar pledged themselves to work together in the most intensive manner to bring under European control the place where the events of the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred.

The Written and unwritten rules of the Order were such that the Knights were to think of nothing except how they could completely fill themselves in heart and soul with the sacred Mystery of Golgotha, and how with every drop of their blood they could help bring the holy places within the sphere of influence of European authority. In each moment of their lives they were to think and feel dedicated with all their strength to this task alone, shunning nothing in order to realize it. Their blood was no longer to be their own but was to be devoted solely to the task we have indicated. Were they to meet a power three times as great as themselves, it was commanded that they were not to flee but were to stand firm. In each moment of their lives they were to think that the blood coursing in their veins did not belong to them but to their great spiritual mission. Whatever wealth they might acquire belonged to no one individual but to the Order alone. Should a member of the Order be killed, no booty should be available to the enemy except the hempen cord girding his loins. This cord was the sign of their work, which was freely undertaken for what was then regarded as the healing of the European spirit. A great and mighty task was set, less to thought than to deep feeling, which aimed at strengthening the soul life as individual and personal with the intention that it might be entirely absorbed in the progressive stream of Christian evolution.

This was the star, as it were, that was to shine before the Knights Templar in all that they thought, felt and understood. With this an impulse was given, which in its broader activity—on the wider extension of the Templar Order from Jerusalem over the countries of Europe—should have led to a certain penetration of European life by a Christian spirit. With respect to the immeasurable zeal that existed in the souls of these Knights, the powers who have to hold evolution back, leading the souls to become estranged from the earth and to led away from it to a special planet, leaving the earth uninhabited, those powers who desired this, set to work quite especially on souls who felt and thought as did the Knights Templar. They desired to devote themselves entirely to the spirit and could easily be attacked by those forces that wished to carry away the spiritual from the earth. These forces do not want the spiritual to be spread over the earth to permeate earth existence. Indeed, the danger is always at hand that souls may become estranged from the earth, become earth weary, and that earthly humanity may become mechanized.

There we have a powerfully aspiring spiritual life that we can assume will easily be approached by the luciferic temptation; a foothold is here given it. Then we also have, however, at the same time as the spread of the Templar Order over the various countries of Europe, the possibility of a sharp intrusion of ahrimanic powers in Western Europe. At the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Templar Order—not the individual Knights but the Order—had attained great prestige and wealth through its activity and had spread over Western Europe, we have a human personality ruling the West who can actually be said to have experienced in his soul a kind of inspiration through the moral, or the immoral, power of gold. He was a man who could definitely use for his inspiration the wisdom materialized from gold. Recollect the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in which the Golden King became the representative of wisdom. Since spiritual forces also exist in the various substances, which are always only maya with spiritual forces standing behind that [which] the materialist cannot perceive, it is absolutely possible for gold to become an inspirer.

A highly gifted personality, Philip the Fair, who was equipped with and extraordinary degree of cunning and the most evil ahrimanic wisdom, had access to this inspiration through gold. Philip IV, who reigned in France from 1285 to 1314, can really be said to have had a genius for avarice. He felt the instinctive urge to recognize nothing else in the world but what can be paid for with gold, and he was willing to concede power over gold to none but himself. He wished to bring forcibly under his control all the power that can be exercised through gold. This grew in him to be the immense passion that has become famous in history. When Pope Boniface forbade the French clergy to pay taxes to the State, this fact, in itself not very important, led Philip to make a law forbidding anyone to take gold and silver out of France. All of it was to remain there, such was his will, and only he was to have control of it. One might say that this was his idiosyncrasy. He sought to keep gold and silver for himself and gave a debased currency to his subjects and others. Uproar and resentment among the people could not prevent him from carrying out this policy, so that, when he made a last attempt to mix as little gold and silver as possible in the coinage, he had to flee, on the occasion of a popular riot, to the Temple of the Knights Templar. Driven to do so by his own severe regulations, he had had his treasures deposited for safety with them. He was astounded to see how quickly the Knights calmed the popular uprising. At the same time, he was filled with fear because he had seen how great was the moral power of the knights over the people, and how little he, who was only inspired by gold, availed against them. The Knights, too, had by this time acquired rich treasure and were immensely wealthy, but according to their rules, they were obliged to place all the riches of the Order in the service of spiritual activity and creative work.

When a passion is so strong as avarice was in Philip the Fair, it presses out strong forces from the soul that have a great influence on the unfolding of the will toward other men. To the nation, Philip counted for little, but he meant much to those who were his vassals, and these constituted a great host. He also understood how to use his power. As Pope Boniface had once opposed his will to make the clergy in France pay as much as possible, Philip hatched a plot against him. Boniface was freed by his followers but he died of grief soon after. This was at the time when Philip undertook to bring the entire Church completely under his control, thereby making Church officials mere bondsmen of the kingly power in which gold ruled. He thereupon caused the removal of the Pope to Avignon, which marked the beginning of what is often known in history as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. This lasted from the year 1309 to 1377.

Pope Clement V, former Bishop of Bordeaux, resided in Avignon and was a tool completely in the hands of Philip. Gradually, under the working of Philip's powerful will, he had reached the point of having no longer a will of his own, but used his ecclesiastical power only to serve Philip, carrying out all he desired. Philip was filled with a passionate desire to make himself master of all the then available wealth. After he had seen what a different significance gold could have in other hands, it was no wonder that he wished above all things to exterminate those other hands, the Knights Templar, so that he might confiscate their gold and posses their treasure himself. Now, I said that such a passion, aroused in such a materialistic way and working so intensely, creates powerful forces in the soul. At the same time, it creates knowledge, although of an ahrimanic order. So it was possible for a certain second-hand sort of knowledge to arise in the soul of Philip, of those methods that we have seen flame up in the harshest, most horrible way in the Mexican mysteries. The knowledge arose in Philip of what can be brought about by taking life in the correct way, although in a different, more indirect way from that of the Mexican initiates. As if out of deep subconscious impulses, he found the means of incorporating such impulses into humanity's evolution by putting men to death. For this, he needed victims. In a quite remarkable way this devilish instinct of Philip's harmonized with what developed of necessity in the bosom of the Knights, resulting from the dedication of their lives to the things I have indicated.

Naturally, where something great and noble arises, as it did among the Knights Templar, much that does not belong—perhaps even immorality—becomes attached to that greatness and nobleness. There were, of course, Knights who could be reproached for all sorts of things; that shall not be denied. But there was nothing of this kind in the spirit of the foundation of the Order, for what the knights had accomplished for Jerusalem stood first, and then what could be accomplished for the Christianizing of the whole of European culture. Gradually the Knights spread out in highly influential societies over England, France, Spain, part of Italy and Central Europe. They spread everywhere. In each single Knight was developed to the highest degree this complete penetration of the soul with the feeling and experience of the Mystery of Golgotha and of all that is connected with the Christian impulse. The force of this union with the Christ was strong and intensive. He was a true Knight Templar who no longer knew anything of himself, but when he felt, he let the Christ feel in him; when he thought, he let the Christ think in him; when he was filled with enthusiasm, he let the Christ in him be enthusiastic. They were perhaps few in whom this ideal had worked a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of the soul life, and who had really often brought the soul out of the body and enabled it to live in the spiritual world, but in respect of the entire Order they were, for all that, a considerable number. Something quite remarkable and powerful had thus entered into the circle of the Templar Order without their having known the rules of the Christian initiation other than through sacrificial service. At first in the Crusades, then in the spiritual work in Europe, their souls were so inspired by intense devotion to the Christian impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha that consequently many Knights experienced a Christian initiation. We have before us the following world historical event: on the world historical basis of the experience of a number of men, the Christian initiation, which is to say the perception of those spiritual worlds that are accessible to men through Christian initiation, arises from the fundamental depths of human development.

Such events always call forth opposing forces, which, indeed, in those times were abundantly at hand. What thus enters the world is not only loved; it is also excessively hated. In Philip, however, there was less hatred than the desire to rid the world of such a Society and to filch from it the treasure that had flowed abundantly to it and that was used only in the service of the spirit.

Now in such an initiation as was experienced by a number of the Knights, there is always the possibility of perceiving not only the beneficent, the divine, but also the luciferic and ahrimanic forces. All that draws men down into the ahrimanic world and up into the luciferic, appears, to him who goes through such an initiation, side by side with the insight into the normal worlds. The one thus initiated is confronted with all the sufferings, temptations and trials that come upon man through the powers hostile to good. He has moments in which the good spiritual world disappears before his spiritual gaze, the gaze of his soul, and he sees himself as though imprisoned by what tries to gain power over him. He sees himself in the hands of the ahrimanic-luciferic forces that wish to seize him to gain control of his willing, feeling, thinking and sense perception. These, indeed, are spiritual trials that are well-known from the descriptions of those who have seen into the spiritual world.

There were many in the circle of the Knights Templar who could gain a deep insight into the Mystery of Golgotha and its meaning and into Christian symbolism as it had taken shape through the development of the Last Supper. They beheld as well the deep background of this symbolism. Many a one who in consequence of his Christian initiation could look into the Christian impulses passing through the historical evolution of the European peoples, also saw something else; he experienced it in his own soul, as it were, since it always again came over him as a temptation. Recognizing the unconscious capabilities of the human soul, he repeatedly overcame the temptation that showed itself to him. The initiate thus became conscious of it and sought to overcome what otherwise remained in the subconscious. Many Knights learned to know the devilish urge that takes possession of the will and feeling to debase the Mystery of Golgotha. In the dream pictures by which many such initiates were haunted, appeared in vision the reverse, as it were, of the veneration of the symbol of the crucifix. This was possible owing to the way in which the initiation had come about, and particularly because the luciferic forces had stood close by with their temptation. He saw in vision how the human soul could become capable of dishonoring the symbol of the Cross and the holy ritual of the Consecration of the Host. He saw those human forces that urge men to return to ancient paganism, to worship what the pagans worshipped and to scorn the advance to Christianity. These men knew how the human soul could succumb to such temptation since they had to overcome it consciously.

You are looking here into a life of soul of which outer history relates but little. Philip the Fair, through his ahrimanic gold initiation, had also a correct knowledge of these facts of soul life, even if only instinctively. He knew enough of it, however, to be able to communicate it to his vassals. Now, after a cruel judicial process had been contrived involving all manner of investigation, a course of action, decided upon beforehand, was begun. Plots were made, instigated by Philip together with his vassals who had been summoned to make investigations against the Knights. Although they were innocent, they were accused of every imaginable vice. One day in France they were suddenly attacked and thrown into prison. During their confinement their treasures were seized.

Trials were now arranged in which, entirely under the influence of Philip, torture was extensively employed. Every Knight to be found was subjected to the severest torture. Here, therefore, torture was also used to take life, the significance of which you have already learned to know. The intention of Philip was to put to the rack as many persons as possible, and the torture was applied in the most cruel way so that many of the harassed Knights lost consciousness. Philip knew that the pictures of the temptations emerged when, in terrible agony on the rack, their consciousness became clouded. He knew: the images of temptation come out! Under his instigation a catechism of leading questions was so arranged that the answers were always suggested in the way the questions were put. The Knights' answers were, of course, given out of a consciousness dulled by the torture. They were asked, “Have you denied the Host and refrained from speaking the words of Consecration?” In their clouded consciousness the Knights acknowledged these things. The powers opposing the good spoke out of their vision and, whereas in their conscious life they brought the deepest reverence to the symbol of the Cross and the Crucifix, they now accused themselves of spitting upon it; they accused themselves of the most dreadful crimes, which normally lived in their subconscious as temptations. So from the admissions made by the tortured Knights, the story was fabricated that they had worshipped an idol instead of Christ, an idol of a human head with luminous eyes; that on their admittance to the Order they were subjected to repulsive sexual procedures of the vilest nature; that they did not conduct the Transubstantiation in the right way; that they committed the worst sexual offences; that even on their admittance to the Order they forswore the Mystery of Golgotha. The catechizing had been so well organized that even the Grand Master of the order had been tortured into making these subconscious avowals.

It is one of the saddest chapters of human history, but one that can only be understood if one sees clearly that behind the veil of what is related by history stand active forces, and that human life is truly a battlefield. Because of lack of time, I will omit all that might be said further on this subject, but it would be easy to show how there is every ostensible reason for condemning the Knights Templar. Many stood by their avowals, many fled; the majority were condemned and, as stated, even the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was forced under torture to speak in the way described. Thus it came about that Philip the Fair, Philip IV of France was able to succeed in convincing his vassal, Pope Clement V—it was not difficult—that the Knights had committed the most shameful crimes, that they were the most unchristian heretics. All this the Pope sanctioned with his benediction, and the Order of the Templar was dissolved. Fifty-four Knights, including Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Shortly afterward in other European countries—in England, Spain, then right into Central Europe and Italy—action was also taken against them.

Thus we see how the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha and its influence penetrated into the midst of European evolution through the Order of the Templar. In a deeper sense, however, these things must be looked upon as determined by a certain necessity. Humanity was not yet ripe to receive the impulse of wisdom, beauty and strength in the way the Knights desired. Besides, it was determined on grounds we have yet to learn, grounds that lie in the whole spiritual development of Europe, that the spiritual world was not to be attained in the way in which the Templars entered it. It would have been gained too quickly, which is the luciferic way. We actually behold here a most important twofold attack of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lucifer urging the Knights on, driving them into their misfortune, and Ahriman working actively through the inspiration of Philip the Fair. We see here a significant twofold attack effected in world history.

But what lived and worked in the Knights Templar could not be eradicated. Spiritual life cannot be rooted out; it lives and works on further. With the Knights, notably with the fifty-four who had been burned at the stake through the agency of Philip, many a soul was certainly drawn up into the spiritual world who would still have done much work on the earth in the spirit of the Templar Order, and who would also have attracted pupils to work in the same spirit. But it had to turn out differently. In the spiritual world these souls lived through those experiences they had undergone in the most terrible agonies that were brought about under the influence of the visionary avowals extorted through torture. Their impulses, which now, between their death and their next birth, go out to souls who have since descended, and also to souls who are still above awaiting incarnation, must be metamorphosed from the character of the activity of the physical earthly world into spiritual activity. What now came from the souls of the Knights, who had been murdered in this pitiful way and who before their death by burning had to undergo the most frightful experience a man can suffer, was to become for many others a principle of inspiration. Powerful impulses were to flow down into humanity. We can prove this in the case of many human souls.

Today, however, we will keep more to the sphere of knowledge and intellect as we have done also in the other examples given in recent days. Inspiration from the cosmic knowledge of the Knights Templar—this was always given. The fact that ultimately people came to look on the Templars as heretics after they had been burned to death is not to be wondered at; nor is it to be wondered at that people also believed they had committed all sorts of infamous crimes. Had someone been pleased to condemn as specially heretical the Devil's act, which has just been presented here,¹ in which Mephistopheles, the Lemures and the thick and thin Devils appear, perhaps—I do not know—countless persons in the nation would also look on that as something heretical. The methods of Philip the Fair are, however, no longer employed in the present rather more lamentable times. The cosmic wisdom that these Knights possessed has entered many souls. One could cite many examples of how the inspiration of the Knights Templar had been drawn into souls. I will read you a passage from the poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen, which appeared in 1838. As you can read in the lecture cycles, I have often referred to Julius Mosen, the author of the profound poem “Ritter Wahn” (Knight Chimera). In the very first canto of the third section of “Ahasver”, Mosen leads his hero to those parts of the earth where, in Ceylon and the neighboring islands, the region is to be sought that we describe in the cosmology of our spiritual science as the approximate locale of Lemurian evolution. This region of the earth is distinguished in a special way. You know that the magnetic north pole is located at a different point from that of the geographic north pole. Magnetic needles everywhere point toward the magnetic north pole and one can draw magnetic meridians that meet at this point. Up in North America where the magnetic north pole lies, these magnetic meridians go round the earth in straight lines. Remarkably, however, in the Lemurian region the magnetic meridians become sinuous serpentine lines. The magnetic forces are twisted into a serpentine form in this region. People notice these things far too little today. One who sees the living earth, however, knows that magnetism is like a force vivifying the earth;

in the north it goes straight, and in the region of old Lemuria it goes in a tortuous winding line. Just think how profoundly Julius Mosen speaks as he sends his Ahasver toward this region in the first canto of the third epoch—it is divided in epochs—of the poem:

In line direct and straight from Southern Pole
Takes the Magnetic Line its chosen course,
When suddenly it twines in serpent-curve

There before India and its neighbor isles
Before the dungeon where in deepest woe
Sits the Eternal Mother ever bound.

In circle form the Line drew back its length,
And twining swift and secret on itself
With a single plunge in swirling vortex fell.

There the Great Spirit in a first embrace
Held the poor spouse, and from their ardent fire
Sprang the Earth-demons instantly to life.

When thus the first creation came to naught,
The Great, the Nameless Spirit in his wrath
Stamped down the bridal couch beneath the sea.

So it goes on. We see inspiration emerge with wonderfully intuitive knowledge. The wisdom lives on that could only enter the world amid sufferings, tortures, persecutions and the most frightful offences. Nevertheless, it lives on in spiritualized form.

When we seek the most beautiful spiritualizations of this wisdom that has entered the development of Europe, as we have described, then we find one precisely in all that would work and live in the powerful imaginations of Goethe. Goethe knew the secret of the Templars. Not without purpose has he used gold as he has done in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which he made the snake consume the gold and then sacrifice itself. By this deed the gold is wrested from the powers with which Goethe truly knew it must not be allowed to remain. Gold—naturally everything is also meant here of which gold is a real symbol. Read once more Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and try to feel how Goethe knew the secret of gold, how, through the way in which he lets gold flow through the fairy tale, he is looking back into earlier times. May I perhaps add here the personal confession that when for the first time in the eighties of the last century, I faced the question of the gold in Goethe's fairy tale, the meaning of the story emerged for me through the development of the gold in it.

Through the way in which Goethe lets gold flow through this fairy tale, he shows how he looks back into the time in which wisdom—for which gold also stands, hence, “The Golden King of Wisdom”—was exposed to such persecutions as those described. Now, he sought to show past, present and future. Goethe saw instinctively into the future of eastern European civilization. He could see how unjustifiable is the way in which the problem of sin and death worked there. If we wished to designate, not quite inappropriately perhaps, the nationality of the man who is then led to the Temple and the Beautiful Lily, who appears at first as without vigor as if crippled, then, from what we have had to say recently about the culture of the East and of Russia, you will not consider it unreasonable to deem this man to be a Russian. In so doing, you will almost certainly follow the line of Goethe's instinct. The secret of European evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies concealed within this fairy tale, just as truly as Goethe was able to conceal it in his Faust, especially in the second part, as we know from his own statement. It is clearly to be seen in Goethe—we have already shown it in various respects; later it can be shown in others—that he begins to regard the world and to feel himself in it, in accord with the fundamental demand of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goethe we have a true continuation of the life of the Knights Templar but, as I have said, in a spiritualized way. This Goetheanism, however, will only be able to enter slowly and gradually into human understanding. I have already shown in certain respects how the impulse for everything of a spiritually scientific nature lies in Goetheanism. All of spiritual science can be developed from Goethe. I have shown in a public lecture (Berlin, April 15, 1916) that I gave a short time ago how the first elementary scientific foundation for the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earth lives, lies in Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis. He begins the teaching of metamorphosis by showing how the leaf changes into the blossom, how an organ appears in different forms. When one follows this through with penetration, there lies implicit in it what I have often explained here; that is, the head of man is the transformed body, and the rest of the body is a human head still to be transformed. Here is metamorphosis in the ultimate degree, which for science will develop into a direct knowledge of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. But Goethe is still but little understood; he must first become familiar in the cultural life of humanity. Not only centuries but millenniums will be needed in order to unravel what lies in Goethe. As a matter of fact, even today there is not a foundation for a study of Goethe such as a monograph or biography could provide that would be produced really in his very style.

Let us see what has been done in particular instances in modern culture toward the understanding of Goethe's personality. We can, of course, only cite single examples. Herman Grimm has, however, rightly said, “A certain Mr. Lewes has written a book, which was for some time the most famous book on Goethe; one can even say the best. It is a book treating of a personality who was supposed to have been born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, and to have had a Frankfurt councilor for a father. He then developed and grew up in such a way that Goethe's youth was ascribed to him, along with all sorts of other things taken from Goethe. Goethe's works were attributed to him; he also traveled to Italy in the same year as Goethe, and died the same year Goethe died. This person, however, is not Goethe but a fantasy of Mr. Lewes's”.

Then we also have a relatively good book in which Goethe's life and creative work is described with immense industry and better than many other works on Goethe. It is filled, however, from the first to the last page with hatred and aversion. This book is by the Jesuit, Baumgartner. It is an excellent but, in fact, a Jesuitical, book; but antagonistic to Goethe. At least, it is better written than the countless others on Goethe that have appeared throughout the nineteenth century and now on into the twentieth. A great number of these works are unpalatable. One continually sneezes because the dust of the library and professor gets into one's nose. They have been written by pedants who call it Goethe. Often they have been written with pedantic pride, but they are also fusty with library dust or the air one must breathe when one guesses how often the man who is writing about Faust, for example, has opened Grimm's or some other glossary in order to decipher a word or passage—and so on. One could say: Oh horrible, most horrible, what has been written in this field!

One book, however, stands out in a quite unusual way. These are Herman Grimm's lectures on Goethe given in the seventies at Berlin University. Grimm was, as we can see, a spirit who had the best will and the most wonderful traditions to aid him in familiarizing himself with Goethe. His book is an intelligent and excellent one that has developed right out of the Goethean atmosphere. Grimm grew up in the age when there were still Goethean traditions, but this book shows something quite remarkable. In fact, in a certain respect it is not at all a book that has developed from Goethean traditions; it is both Goethean and un-Goethean. For Herman Grimm does not write in a Goethean style but, strangely enough, in a style that leads one to say that the book was written by an American, a German American! One can call Grimm's lectures a book written by an American but in German. In style it is American—a style in which Grimm has educated himself. As one of the most enthusiastic followers of Emerson, he has studied him, read, digested, translated him, has quite familiarized himself with him. Now, Grimm finds his way into this American-Emerson style so that he is complete master of it; at the same time he grows enthusiastic about it. One can see at once on reading his novel, Invincible Powers, how he is able to let everything American live on in him. Enthusiasm for what is American and at the same time a wonderful feeling of internationalism is poured out in Herman Grimm's Goethe lectures.

In spite of all this, much, very much in the spiritual life of man must come about before Goethe and similar spirits will be understood! If sometimes they are rightly understood, it must be in quite another way from that of Herman Grimm. Once, in a conversation with him, I wished to make just a few references to the path by which one could gradually enter the spiritual world. The movement of his right arm will always remain unforgettable—a gesture of warding off; he wanted to push that aside. He created a Goethe who is simply delightful to see from outside, but one does not see into his heart. This Goethe of Grimm's, as he makes his way through historical development, as he stands there, as he moves about and comes into relation with people, as human relations flow into his works, as the contemporary world conception flows into his works—this Goethe goes past our mind's eye as a ghost who flits through the world unseen by the living. Goethe will only be understood when one has deepened Goetheanism to become spiritual science. Then, much will emerge from Goethe that he could not express himself. Goethe, truly understood, leads, in fact, to spiritual science, which is really developed Goetheanism.

From the beginning Goethe also understood that Christianity is a living thing. How he longed for a possible expression for the Christianizing of the modern world conception. It did not lie in his time to find it, but in the new age spiritual science is already working to attain it. Let us take his poem, “The Mysteries” (Die Geheimnisse), in which Brother Mark is guided to the Temple where the Rose Cross is on the door, and let us look at the whole picture. We shall see that the Christian mood is in this fragment, “The Mysteries,” the mood born of the feeling that the symbol of the Cross becomes a picture of life through the living roses entwining it! Then, too Goethe lets his Faust end with a Christian conception; he spoke of it to Eckermann in his old age. A time will come when in a much more active, intense sense, one will connect with Christianity the thoughts that ring through the conclusion of Faust, although Goethe, who was inwardly modest in such things, was far from doing so himself. He was, in reality, on the way that he made his Brother Mark take—to the Cross encircled with roses. In this lies ultimately all that is to flow from such wisdom as was striven for by the Knights Templar. (Their striving was too rapid and unsuitable to physical evolution.)

A longing for the full Christianizing of the treasures of wisdom concerning the cosmos and earthly evolution gradually broke through—a longing for the full Christianizing of earthly life so that suffering, pain and grief appear as the earth's Cross, which then finds its comfort, its elevation, its salvation in the Rose symbol of the Crucifix. Repeatedly in men thus inspired, in whom lived on what was thought to have been destroyed with the burning of the Templars—in these inspired men lived ever again the ideal that in the place of what brings strife and quarrels something must appear that can bring good to earth, and this good may be pictured in the symbol of the Cross in conjunction with the roses.

The book, Ruins (Shutt), by Anastasius Grün has been given to me today by one of our members. I have here again the same verses that I read to you some time ago to confirm the fact that this mystery, which this poem also expresses, is not merely something put forward by us, but that it comes to life again and again. Anastasius Grün, the Austrian poet, composed these poems; the eighth edition appeared in 1847. In his own manner he wrote of the progress of mankind, and I will read again today the passage I read years ago as proof of the role played by the image of the Rose Cross in evolving humanity; that is, among those who are incarnated in the new age. Anastasius Grün turns his gaze toward Palestine and other regions after having described how much confused fighting and quarreling has been spread over the earth. After he has seen and described much that causes fighting and strife he, who is a great seer in a certain way, turns to a region of the earth that he describes thus. I cannot read all of it as it would take too long, but one's eye is first turned to a part of the earth where the ploughshare is used.

As children once were digging in a meadow
They brought a shapeless thing of iron to light,
It seemed too straight, too heavy for a sickle,
For plough it was too slender and too slight.

With toil they dragged it home as new found treasure;
The elders see it, yet they know it not;
They call the neighbors round within the circle,
The neighbors see it, yet they know it not.

There is an ancient greybeard, wan and sallow,
Whose lifetime lingers on like tale forgot
Into the present world of busy dealing,
They show it to him, but he knows is not.

Well for them all, that they have never known it,
Else must they weep, and still must be deplored
The folly of their fathers, long since buried,
For what was known by no one was a sword!

Henceforth it shall but cleave the earth as ploughshare;
Shall point the seed-corn's path into the ground,
The sword's new hero-deeds are peaned
When sun-filled airs with song of lark resound.

Once more it came to pass, that in his ploughing
The farmer struck what seemed a piece of stone.
And as his spade unloosed the earthy covers,
A structure of a wondrous shape was shown.

He calls the neighbors round within the circle;
They look at it but still they know it not.
Thou wise and aged one, thou'lt surely tell us?
The greybeard looks at it, yet knows it not.

Thus, in ploughing, something was dug up and even the aged man does not recognize it.

Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around in every roadway;
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight!

They saw the fight not, and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not, and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross will always be known, even in a region where it was already buried and drawn out of the earth as a cross of stone, where civilization has so withdrawn that an un-Christian culture has developed. There, Anastasius Grün wishes to say, a cross is found and men know it in their inmost breasts, even though the oldest among them fails to recognize it through tradition.

Though known to one, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around on every roadway,
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight.

They saw the fight not and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross of stone they set up in the garden;
A venerable relic strange and old,
Flowers of all species lift their growth above it,
While roses climbing high the Cross enfold.

So stands the Cross weighty with solemn meaning
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen;
Long since 'tis hidden by its wealth of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen.

But it is there! There is the Cross! There are the roses! One only learns the meaning of history when one turns one's gaze to what lives in the spiritual and pervades human evolution, when, too, one will turn one's attention to what shows us under what auspices, under what insignia things enter world history. I think that one can feel the deeper connection between what we have characterized for later times and what has been characterized in the ideal of the Knights Templar and their fate in the world at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

• 1. A presentation of Faust had presumably just taken place.

In our previous studies I have tried to show that a meaning, a wisdom-filled guidance, exists in the historical evolution of mankind that can only be discovered when ones digs deeper into spiritual foundations. I endeavored to bring this especially to your attention yesterday, and for some weeks I have sought to present it with various concrete examples. People in general live within their age in such a way as to let events come upon them, causing happiness or unhappiness, joy or sorrow; they derive their inner experiences from the impulses of the age. In a certain respect, they also reflect upon things. But their meditating upon what happens does not signify much because the spiritual development of our age is not fitted for a full penetration into the causes that hold sway spiritually behind the phenomena.

Now, as I have pointed out to you, he who goes deeply into the events of the time should continually bear in mind that with so-called civilized humanity's present-day thinking and feeling, the social order can only be maintained for a few more decades. A reshaping of sentiment and thinking is essential to mankind, a transformation of many ideas, perceptions, feelings and will impulses; spiritual science is ready to contribute its share toward the comprehension of such a renewal.

Official history today is really of little help in making a man understand why the things that go on around him are as they are. For the most part, official history does not desire to look into the inner growth of things, but instead registers what happens externally and, in what might be called the simplest and most convenient manner, always considers what has happened earlier to be the cause of what follows. But when one traces things back to their causes in the simple, easygoing way that modern history largely employs, one comes to positive absurdities. Ultimately, one would have to come to the opinion that the greatest part—yes, perhaps even the most widespread part of what happens—owes its existence not to sense, but to absurdity. If the full consequences of the views that people are so prone to entertain in our time were examined logically, one would have to admit that there is not sense, but nonsense in history. Let us take an example that everyone who studies ordinary history can see for himself.

Let us consider, for instance, the origin of the orthodox English denomination, the Anglican Church, to which many people belong; let us seek its external historical origin. Well, we shall find that Henry VIII reigned from 1509 to 1547, and that he had six wives. The first, Catherine of Aragon, was divorced from him and, considered quite externally, this divorce played a great historical role. The second, Anne Boleyn, he beheaded. The third, Jane Seymour, died. The fourth, he divorced. The fifth, Katherine Howard, he also beheaded. Only the sixth survived him and, if one investigates history further, it will be found that that was really only through a sort of mistake! A different fate was planned for her, too. I refer to his somewhat complicated matrimonial history of Henry VIII, who, as stated, reigned from 1509 to 1547, less for its historical content than in order to lead up to a consideration of his character. One can really gain some idea of a person's character if one knows that he has had two wives beheaded, been divorced from a certain number, and so on.

Now, taken purely historically, the divorce of the first, Catharine of Argon, played a definitely significant role; one need only look at two events to see this. The first was that Henry VIII, the Defender of the Faith, as he called himself, that is, of the Catholic faith emanating from Rome, became the opponent of the Pope because he refused to annul the marriage. Henry became the opponent of the Pope, of the Catholic Church issuing its orders from Rome, and simply on his own authority and power separated the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, a kind of Reformation took place that was of a quite individualistic nature since the old customs, ceremonies and rituals were preserved. It was not the cause, as it was with the Protestants, that a renewal had been sought from a real spiritual basis and spiritual force. Everything of an ecclesiastical nature was preserved, but the Church in England was to be cut off from the Roman Catholic Church simply because the Pope had refused to sanction Henry VIII's divorce. Thus, in order to obtain a different wife, this man founded a new church for his people that has existed ever since.

So we have the outer historical fact that many millions of people have lived throughout a long period in a religious communion because a king's divorce could only be brought about through his creating this religious body! This a fact of external history. Is it not an absurdity? When one looks at the matter more closely, then another absurdity is added, a real inner absurdity, because it cannot be denied that many thousands of people, since the divorce of Henry VIII and the founding of the English Church, have found really deep, inner religious life within the communion that originated in such a questionable manner. This implies that something can arise in history through a most questionable procedure, and the ensuing fruits can bring—and have, in fact, brought—the greatest inner healing of soul to many thousands of people. One must only follow things to a certain conclusion. As a rule, one skims over things in their development but if one will observe their consequences, it will be clear that, when we look at facts from the point of view that is held today, we arrive at all sorts of absurdities.

I have spoken of one fact that emerged, but we must record yet another—the execution of Sir Thomas More, that most significant and gifted pupil of Pico della Mirandola. He it was who wrote Utopia, a wonderful work in which, out of a kind of visionary perception, he created the idea of a social relationship among men. I cannot enlarge on this today but another time it may be pursued further. One sees how this pupil of Pico della Mirandola, Thomas More, created in his book, from a certain atavistic clairvoyance, a picture of the social order. Let the people who are so clever think as they will of the practicality of this picture; ingenuity and impulses of genius live in it.

Although such a picture is not immediately practicable in the outer world, yet it is precisely for such pictures that Johann Gottlieb Fichte's words hold good regarding social and other ideals that have been set up for humanity. He observed how again and again people say, “Well, here come thinkers, preaching all sorts of ideals, but they are impractical men; one cannot make use of their ideals!” In response to such objections, Fichte said, “That these ideals are not directly applicable in real life is known to us, too, just as well as to those who make such objections—perhaps better. But we also know that, if life is truly to advance, it must be continually shaped according to such ideals. People who do not want to know anything of such ideals show nothing more than that in the evolution of humanity they are not to be counted upon. So may the good God grant them rain and sunshine at the right time and, if possible, food and drink and a good digestion also, and, if it can be done, good thoughts, too, from time to time!” So says Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and with justice. It is, after all, mankind's ideals that find realization in the world, although other forces and other impulses work together with them; the ideals do not always work directly, but indirectly.

Through the influence of Henry VIII, however, many charges were brought against Thomas More, and he was executed. It is precisely in such an execution and in the creation of the English Church, that we can see two events that must be observed more closely if we wish to know them in their deeper meaning. One can understand why this particular evolution took the course it did only when one considers outstanding individuals who appeared in the years following the time of Henry VIII and his activities.

Let us first consider the fact that a religious body was created in order to bring about a divorce. As already stated, that need not have any particular consequences for the individual if he be religiously inclined. He can find his salvation, and many have, even within a church so founded. But with regard to the religious question in historical evolution since that time, we see, in fact, that through this external creation of a religious communion something quite extraordinary has been brought about. In order to understand this, we must note what has proceeded by way of spiritual impulse from the civilization into which this religious body has been placed. Viewing matters objectively, we must be clear that after the spiritual influences coming from the southwest began to decline, cultural influences coming from England continually increased. The influence of English spiritual culture became ever stronger, first in the West and then on the entire European continent. If one wishes to speak of the strongest influences working in a spiritual sense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, one must naturally have in mind the impulses proceeding from England. Certain people appear within English civilization who are inspired by this cultural impulse; persons also appear in France in whom these cultural impulses live.

There arose in England, for example, the extraordinarily influential philosopher, Locke. Today, it is true that not many people know anything about him, but the influences of such men nevertheless go through thousands of cultural channels unknown to external life. Locke had an immense influence on Voltaire, who influenced European thinking greatly. This influence goes back to Locke. How much has directly come to pass under what we may call the Locke-Voltaire influence! How many thoughts would not have spread over Europe if this Locke-Voltaire influence had never existed. What a different part political and social life in Europe would have played if the European soul had not been fed such thoughts. In France, for instance, we see these same impulses live on in the immensely influential Montesquieu. If we then look to wider intellectual influences on the continent, we see how through Hume, and later on through Darwin, human thinking is revolutionized. Again we see, as through Locke and Voltaire, so also through Hume and Darwin, that an immense influence is exercised. And there is Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, whose influence cannot as yet be evaluated by the self-styled “cultivated” people because it exists so widely. When Marx began to study and to write his fundamental work, Capital, he went to England. To be sure, Hegelism lived in Marx, but a Hegelism colored by Darwinism. One who studies the constitutions of the different European countries in the nineteenth century and their constitutional conflicts, will realize how profound was the influence of the cultural impulses coming from England. All this can only be indicated here.

If, however, we now turn our minds to the outstanding personalities who give Europe a certain configuration, we find in all of them a specially developed, abstract rationalistic thinking that makes an excellent instrument for research in, and for learning to know and deal with, the physical world. In Locke and Voltaire, in Montesquieu and also in Hume and Darwin, in everything dependent on them, a faculty lives that is transmitted to European thinking and feeling, so that even those who know nothing of it are still deeply influenced by it. This faculty creates a kind of thinking that is peculiarly fitted to understand and deal with the materialistic relations of the world, and to create social orders that arise from materialistic connections.

Now we see a certain concomitant phenomenon that appears in all these thinkers and is emphatically not without significance. They are keen and at times brilliant thinkers, penetrating minds with respect to material matters, but they are all thinkers who take a peculiar stand toward man's religious evolution, definitely refusing to apply thinking to the sphere of religious life. Not one of them—neither Locke, nor Hume, nor Darwin, nor Montesquieu—is willing to apply thinking to what he considers to be concerns of the religious life. But neither do they dispute this religious life. They accept it in the form in which it has developed historically. To them, it was commonly accepted that one is Catholic or Protestant just as one is French or English. This means that one accepts it as something that is there; one does not criticize; one adapts oneself to it and lets it stand. But neither does one allow the subject to be broached in thought. Such energetic and keen thinkers as Hume and Montesquieu feel that the religious life should stand and be recognized in external life, but the discrimination that one employs to the full in material things should not be allowed to enter into matters concerning the spiritual sphere.

This is a direct historical consequence of the callous organization of the religion of England by Henry VIII. That is the inner meaning of the matter. This mood, which is poured out over countless European impulses, is dependent on the fact that a certain religious body was created through a man's desire for a divorce—a matter of indifference to everyone. A matter of indifference, a man's wish to be divorced, stands at the source and results in a mood in which one does not concern oneself with these affairs, but rather lets them stand for generations, centuries. This way of thinking about religious matters could only have come about through such an historical event standing at the beginning. Only when one views things from the inner aspect does one find the right connection.

Now for the other event, the execution of Thomas More that took place in 1535. Here, for various reasons, a man is executed who sees into the spiritual world, although in distorted, caricatured form. He is executed. I cannot go into the inner reasons today, but externally it is because he does not join those who take the Oath of Supremacy; that is, does not recognize the separation of the English Church from Rome. Such a man goes over into the spiritual world. The soul has thus left the physical body after having already had, while still in that physical body, deep insight into the spiritual world. This remains; it lives on further in the world as cause. What Thomas More had perceived of the spiritual world while in the physical body remains so closely united with him when he passes with his soul through the gate of death, that he can, through this circumstance, exercise a great influence upon the age that follows.

So these two streams work together. An external one, which I have described, that is apathetic toward the religious life, though full of an apparently orthodox recognition of it, and a soul that has grown powerful because, in the physical body, it has experienced the super-sensible and allows it to radiate out over succeeding evolution. It streamed into the other spiritual atmosphere I described about eight days ago (Lecture VI). The spiritual atmosphere from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries is, as we know, also permeated by the impulses that have arisen through the persecution and death of the Knights Templar.

Founded in 1119, the Knights Templar were first active in the Crusades. Then they spread out toward Europe, and through special circumstances many of them became victims of the avarice, the gold avarice, of Philip the Fair. I have described this to you, as I said, but let us see once more how these Knights were sacrificed. Let us turn our attention again to what we presented from the actual course of events, namely, that countless numbers of these Knights were tortured after having previously experienced a Christian initiation through the principles and impulses living in the Templar Order. Let calumnies assert what infamous things they please of the Knights Templar; that these were not true can be proved from history. Exceptions, of course, exist everywhere, but in essence the calumnies are not true. What was inculcated in the Templar Order was this, that each member of the Order should realize that his blood did not belong to himself but to the task of familiarizing Western mankind—and to some extent Eastern also—with the Mystery of Golgotha in the spiritual sense. What streamed to the Knights from this devotional mood toward the Mystery of Golgotha changed gradually into a kind of Christian initiation, so that a great number of them could actually see to some extent into the spiritual worlds. Through this power, however, they were exposed to quite special danger when their consciousness was dulled through the agonies of torture, as happened in hundreds of cases. Their consciousness was darkened through the torture; their day-consciousness was crippled and a subconscious was aroused. All the temptations to which one who strives toward such spiritual heights is exposed came to expression on the rack. So it came to pass as Philip the Fair had foreseen; in his own way he had a touch of genius, inspired by avarice and covetousness, as I have described. It came to pass that a great number of Knights admitted, in a subconscious state, not only the extraordinary charge of denying the Christian religion and the Mystery of Golgotha, an admission which, arising from their temptations, was understandable, but they also accused themselves of other crimes. A certain number afterward recanted when they were released from the rack and consciousness returned; others could not recant. In short, fifty-four of them met with a cruel death, including the Head of the Order, Jacques de Molay.

Souls thus passed through the gates of death who had not only looked into the progressive spiritual world in waking consciousness by having attained a Christian initiation and beheld the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, but who also knew something of evolution and could work into it by having learned to know those forces opposing human effort that spoke through their lips on the rack when they, in innocence, had accused themselves of crimes. These horrible and terrible experiences assumed an appropriate form when these souls were in the spiritual world. I have already related how, after these souls had gone through the gate of death, impulses streamed from them that would then work further in the super-sensible impulses from the fifteenth century on into our time. The inspiration living in different gifted personalities comes, if one observes its real cause, from the fact that souls were carried up into the spiritual world having first experienced what Philip the Fair had subjected them to before they died.

This has all been a preparation for the time in which we are now living. These causes, and many others, would first have to be described if one would fully understand among what thoughts a man born since then has been placed. What flowed out of the events I have recorded lived in everything; one can prove that by actual history. I will only refer to one instance, but I could point to many. In the age of which I speak, a most powerfully effective educational book, Robinson Crusoe, was produced. One need only think how the ideas living in this book become familiar to the tenderest, earliest age of childhood. This book has not only gone through hundreds of editions in its original form and has been translated into all languages, but it has been recreated in every possible tongue. There are not only Bohemian, Hungarian, Spanish, French, German, Polish and Russian, but also other translations. In all these languages there are new creations in the spirit of Defoe. What lives in it, how souls are moulded by it, is generally never considered at all. All of Robinson Crusoe would have been unthinkable if it had not been preceded by those events I have related.

All these things have their inner connections, and this is true down to the actual details. Today, a man walks from one street in the city to another on some business or other. At most, if he thinks of it at all, he only thinks of the immediate cause. The fact that he would not take this walk nor have this business if everything I have just mentioned had not come about before, is not considered at all. In general, inner connections are but little observed. I have often called attention to how seldom people are inclined to turn their minds to inner connections. For instance, a man who looks at things quite externally may perhaps sometimes wonder who built the St. Gotthard tunnel. Tunnels are not built nowadays unless certain calculations are made in differential calculus. The St. Gotthard was not only built by those who laid stone on stone, but without the calculus it would not have been built at all. The solitary thinker, Leibniz, devised the differential calculus; thus, he was a co-builder. All this is part of it. I am only saying this for the purposes of elucidation; the example in itself does not tell us much; it is only to make things clear.

Our age stands under all these influences—the thinking and the entire configuration of our age—that I have sought to characterize. Now one definite peculiarity is to be emphasized for this age. According to prevalent belief, it stands, not only with both feet, but also with hands and, in fact, the whole body, within reality. It is the pride, not to say the arrogance, of our age that people believe they are standing deep in reality. They are immensely proud of it. But as a later age will show, as regards thought, our age is by no means rooted in reality; it is far less so than was an earlier age. What will a later age teach? Well, it will naturally not deny that our age has produced great thoughts and achievements. The Copernican world conception makes its appearance; Galileo creates modern physics; Kepler modern astronomy; we have galvanic, voltaic electricity appearing, with all that grows out of it; we have the steam age, and so forth. Thus, the thoughts that have been formed in this age are striking; they are grand. Over and over again people emphasize, though they may not express it in the same words, how conscious they are that we have made such fine progress, in contrast to the silly superstitions of people in earlier ages. In short, men are entirely convinced that Copernicus, for example, finally established the fact that the sun stands still, or perhaps has a movement of its own. In any case, it does not move around the earth every twenty-four hours, but the earth itself revolves, and also moves around the sun in the course of the year, etc. These things are well known. They are understood today as if man had finally cast off the ancient superstition of the Ptolemaic world conception and had set truth in place of the former error. Earlier humanity believed all sorts of stupid things because it trusted its senses. The men of more recent times, however, have at last arrived at seeing that the sun is in the center and Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn move in ellipses around it—Uranus and Neptune being further out. At last, one knows this. At last, one knows that in the course of the year the earth revolves around the sun, and so on. In fact, one has made wonderfully fine progress!

We are no longer far distant from the time in which we will understand what all this means. The true reality was of no consequence at all to the spiritual powers upon whom Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were dependent; it was rather to bring definite faculties into the human head. What matters is the education of mankind through the education of the earth.

Thus, mankind has to be obliged for a time to think in this way about the cosmos in order to be educated in a certain way through thoughts. It is with this that the wise guidance of the world is concerned. If one should begin to look at the matter spiritually—not merely externally, mathematically or physically as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and especially their successors have done—one would come to yet other remarkable things. One will say, “Good, now we have a physical cosmic system; when we study it we must, as we know, calculate it and treat it geometrically as is taught today in practically every elementary school.” But spiritually, things are otherwise. You see, to an observer able to behold the spiritual, the following is presented, for example. He comes upon a certain movement of the sun; it takes this course.

Seen from a certain point of view, it is the sun's course; but when I draw this line here and bring the sun back again, the point does not fall exactly on the earlier point; it lies somewhat above it. This is a real movement of the sun that can be perceived spiritually.

But the earth, too, makes certain movements in the course of a year. Observed spiritually, it describes this orbit.

You must picture it in three dimensions. If you picture the orbit of the sun lying in a plane, then the orbit of the earth lies in this plane—seen, that is, from the side. If here is the orbit of the sun drawn as a line the earth orbit is so:

But, as you see from this, there is a point in the cosmos, where the sun and the earth are both together, but at not the same time. When the sun is there on its path, or rather has left this point by a quarter of its path, the earth begins its movement at the point that the sun has left. After a certain time we are, in fact, on the spot in cosmic space where the sun was; we follow the sun's path, cross it and are, at a certain time of the year, at the very place where the sun has been. Then the sun and earth go forward and after a time the earth is again practically at the spot where the sun was. Together with the earth, we actually pass in space through the spot where the sun has been. We sail through it. We not only sail through it, however, because the sun leaves behind results of its activity in the space it has traversed, so that the earth enters into the imprints left behind by the sun and crosses them—really crosses them. Space has living content, spiritual content, and the earth enters and crosses, sails through, what the sun has called forth.

You see, this is how the matter looks spiritually. Spiritually one must draw lines like these when one thinks of the orbits of earth and sun. There is a similar relationship with the other planets, too. At certain times we are approximately at the places where Mercury was, etc. The planets carry out quite complicated movements in universal space, and they enter into the imprints of each other. We have now the external picture, the purely geometrical picture. The other picture will be added, and only from a combination of the two will a later humanity attain the concept it must have.

You see, I am now telling you these things, but imagine for a moment that you relate what I have said to an astronomer. He would say, “Someone has lost his senses, has gone mad, to present such things. They are out of the question.” But it was not so long ago that the members of a famous Academy of Science also said, when meteoric stones that fall to the earth were spoken of, “That is a senseless statement!” This happened not at all long ago; many similar things could be recorded. Today, in orthodox physics, one recognizes the so-called law of the conservation of energy as something fundamental. The first to speak of it, Julius Robert Mayer, was confined in a madhouse. One could, of course, relate hundreds of such stories. But the point is this, that you see from what I have told you—I have given it only as an example—how the nature of thinking in astronomical fields, that wonderfully effective thinking from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, has had rather the faculty of bringing men away from reality. Men do not at all stand, as they believe, with both feet, both hands and the body in the real, but they give themselves up to the most fantastic ideas and imagine these to be reality. Men had to be educated like this in these centuries. They had to give themselves up to fantastic ideas about outer nature so that they might not be merged in the external events in the old way, but that, by virtue of these fantastic ideas, they might all the more obtain a feeling of the inner ego. This feeling has been greatly intensified in men during the last few centuries precisely through these fantastic materialistic ideas. That had to happen; the feeling of the ego had at some time to be engendered in the development of mankind's history. I have chosen an astronomical example, but it could be shown in every sphere how human evolution followed a course in the centuries just past that drew man away from true reality.

Now you will ask if men have known of such things as this, that together with the earth we enter the tracks of the sun, that twice in the year we are where the sun has been operative in space. Have men ever known anything of this? Yes, they have known it before, and it can even be easily proved historically that they knew it. Imagine that a man knows, really knows, that at a certain time in the course of the year the earth on its path so crosses the sun's path that the earth enters into the tracks of the sun and follows it. The reverse comes about when the earth turns back again toward the other side. The first time it is as if the sun descended below the earth's path, and the second, as if the sun ascended and the earth's path were underneath. The first time, the human being moves up with the earth above the sun's path, finding the traces of the sun by ascending; the other time, he moves down and passes under the traces of the sun. What can the man say who knows this and who also possesses the means to confirm it? He is able to know that now, at the point where the earth's path crosses the sun's path, he is passing through the place where the sun has stood. What could such a man say? He could say that this is a specially important time for us because we are at the place where the sun has been. This is expressed in the spiritual atmosphere and one meets the picture that the sun has left behind in the ether. Here, at this point in time, one establishes a festival! The ancient mysteries celebrated two such festivals of which but faint memories still remain in those of today, though the connection is no longer known. Please do not understand this as if I wished to give the actual point in time, but in the ancient mysteries it was known when we cross the sun's path and find in the ether the sun's content that has remained behind. In the time of such knowledge it was right for special festivals to be established at definite times of the year.

With the knowledge of today men are separated from these connections. Nor will they respect these things much since they say, “Well, what good is it to me if I do know that I am on the same spot that the sun was on? Of what use is that to me?” That is how modern man would speak. But the ancient Egyptians, for instance, did not speak in that way in their mysteries. On the fifteenth day of that month when they knew that the earth is passing through the point the sun has left, they interrogated the priestess of Isis, who had been prepared in the sanctity of the Temple. They knew that through the special spiritual preparation that this priestess could undertake, she could bring to light what can be experienced when one passes through the aura of the sun, and the priests might write down what they heard from the priestess, for example, “Rainy year, sow seeds at such and such a time...” In short, they were purely practical; that is, things that were important for guiding life in the succeeding year were noted. They lived according to these directions because they knew how the heavens work down into the earth.

This is what they investigated. It was already a time of decline when this science was betrayed by the opponents of the Osiris-Isis cult. The only way they could protect themselves—this external event has again a connection with the Osiris-Isis saga—was henceforth to impart at fourteen different temples what earlier, in ancient Egypt, had been the secret of only one temple. This was the art of living with the course of the year and investigating spiritually the influences on the earth.

The humanity of our age had to break away completely from such a relationship with the heavens because it had the task of finding the path away from the ambiguity of impulses and instincts, and of forming the pure ego. The ego did not act strongly at a time in which men made themselves mere instruments of heavenly activities, nor did it work strongly in the ages when the priest taught his immediate pupils, “There stands the Pleiades. When they are there, we must begin the days of Isis; then we must see that what we learn prophetically is the best way to proceed in the coming year.” They placed themselves as completely within the course of the universe as a cell is incorporated into our organism. Humanity could only become individual, personal, if in a definite epoch it were torn out of this connection, if all these human faculties of spirit that mediated such connections passed into a state of sleep. Thus a sleep regarding the spiritual was prepared, and mankind has slept most deeply in respect of spiritual matters ever since the fourteenth century. It has been a sleeping culture but now the time has come for an awakening.

Do not say, “I wish to criticize Creation and the Creator; why has he let me sleep?” This means putting oneself with one's intellect above cosmic wisdom. During the course of the earth stage, human evolution must go through its sleep periods just as much as the individual man must sleep in the course of twenty-four hours. Spiritual faculties, which is to say, a concept of the world in the sense of these faculties, slept deeply in the centuries indicated. On the other hand, man dreamt of geometrical lines in space; he dreamed the dream of the Copernican, the Galilean and the Darwinian world conception. Man needed this dream, this training, even the illusion of experiencing a special reality through the dream. Ultimately, it is the same with our sleep. In the evening we are tired and we go to sleep. Then we wake up refreshed with an inner feeling of reality. If humanity had developed the ancient spiritual faculties further, if these had not slept, men would have been tired out and would not have reached reality. They came to reality precisely by the fact that in their thinking and reflecting, and also in their social organizations, they had left reality. Because these capacities slept, past centuries have brought renewal and refreshment to mankind. In a certain respect, humanity has even become freer than it was in earlier centuries, and it will have to regain spiritual knowledge—and later spiritual power—in order to progress even further on the path of freedom.

Such things can be known! But again today's true materialist will say, “Well, and what if they are known!” I have, in fact, found materialists who say, “Good gracious, why must I think about the life of the soul after death. I shall see all that when death has arrived. Why need I bother now in the physical body about this life after death?” This seems to be quite plausible, this idea that it would be really unnecessary, here in the physical body, to bother about the super-sensible life. But this is not the case; it was so only in an earlier age when man was not yet ready for freedom. Today, the position is such that certain thoughts can only be grasped by the super-sensible hierarchies if men grasp them here in earthly existence. The gods only think certain thoughts if they live in human bodies. These thoughts must be carried into the spiritual world through the gate of death; only then can they be active. It is truly so; one who will not think about the super-sensible is like a farmer who says to his neighbor, “You are a silly fellow. Every year you put by a certain part of the grain for seed. I only became a farmer this year, but I am not as foolish as you. I shall grind it all, eat it and calmly wait. The grain will certainly grow again by itself.” Such a farmer resembles a person who is not willing to hear that, as well as consuming what we experience in the world, we must also lay aside certain seeds in the soul to guide it along its path in the spiritual worlds. Inasmuch as we pursue the science of the spirit, we are creating the right seeds for the present time. And the science of the spirit must be pursued.

You see from this that our time can become ever more clear to us through the spiritual understanding of its fundamental character and nature. This deepening of our inner faculties that must be striven for in order to come to a more real astronomy, for example, must also be striven for in social thinking. Regarding our thinking, we—or at any rate, most of us—have become as much asleep and dreaming in outer lives as we are in regards to astronomy, for instance, which I chose for an example. In the centuries gone by, and right up to today, very much has become veiled from humanity. Nor will what was present earlier appear again—investigations, for instance, through a priestess of Isis or through the Celtic druidical mysteries in which a priestess was similarly employed. To seek in that way to know about the action here of the spiritual will not recur; much more inward ways will be found, ways much more suited to future humanity. But they must be found.

Now, connect this with something I have already indicated yesterday. Remember that the servant of Osiris prepared the priestess of Isis before the fifteenth of a certain month of the year in order to obtain certain prophetic utterances from her when she traversed the sun-space with her soul. What happened through this Isis cult? What occurred was that actual time—not the abstract time of which we dream today, but actual time, was investigated. The time of year, the point of time, was, in fact, a specially important point, and the point on the return path was again important. How time works—concrete, real time—was expressed through the content of what the Isis priestess had to say. Then, might not the inscription on the Isis image read, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future?” this is the order of time. But only when such prophetic research was penetrated with a noble mood resembling the mood of virginity, when coming near to Isis was symbolized by the fact that Isis wore a veil, only then could one bring forth what was necessary. The whole must be steeped in holiness, in the atmosphere of a sacrifice.

Do not imagine that wisdom was not connected with the practical in those ancient times. What was called wisdom was fully united with practical things. Everything had a practical direction. One investigated the voice of the gods in the Egyptian temples, but the investigations were made in order to know in the right way which days or hours were most suited for sowing. Everything was connected with practical life. One investigated the action of the gods in practical life, and was conscious of how they penetrate it. Indeed, it was necessary that this temple service should be kept holy. What evils could have been committed if it had not been treated as sacred! It must never be asserted that these things that relate to past ages will arise again in the same way. They will arise quite differently. But a knowledge will again be won for humanity that will be directly fitted for entering practical life. A spiritual knowledge—but just because it is spiritual, a practical knowledge—will again appear in which the things around us will be fully mastered. Neither an Isis nor an Osiris cult will appear. Something else will arise that will bear the traces of our having passed through the centuries since the Isis and Osiris cult existed. It will show that the new science of the spirit must be sought with full consciousness and in freedom. But the things that have taken place must be tested a little in their reality. History must be different from what it so often is today, when people merely make researches in documents and records.

One comes, however, upon all sorts of peculiar explanations, like the one I have already given regarding Isis. When there stood as inscription on her image, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future,” one who was initiated knew that this referred to concrete reality and that the veil only expressed a certain attitude of mind. Today, people say of the veiled Isis image at Sais that the veil means that one cannot penetrate behind wisdom, that one will never know who Isis is. But when the inscription, “I am the Past, the Present, and the Future, no mortal hath yet lifted my veil,” stands there, one must explain it as meaning that the veil is not lifted because one only approaches its holiness when veiled as a nun, not because something lies behind it that one cannot know and that cannot be communicated to anyone. If the explanation that people usually give were correct, then one must really compare it with the trivial statement, “I am called Hans Muller, but you will never know my name.” She says indeed who she is—“I am the Past, the Present and the Future”—and this implies that it is for her to impart the Mysteries of Time, while what flows out of Time into Space is to be mediated by the Osiris priest. He is to carry the temporal into the spatial and is to receive in thought what comes from the soul, that is, the Isis revelation that is embedded in the universe and its course.

Today, the science of the spirit is still largely held to be foolish. But when it has really been understood, it will be seen to contain a science much more real than the scientific dream of the past centuries. Quite different practical operations, practical mastery of the outer world, will come to light when the time arrives. It is not yet time today; mankind must first have knowledge and know in the spirit of spiritual science before it can act in the spirit of the science of the spirit.

I wanted to go into this in order to point out precisely at this time how it is only through a true understanding of what has happened that an understanding can also be reached of what has to happen. In the future, humanity must be guided beyond many things with whose karma mankind is heavily burdened in our present grievous and painful times. Today mankind is burdened with the karma of the dream life of the past centuries. This mystery must first be grasped on its depths; then it will be easier to understand our sorrowful present and also to understand how humanity must gradually prepare a different karma for the future.

The lectures of 18th and 24th September, 1916 on pre-Columbian America, to which this introduction is devoted, contain one obvious and central contradiction: on the one hand there is the universally accepted knowledge that on the occasion of human sacrifices it was the heart that was plucked out, while Steiner on the other states clearly that it was the stomach. So in all that follows we shall have two purposes in mind. It is not our intention to make use of all the documents that are available to us, but rather to deal in a precise manner with a few of them which seem to provide some confirmation of Steiner's statements. We shall then conclude by providing the reader with some thoughts of a methodological nature about the study of the oral and visual evidence for pre-Columbian Mexican spirituality.

Before embarking on the subject itself it seems to us to be most important to consider at some length a few of the characteristics of the existing documents. First of all, they are very scarce, and they contain many gaps. The architectural remains, the stonework and crafts in general have provided some substantial information on Middle American culture, whereas the written documents, what we may call in general the conceptual material, is very poor. Three, or possibly four Maya manuscripts survive, which may or may not be correctly deciphered, as against 27 others destroyed by Fray Diego de Landa in 1562, all the documents described for example by Alonso Ponce in 1588, some or all of which he may have seen, together with all those described by José de Acosta in 1590 and Pedro Sanchez de Aguilar in 1639. Most of the manuscripts assembled by later collectors such as the Frenchman Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg were lost, as well as those destroyed in 1847 during the civil war in Yucatan, the so-called “war of the castes.” Such a total of manuscripts is beyond computation, and to these must be added the numberless chronicles destroyed in Upper Yucatan in 1870.

The Mexican manuscripts in the strict sense of the word have experienced similar vicissitudes, though from a historical viewpoint they were even more spectacular. The fifteen “codices” in our possession, even if we include other texts such as the monumental collection of Sahagun and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, are only a few remnants of what at one time was a vast corpus. Itzcoatl, the fourth Aztec king (1427-1440) commanded all the documents of the subject peoples to be destroyed, while Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico, was responsible for the auto-da-fe in 1528 of a “small mountain” of manuscripts heaped up by missionaries in the marketplace of Tezcoco.

Even though we examine with the greatest care the few crumbs that remain in the hope of extracting as much information from them as possible, it must be recognized that for purely statistical reasons they cannot provide any kind of a overall panorama of the cultural reality of Mexico in the historical sense of the term. And this remains true even when we take into account also such useful material as is to be gleaned from the iconography of the stonework or general ornamentation, which is necessarily fragmentary. However ingenious those investigators who rely on these documents may be, they will never be able to extract from them what is not there—and there can be no doubt that what is missing is the greatest part of Mexican culture. For this reason it is not logically possible to use this tiny fragment of pre-Columbian history for the purpose of trying to refute the work of a spiritual investigator.

We shall now proceed to a point by point comparison between the indications given by Steiner in his two lectures on the subject, and the various documents that are available. The most important is the Codex Florentin of Sahagun (here abbreviated to Sah.) in the remarkable Anglo-Nahuatl edition of Anderson and Dibble published from 1950 to 1961 by the University of New Mexico at Santa Fe (General History of the Things of New Spain).

Steiner places the original Meso-American mysteries long before the beginning of our era. For this epoch, which covers the pre-classical and probably also the classical periods, all documents are therefore lacking. Moreover, we many easily imagine that the iconography evidence, as for example for the second period of Teotihuacan, will scarcely offer us any indications because of the secret character of this high (if degraded) initiation. It seems hopeless to expect to find external traces of this initiation in view of the fact that most Mexican art was of a public nature, whether employed for the ornamentation of the temples or for such artisinal products as pottery. Since the veil of secrecy regarding initiation could have been lifted only as the result of a betrayal, it is in the highest degree unlikely that anything bearing on it could have survived. And it was precisely at the period we are discussing that the Mysteries reached their highest point, not when the cult of Taotl was in decline. It my well be that there was such a decline after the destruction of the great black magician mentioned by Steiner, and that this was accompanied by the growth of theocracy—for which the architectural and theological vigor of Teotihuacan II and III provides evidence. With regard to objects having an esoteric character and for this reason not public, the case might be different. We shall return to this point later, while always keeping in mind Juan de Zumarraga's boast that he destroyed 20,000 “idols.”

The only indications that it would be reasonable to look for are oral traditions from very much earlier transcribed into the Nahuatl language at a time when such knowledge was no longer forbidden. It is of course a well known fact that the failure to commit oral literature to writing has the effect of preserving it better than when it is, as we say, “fixed” in writing. Even if transmission by word of mouth involves numerous changes, especially in a period when an earlier original spirituality is in decline, nevertheless oral transmission does still contain an inner impulse necessarily lacking in a written document.

Steiner begins by speaking of Taotl:

“Before the discovery of America, there were mysteries of the most varied kind in the western hemisphere. ... Like a single central power whom all followed and obeyed, a kind of spectral spirit was revered. ... This spirit was called by a name that sounded something like Taotl.”

The Florentine manuscript contains in several places the word teutl (e is the vowel preferred by modern scholars) god, or teteuh, gods, in the categorical meaning of the term.

“First Chapter, which telleth of the highest of the gods (teteuh).

“Second Chapter, which telleth of the god (teutl) ...” (Sah. I).

The same word is used by the Aztecs in addressing Cortés: “May the god (in teutl) deign to hear ...” (Sah. XII).

In taking account of Steiner's indications we are faced with a process of abstraction that developed in the course of time, by which the “single central power” spoken of by Steiner and common to all the mysteries has become the collective “concept” of the gods. Such a process extending over thousands of years seems plausible to us.

The second point, which we shall examine, concerns Uitzilopochtli (or Vitzliputzli, as the name was transcribed in Steiner's account). In the lecture of September 18th the words appear: “At a certain time a being was born in Central America who set himself a definite task within this culture. The old ... inhabitants of Mexico ... said that he had entered the world as the son of a virgin, who had conceived him through super earthly powers, inasmuch as it was a feathered being (called in the lecture of 24th September a “bird”) from the heavens who impregnated her.” The later lecture also makes it clear that “Vitzliputzli was a human being, a being who appeared in a physical body.”

So it is a question here of the incarnation of a spiritual being who was not a human being in the usual sense of the term. It was only his incarnation in a physical body that made him similar to men. This corresponds very exactly with what is to be found in the Codex Florentin (Sah. I):

“First Chapter, which telleth of the highest of the gods whom they worshipped ... Uitzilopochtli ... was only a common man ...”

The legend to which Steiner refers forms an integral part of the Codex (Sah. III):

“And once ... feathers descended upon her—what was like a ball of feathers. ... Thereupon by means of them Coatl icue conceived [Uitzilopochtli].”

The following are the principal features of the mission of Uitzilopochtli, as Steiner gives them, in connection with the great initiate of the Toatl cults, whom he does not name:

“At this time in Central America a man was born who was destined by birth to become a high initiate of Taotl ... This was one of the greatest black magicians, if not the greatest ever to tread the earth ...”

“Then a conflict began between this super-magician and the being to whom a virgin birth was ascribed, and one finds from one's research that it lasted for three years. ... The three-year conflict ended when Vitzliputzli was able to have the great magician crucified, and not only through the crucifixion to annihilate his body but also to place his soul under a ban, by this means rendering its activities powerless as well as its knowledge. Thus the knowledge assimilated by the great magician of Taotl was killed.”

The continuation of the legend quoted by Steiner deals with the way Uitzilopochtli came into the world (Sah. III).

“At Coatepec ... there lived a woman named Coatl icue, mother of the Centzonuitznaua. And their elder sister was named Coyolxauhqui ... Coyolxauhqui said to them: ‘My elder brothers, she hath dishonored us. We [can] only kill our mother ...’ And upon this the Centzonuitznaua ... when they had expressed their determination that they would kill their mother, because she had brought about an affront, much exerted themselves ... But one who was named Quauitl icac ... informed Uitzilopochtli [who was not yet born]. And Uitzilopochtli said to Quauitl icac ‘... I already know what I shall do ...’

Then Quauitl icac said to him: ‘... At last they arrive here’ ... And Uitzilopochtli just then was born ... He pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then quickly struck off her head ... And Uitzilopochtli then arose; he pursued, gave full attention to the Centzonuitznaua; he pursued all of them around Coatepetl. Four times he chased them all around ... he indeed destroyed them; he indeed annihilated them; he indeed exterminated them ... And only very few fled his presence.”

It is startling to recognize how well these lines agree with what Steiner has given, and how fifteen centuries of oral tradition have only slightly altered the facts made available by occult investigation. According to Steiner's indications regarding the differences between white and black magic, the latter includes a strong dose of egoism, and permits the magician to investigate his own future for selfish aims (a practice, as Steiner often pointed out, forbidden to true occultists). The legend confirms this element of black magic when it speaks of the foreseeing of the birth of the man who is to fight against the forces of evil, and of the attempt made to prevent his incarnation. This is clearly shown in the dialogue between Quauitl icac and Uitzilopochtli who, though not yet born, is fully conscious of his own mission. The three-year struggle indicated by Steiner has a good correspondence with the four times that the Centzonuitznauas were chased around Coatepetl, before they were finally wiped out. Since the great Taotl initiate would naturally be supported by a powerful troop of helpers all equally devoted to evil, the legend confirms that this was indeed the case when it speaks of how the Centzonuitznaua—i.e., the multitude of the Uitznaua—were “exterminated,” and “very few fled his presence” (i.e., not all), thus confirming that the mysteries continued to exist, even though, as indicated by Steiner, they had lost the greater part of their power.

One further remark on this subject, to be taken into consideration only as a possibility, a hypothesis. Steiner does not indicate the name of the great initiated black magician. The legend, however, is most explicit on the matter. The feminine personage (this would be part of the alteration over the centuries) who was the first to wish to prevent Uitzilopochtli from coming into the world, and who was the first to be killed (pierced, as the legend says, in this suggesting the crucifixion) since she was the principal enemy, is Coyolxauhqui (Coyolli meaning fish-hook and xauhqui meaning adorned or decorated). Might this not be the name, or a corruption of the name of the great black magician? And indeed it may be easily imagined that a personage of this kind did not take part personally in the struggle against Uitzilopochtli and his forces, but was only the inspirer of the war waged by his (her?) troops to preserve his knowledge and power intact against the most deadly of his enemies.

The only real contradiction in our hypothesis results from the reversing of the time sequence. According to Steiner it was at the end of the Three Years' War that the black magician was put to death, whereas in our quotation the death of Coyolxauhqui occurred before the final disastrous conflict. This could be a question of one more alteration, or one could perhaps entertain the hypothesis that the magician's name was Uitznaua, or, more likely, a variant of this name-Uitznaua being a plural word designating a Mexican tribe.

The Aztec rites at the period of the Conquest were only a vestige of what was “flourishing” at the beginning of our era. In view of the particular character of these rites it is in keeping with them that a demonical character should have been attributed to Uitzilopochtli. As Sahagun says, “Uitzilopochtli was ... an omen of evil.” (Sah. I). But their transitory character by comparison with the original orientation of these rites in the past might well have resulted in an all-embracing syncretism, combined with fear and veneration toward Uitzilopochtli. And indeed the documents do give evidence of this mixture. The “diabolical” Uitzilopochtli is at the same time the god of a paradise that is fervently desired. As Cortés says in his Third Letter: “They all desired to die and go to ‘Ochilibus’ (Uitzilopochtli) in heaven, who was awaiting them ...” This attitude is also to be found in their desire to be impregnated by this divinity as demonstrated in numerous religious ceremonies. “And of those who ate it, it was said, “they keep the god.” (Sah. III).

Steiner's third statement gives us information about Tezcatlipoca.

“Many opposing sects were founded with the objective of countering this devilish cult (of Taotl). One such sect was that of Tezcatlipoca. He too was a being who did not appear in a physical body, but who was known to many of the Mexican initiates, in spite of the fact that he lived only in an etheric body.”

Compare this with the story as told by Sahagun:

“Third Chapter, which telleth of the god named Tezcatlipoca ... he was considered a true god ...” (Sah. I).

“... even as an only god they believed in him ... he was invisible, just like the night, the wind. When sometimes he called out to one, just like a shadow did he speak.”(Sah. III).

By contrast with Uitzilopochtli who was both god and man, Tezcatlipoca is a real, veritable god, a clear confirmation of what Steiner says. This is reinforced by a striking agreement: The initiate (that is, “one,” i.e., aca (somebody) perceives “just like a shadow” (can iuhquj ceoalli, literally, only like shadow), that is to say, the etheric, the etheric body being remarkably suggested by the nahuatl term. Ceoalli means “the shadow made by the body when it intercepts the light;” not a shadow in the abstract sense, but something that is similar to the physical without actually being physical.

Let us continue with Sahagun: “When he (Tezcatlipoca) walked on the earth, he quickened vice and sin. He introduced anguish and affliction. He brought discord among people. ... But sometimes he bestowed riches—wealth, heroism, valor. ...” (Sah. I).

Since the point of view here is the same as that attributed to Taotl, it is natural that Tezcatlipoca should be seen as spreading evil in all its forms. But as in the case of Uitzilopochtli it is clear that there has been a noticeable syncretism, as may be seen in the way “sometimes” Tezcatlipoca (in quenman) benefits human beings.

Quetzalcoatl is the fifth being mentioned by Steiner:

“Another sect venerated Quetzalcoatl. He too was a being who lived only in an etheric body.” (24/9).

“He had much in common with the spirit whom Goethe described as Mephistopheles.” (18/9).

Bearing in mind that the great temple of Teotihuacan, belonging to the period with which we are concerned, was dedicated in part to Quetzalcoatl, we read as follows in Sahagun:

“Fifth Chapter, which telleth of the god named Quetzalcoatl. ... Quetzalcoatl—he was the wind.” (Sah. I).

“Third Chapter, which telleth the tale of Quetzalcoatl, who was a great wizard. ... This Quetzalcoatl they considered as a god; he was thought a god. ... And the Toltecs, his vassals, were highly skilled. Nothing was difficult when they did it. ... Indeed these (crafts) ... proceeded from Quetzalcoatl. ... And these Toltecs were very rich; they were wealthy. Never were they poor. They lacked nothing in their homes.” (Sah. III).

While taking note of the use of the same word “wind” (ehecatl) to characterize the substance of both Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, a substance that we have identified as “etheric” in the sense indicated by Steiner, we may think we are also in the presence of a resume of the gifts acquired by Faust by virtue of his position as “vassal” of Mephistopheles—the word maceualli meaning “vassal” just as well as its more usual meanings of “merit” or “reward.”

We find also in the legends the antagonism between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, as indicated by Steiner. For example in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan there is mention of “Quetzalcoatl vanquished by the sorcery of Tezcatlipoca,” again equating him with Taotl as well as referring to his defeat, as described by Steiner. This antagonism may also be seen in certain rites, as when, for example, a priest playing the part of Quetzalcoatl “kills” the statue representing Uitzilopochtli.

“And upon the next day the body of Uitzilopochtli died. And he who slew him was (the priest known as) Quetzalcoatl. (Sah. III).

The mention in the Codex Florentin of the vassals of Quetzalcoatl, that is to say of a kind of clan devoted to this divinity, implies the existence of a division of opinion among the Mexicans. It is possible to glimpse this dichotomy in the prayer addressed to the “good” Tezcatlipoca: “O lord of the war ... pity me; give me what I require as my sustenance, my strength, of thy sweetness, thy fragrance.” (Sah. III).

Then, a few lines later, we learn that “And also of Totlacuan (Tezcatlipoca) they said that he also gave men misery, affliction ... he stoned them with plagues, which were great and grave ...”

Having in mind the text of Steiner it would seem that we are here faced with an attribution of the evil deeds of Quetzalcoatl to Tezcatlipoca. But as the point of view adopted in the Codex is primarily that of Taotl, it is in keeping with this that, as was the case of Uitzilopochtli, the enemy should be clothed with the attributes of evil.

Another important agreement between Steiner and the traditions is provided by the cosmogony: the first era (Four Ocelot) of the great ages was presided over by Tezcatlipoca, then the second (Four Winds) was rules by Quetzalcoatl, in this in conformity with the “sending” of Quetzalcoatl, in order to combat the already existing influence of Tezcatlipoca.

We shall now broach the subject of the ritual of the excision—of the stomach, according to Steiner; of the heart, according to what is to be found in all the widely known documents on the subject. But before continuing, let us mention one detail that is in fact of crucial importance; we have found in Steiner's personal library a book in which the tearing out of the heart is related. As Steiner all through his life gave evidence of a capacity for reading that is quite extraordinary, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that he knew about this rite of the tearing out of the heart.

In 1904, in #22 of the ethnological review Globus, Fischer for the first time, as far as we know, brought to the attention of the world a figurine in nephritic stone, which we reproduce here.

This statuette of unknown origin, now in the Linden Museum of Stuttgart, shows two openings hollowed out one above the other. The upper orifice, which penetrates into the body to a distance of 80 mm, begins at the sternum and ascends at an angle of about 45° and constitutes a cavity that is almost spherical. Its opening has a diameter of 16 mm and when it is 5 mm into the body it is enlarged to 22 mm. Fischer, as well as Seler in his 1904 communication to the Congress of Americanists, confirms that this is a cavity that reminds us of the rite of the tearing out of the heart. We indeed share this opinion, especially in view of the fact that the usual method for plucking out the heart is via an incision under the sternum, the priest having to thrust his hand upwards to grasp the heart. That this was his method of taking hold of it is confirmed by the inclination upwards of about 45° of the cavity, and its roundness corresponds likewise to the global form of the heart.

The second cavity, less deep than the first—penetrating only 40 mm into the body—is oval, and its opening has the dimensions of 11.5 by 18 mm. It also becomes wider in the interior. From being 10 mm at the orifice its diameter is widened to 28 mm. By contrast with the upper cavity—that of the heart—it ascends only very slightly. Seler, not having any definite argument to put forward, supposes that the second cavity merely indicates the absence of the navel or umbilical cord. Now bearing in mind the way in which the first cavity corresponds to the heart and the manner in which it was torn out, from an anatomical point of view it is clearly the stomach that corresponds to this ovoid cavity—the stomach, unlike the heart, being directly accessible as soon as the excision is made. Hence the depth, as well as the very slight upward inclination by comparison with the heart. We may also make the observation that the two organs, slightly off center toward the left in the human body, correspond very well to the two openings made one above the other.

The detailed analysis made by Seler of this figurine, which is carefully and totally covered with symbols, arrives at the conclusion that the statuette—aside from its connection with Xolotl and Tlaloc—represents Tlauizcalpantecutli, the god of the planet Venus. But an unusual feature, and noted as such by Seler, is that this is here a divinity with the attributes of Quetzalcoatl. Unusual though this may be it is not, however, unique, for the Codex Borgia—as Seler points out in the same analysis—shows Quetzalcoatl emerging from the mouth of the god of the Wind as the planet Venus. And as the Wind god is Quetzalcoatl himself we have here a kind of double within the duality Quetzalcoatl-Venus. The nephritic figurine therefore presents us, in what is certainly very esoteric symbolism, an unexpected link, as far as our present documents are concerned, between Quetzalcoatl, god of the planet Venus, and the tearing out of the stomach—a conjecture that we go so far as to regard as almost certain. And since the planet Venus is among other things the seat of the Luciferic forces this idol is a noteworthy illustration of the Ahriman-Lucifer duality linked to the tearing out of the stomach as it is also to the tearing out of the heart. This is, from an occult point of view, an insignificant inference from the indications given by Steiner.

There remains one last problem which, for the moment, is still awaiting solution: the indication by Steiner that Europeans were put to death by having their stomachs torn out—and the remarks with which Steiner follows this statement constitute the real riddle here. “The fact is even known to history,” he tells us and “this is a matter of historical knowledge.” Though we cannot pretend to resolve this contradiction, we may propose two directions for research along the lines we have followed here. Either Steiner is quoting some historical work without naming it—perhaps a book available only in German—which tells of the association mentioned above. Or else Steiner, after examining some iconographic elements of the documents concluded that the stomach was the organ referred to when it was tacitly traditionally accepted as being the heart.

In the new (1984) German edition of the present cycle the editor tells us that Rudolf Steiner's library contained a book by Charles V. Heckethorn entitled Geheime Gesellschaften, Geheimbünde und Geheimlehren, in which both the excisions, the heart and the stomach, are referred to, and these were said to have been practiced on the Spaniards as well as on others. However, this book, which is not a historical but a popular work, contains descriptions that are very approximate and no doubt partly imagined; and it is clear that Heckethorn has not read Sahagun's work edited by Bustamente in Spanish in 1829 and in French by Siméon in 1888. In view of the fact that Steiner provides very precise descriptions that are not those given by Heckethorn, nor those that have come down to us in any historical documents known to us, we do not believe that Steiner, as the editor says in a footnote, relied on this book, especially when we keep in mind that it is absolutely not a “historical” reference book. So the problem remains still unsolved.

To conclude we should like to begin the second part of our discussion by outlining a number of reflections on the subject of the methodology of the study of what are commonly called “mythologies.” It is possible in a schematic but not altogether incorrect manner to separate two fundamentally different tendencies. The first adopts an anthroposophical viewpoint, held by only an almost negligible minority of officially recognized scholars. These hold that mythologies are the remnants of what were once clairvoyantly perceived facts, that is to say, a perceptible and comprehensible universe, formerly perceived in pictures. This approach was inaugurated by Steiner on the basis of his own personal investigations, which he only later compared with what had survived from ancient cultures. Today the anthroposophist, or someone who wishes to follow this path but lacks the capacities possessed by Steiner, aside from using his awakened sensibilities which can indeed be of real help to him, can only place the totality of what Steiner has taught about the spiritual world over against the mythological facts as they are revealed by the various traditions.

The second path is the one taken by almost all current studies. The spiritual world is invariably regarded as nothing but the subjective creation of the individual, and no effort is therefore made to look for anything truly suprasensible. Looked at from a strictly logical point of view, which ought to predominate in any scientific study, it is entirely legitimate to regard mythical facts as purely subjective, in the absence of clear, controlled and understandable suprasensible perceptions. But such premises must they always be looked upon solely as working hypotheses, and never as untouchable dogmas overruling all other considerations. Indeed the difference between hypothesis and dogma is fundamental. A hypothesis as such never loses sight of its contrary hypothesis, and results alone can eventually eliminate one of the premises. Another unscientific defect may be noted in the attribution of an exclusively subjective character to mythologies: from the point of view of logic the inability to perceive the suprasensible cannot lead one to affirm that such perception does not exist! A man blind from birth cannot do otherwise than recognize that for him colors do not exist. But the same blind man would commit an egregious error in elementary logic if he were to conclude that in the case of everyone else colors are also subjective and not perceived, and if he were to insist also that the names given to colors are therefore meaningless! Although this example may be a little crude it is nevertheless a fair picture of the abnormal situation in which every science that claims to be serious finds itself at the present time.

A second feature of this orientation is its conceptual framework which results in a poverty of concepts that most of the time drives one to despair. Thus Coyolxauhqui is abstractly associated with both “moon” and “goddess” to make her “goddess of the moon.” But what does this association mean in reality? The unlikely ceremony of flaying (practiced in the Mexican rites) is supposed to be a “commemoration” of the simple process of husking the ears of corn—and this, in spite of the varied and extraordinary social consequences, the frenzied emotions of the participants, and the outlandish reversal of the natural order of things involved in a rite of this kind!

A well-known reaction to this type of excessively naive speculation exists today in all those tendencies comprised under the general name of structuralism, especially in the works of Levi-Strauss, who looks upon mythology as nothing but imaginative pictures constructed out of the social and geographical realities of a given epoch. If we examine closely the “studies” of Levi-Strauss we find they are based on a kind of fundamental dogmatism. They give the illusion of being impeccably scientific, but in fact they lead to a bewildering series of vicious circles. Instead of regarding materialism as simply a working hypothesis yet to be proved, materialism is put forward as a dogma, and conclusions are then deduced from the original dogmatic content. The logical worth of this kind of procedure can be illustrated from the following picture. Let us imagine an ethnologist blind from birth who is investigating a tribe made up persons with more or less seriously defective eyesight, who are the distant descendants of ancestors whose sight was normal. His informant will tell him about the round shape of the sun and explain that it is the source of heat, the latter being the only aspect of the sun that is perceptible to the blind ethnologist. Since the ethnologist denies the existence of any other kind of perception than his own he will seek to “explain” the round shape of the sun by taking under consideration all the other facts he can find associated with the sun—what the structuralists call the infrastructures. It is easy to imagine that there may be “real” facts in the sense in which the ethnologist conceives of them, which will permit him to associate the source of heat with the round shape of the sun. His learned work of explanation will certainly be coherent and in a certain way irrefutable, but it will be at the same time absurd, the round shape being simply the result of ordinary perception, shared by everyone except the ethnologist! Broadly speaking, that is the “scientific” edifice which is all we possess to explain the entire realm of mythology!

The objection might be raised that we are doing no better than the men whose work we are criticizing. Instead of the dogma of subjectivism we are substituting an equally dogmatic objectivism. Yet in fact there is a crucial difference. We are dealing here with two different conceptual frameworks, one provided by materialism and the other by anthroposophy, neither of them being of course perfected and completed systems. Faced with the data of mythology the first approaches them in a negative way, dogmatically rejecting what they claim to be, namely descriptions of real and not subjective facts, such as life after death, spirits, divinities and the like. By contrast the second approaches them positively. It tries to approach the data of mythology by entering into this material from within, so to speak, making use of a series of concepts which correspond exactly to the mythological symbols, not in an arbitrary manner but as the necessary complement to the percepts of which the symbols themselves are the reflected images. One can then raise the objection that the Steinerian system is just as subjective as the mythologies, and therefore lacks all objective validity. Aside from the fact that once the Steinerian system is known this objection might well disappear, the difference between the two conceptual systems might also be demonstrated objectively. This could be done on a statistical basis, the general principle applicable to all research that makes use of models.

The most coherent model is regarded as that which takes in the largest number of phenomena, and is therefore superior to any other model that covers fewer facts. Take, for example, the Aztec rite of flaying. Is there at the present time any serious psychological system that is coherent and applicable over a wide range of phenomena that can offer any explanation of how it could be that the unlikely sequence of tortures, murders, and rites so repulsive as to be scarcely imaginable, should have been the commemoration of the husking of a plant??? This pretended similarity between the flaying of a human being and the husking of a plant is surely an idea so far-fetched as to be totally worthless. Anthroposophical concepts are of course not waiting passively to be made use of for mythological studies, including studies of the kind just mentioned. But when the first steps in this direction have been taken, only then will the time come when we can talk of a confrontation between the facts and the fundamental teachings of anthroposophy—not a confrontation between anthroposophy and the present materialistic edifice constructed from the beginning out of pure dogmatism, but an undogmatic examination of the material and non-material remains (for example mythology, popular stories and the like) just as they were at the time of their original discovery. This examination should not be based on the dogmatic notions prevalent at that time, which, as far as present day popular and scholarly opinion is concerned, have indeed endured to this day.

Materialism possesses no concept capable of being applied in a positive manner to Uitzilopochtli, who was both a god and at the same time only a man. It is obliged to flatten out the original texts, thus implicitly showing its contempt for their authors; and it can only condescendingly refrain from paying any attention to what appears to it as at most a piece of poetic imagery—for example, Tezcatlipoca appearing like a shadow. This bespeaks neither a true scientific spirit, nor does it show any sign of a true respect for others. When will all this change?

Frédéric Kozlik
France, 1984

My dear friends, in the lectures which have been held here for some weeks I have endeavoured to show you some of the things which have lived in human evolution—certain things connected with various inner impulses which have entered into the modern development of humanity. We have had to go very far back to find the origin of these impulses. We have sought to understand how, from out of the Atlantean civilisation, there flowed the relics of an ancient Atlantean Mystery magic. We have shewn how, in a state of decadence, this Atlantean civilisation still lived on amongst those peoples who were re-discovered in Europe through the re-discovery of America. We then sought to study the relics of another branch of Atlantean magic which sent its rays and streams from Asia throughout Europe. And so, we have seen coming from Atlantis a co-operation in a certain sense between the Eastern and Western pole. From out of these impulses which have remained over from Atlantis, we then sought to deepen ourselves concerning the nature of the Graeco-Roman epoch, which as we know, was a copy to a certain extent, of Atlantean civilisation, though of course on a higher stage. And then we tried to understand the two poles of the IVth Post Atlantean Period. That is, the pole of Greece and the pole of Rome. We then attempted to follow at least partially, the various impulses which were further active in our European life of civilisation. We have especially considered that impulse which came into the spiritual stream of Europe through the fact that the Templars had to undergo a certain fate, and that this fate of the Templars which works so powerfully, so deeply on our own souls, evokes spiritual forces into existence which have continued to work on in a spiritual way; inspiring, impelling, initiating all of those things which have contributed to the external path of the history of the peoples of Europe. And then we have continued to trace how these impulses pass over into a recent material. And in the last lecture, we saw at the end of the 18th century, it gives a peculiar colouring to those ideas which at that time confused the world, the ideas of Brotherhood, Freedom and Equality. Many such impulses as have been born in the course of centuries and flowed into European development could be characterised, but that must be left over to a later time.

I should now like to characterise, through certain significant impulses, the path of our own European life of civilisation, because it is essential that through a Spiritual Scientific observation one should learn to know more and more thoroughly the peculiarities of our own age, the age in which we are standing to-day. It is important for us to know how our own time is determined by that special spiritual structure of the 19th century. In this 19th century all those impulses of which I have spoken to you have been more or less veiled, covered up to a certain extent. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that, as regards the evolution of modern civilisation, the middle of the 19th century was a most important time;—it was that time in which in the 5th Post Atlantean civilisation something was to become especially active something which man knows and learns to produce through his intellect in so far as that is bound to the physical plane. We must rake this quite clear to ourselves. With the 5th Post Atlantean civilisation something of the nature of forces comes into the Post Atlantean development which was absolutely different from what occurred in the Graeco-Latin age in the 4th Post Atlantean epoch. Naturally the Greeks had intellect (verstand) but that was of quite a different nature from our own - our own intellect,—which has gone through the 5th Post Atlantean epoch and which, in the middle of the 19th century, really entered upon a quite definite crisis. That intellect which was developed in ancient Greece, and which, for instance, radiated in all that the Greeks created artistically, which radiated in all that the Greeks created in their State arrangements (which were not really State arrangements at all),—that intellect which worked through the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, that intellect which then was drawn over into the political being of Rome was utterly different from the intellect which arose in our own 5th Post Atlantean epoch. One can even prove this philosophically, as I have attempted to do in the first volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy.” With the Greeks, their ideas were really so existing that they perceived them just as we to-day can see colours, hear sounds, and have sense perceptions: so they could experience ideas. Now with our modern humanity the intellect is separated from outer perception and it works in the inner being of man; but it works in such a way as it must do when it is to be activated through the brain or, in general, through the physical organism. This has gradually brought about a certain state of affairs:—and please bear in mind, that by reason of the whole meaning of our civilisation, it had to be so. The tendency was gradually brought about in the 15th century, through this intellectual development, of permeating human life more and more with purely materialistic cognition, and practical life with the principle of mere utility, Utilitarianism. We have gradually seen with what necessity these things developed, how in the civilisation of the West of Europe certain impulses arose, and in connection with these impulses questions were put in the sphere of cognition. We have seen how these questions differed from others which arose, for instance, in the East of Europe. We have seen, for instance, how the West, through a long preparation was driven in the sphere of knowledge and in the practical sphere of life, to urge the spirit into a configuration which gradually put certain questions above all else. We have seen how in the West there gradually rose the tendency to study what I must call the affinity of all beings; and, when it comes to man, of studying what relates to the Birth of man and to Heredity. One can best understand Western civilisation (when it is striving for cognition) if one knows that these questions concerning the affinity of beings, and of Birth and Heredity, were dominant in the life of the West. From this there arose in the Western world, in their science of chemistry and physics, the seeking of the affinity of different forces of Nature which were regarded as modifications of one particular force of Nature. This tendency then extended to other spheres; in the sphere of Biology it was the affinity of various animals and plants which was investigated; and out of all of this man himself was explained—man, as he was thought to have developed, from a purely animal existence. One must say: To understand the birth of man in its affinity with other creatures on the Earth, was the culmination of these questions in the West.

The Eastern sphere on the other hand, sought in the realm of knowledge other questions: “What is Evil? What is the meaning of suffering in the world?” Never so much as in the East of Europe was there so much thinking concerning Evil and Sin. Of course, in the other spheres this was also the case, but nowhere with the same intensity and with the same genius as in the East. All the literary production of the East stands under the influence of the question: “What is Evil?” And the pains which in the West we applied to the problems of Affinity, were in the East applied to the investigation of Sin. The same thought which was employed in the West to investigate the natural connections of physical man as he passes through birth into existence, was applied in the East to understand Death. That same effort is employed in the East to understand Death. “How does man maintain himself aright as a soul, as he passes through Death? What does Death signify in the whole connection of Life?” That announced itself as a question in the East, one just as important for the East as the question concerning the natural Affinity of Man and the Birth of Man is for the West. Just as in the Western World we can prove that these problems of Birth and Happiness lay at the basis of their thinking, so we can show that in the Eastern world, (for example, in Solovieff) we can say that all his thinking is directed to the question of Evil and of Death. The difference is only this—that in the West one has already travelled a long way in one's investigation, whereas in the East they are still more or less at the beginning. Then, as you know, all these things passed over into the sphere of practical life, into the arranging of social life,—those ideas which we seek to realise in everyday life,—and if to a certain extent we investigate the most intimate impulses in the life of the West, we see that we can refer these to the thoughts concerning the Happiness of Man.

Please just bear in mind how this thinking concerning the Happiness of Man begins with the “Utopia” of Lord Bacon and the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More, and we see how this same trend of thought has developed into the most diverse social programmes which have found expression in the West. Of course, social programmes have also come to expression in the East, but one can easily prove that in the East they spring from quite different impulses than have the social programmes of the West. All these, as well as the idea of Freedom which came to us from the French Revolution, and all the social ideas of the 19th century, all have as their aim the Happiness of Man. In the East we find, (of course still in the beginning) how there, instead of Happiness it is Redemption which is sought for—the inner freeing of the soul of man. There the longing exists to know how the soul of man can develop towards the overcoming of life. One understands this extraordinary interplay of impulses if one keeps this in mind. And we have seen how even a consideration of a somewhat higher kind, of the Lives written of Christ Jesus, has received its colouring from what lies in these same impulses and tendencies. In the West, we have that most characteristic and clever observer of the Life of Jesus—Jesus considered only as Jesus—just as one can consider any other human being, born from a certain race, a certain climate, or a certain nation. I refer to the “Life of Jesus” by Ernest Renan. Now in the East Jesus is little spoken of, and when one speaks of Jesus it is simply as a path along which one can come to the Christ. You find this very strongly in Solovieff.

Between these two, as I have told you, (and if one only has an eye for these things, a sense for what Goethe calls the UR-phenomenon, one knows how these three names are chosen)—between these two, Renan and Solovieff, there stands—a far more original and far clever man than the other two—David Frederick Strauss. Ernest Renan considers only the Jesus, Solovieff considers only the Christ; Ernest Renan transformed Jesus into a simple man, a human, one can almost say an “all too human” man Now with Solovieff this human element is completely lost. Man's gaze is directed into the spiritual world by Solovieff, when he considers the Christ; and he only speaks of moral, spiritual impulses. Everything with Solovieff is forced into a super earthly sphere. The Christ has nothing earthly, although He pours His effects into an earthly sphere. Between these two stands David Frederick Strauss. He does not deny Jesus—he admits that such a personality lives; but, just as Ernest Renan simply and solely considers Jesus as man, so to David Frederick Strauss, Jesus is only of significance in so far as on this Jesus for the first time is suspended the idea of the whole of humanity. Everything which man can long for or ever has longed for, from out of the Mysteries of all ages as the Idea of All-humanity, is attached to the Jesus of David Frederick Strauss. D. F. Strauss does not very much consider the earthly Life of Jesus only as a means whereby to show how in the age when Jesus appears, humanity had the longing to bring together all the myths which refer to the sum total of humanity, and to concentrate them on that Figure. And so, that which in Ernest Renan's Life is so full of colour, with D. F. Strauss becomes a kingdom of shadow, which only seeks to show how the Myths of Centuries all flow together. With D. F. Strauss Christ is not a figure cut off as with Solovieff, but is the idea of that which lives on throughout the whole of humanity—that Christ Who for thousands of years has poured Himself into humanity and developed through humanity. With D. F. Strauss, therefore we find only an idea of Jesus, united with an idea of Christ. With Ernest Renan, we have a personal and historical Jesus. With Solovieff we have a Christ Who is super-personal yet individual, but at the same time super-historic. He is super-personal yet individual, because He is a Being shut off, included in Himself, although at the same time He is an individual but transcending personality. Between these two stands D. F. Strauss, who has not to do with a vision,—a perception of the personal element working in Christ Jesus,—for this personal element is only, as it were, a point of support for all those myths streaming through humanity.

If one only keeps in mind this scheme obtained from a spiritual observation of the history of Europe, one can almost read straight off the various spiritual connections. You see, with Ernest Renan, a man who pre-eminently arose out of the Western civilisation, it is a question the whole time, of understanding how a certain country, a certain race could give birth to Christ Jesus. It is a question of the birth of Jesus. With Solovieff the question is especially: “What does Christ signify for human evolution? And how can Christ save what is born in man as a soul, how can He lead that again through the Gate of Death?”

And so, in the middle of the 19th century, as I have told you, that which lives in this evolution and which belongs especially to our 19th century, reached a certain crisis. At that time, the most extreme point was reached which one can strive for through physical, intellectual performance. In the course of the 19th century, the striving after happiness was gradually transformed into the striving for mere utility,—Utilitarianism. That is something which appears especially in the middle of the 19th century, both in the sphere of knowledge as also in the sphere of life:—the striving after mere utility. And that is something which especially disturbed those who understand the real eternal needs of the human soul, it disturbed them especially that the 19th century should bring forth a striving especially concentrated on the principle of Utilitarianism. Thus, we meet Materialism in the sphere of Knowledge, and Utilitarianism in the sphere of Practical Life. And those two things belong absolutely together.

Now I am not bringing forward these things in order to criticise them, but because they are necessary points of transition for humanity. Man had to go through this materialistic principle in the sphere of Knowledge, as he had to pass through the principle of Utilitarianism in the sphere of Practical Life. It was a question of how humanity should be led in the 19th century in order to pass in the right way through those necessary points of its development. We will therefore begin the consideration of these things this evening from a certain point of view, and then, on a later occasion I shall hope to enter into them more thoroughly.

Knowledge, especially that which in the West is, ae we know, concentrated on the phenomena of Birth and the question of Heredity, and this was placed in the service of Materialism, of Utilitarianism. Now let us make clear to ourselves what really happened in thought. As you know, Darwinism arose, which studied the problem of the Birth of Man, that is, the Origin of Man from a sequence of organisms; and Darwinism attempted to make popular certain quite definite views. We know also that something far more spiritual than Darwinism already stands in Goethe's “Theory of Evolution,” but Goethe's theory had for the time to remain more esoteric. And so, in the first place, the more coarse, materialistic form had to be taken up by humanity. We know too that in the last decades the most intimate pupils of Darwinism have attempted to undermine Darwinism itself in its materialistic colouring. But Darwinism, as it really entered the world of the I9th century, did not enter the world because the investigations of Nature, because science itself made it necessary—not even the natural scientists would maintain that. Oscar Hertwig, the best pupil of Haeckel says, that because human beings only wanted to keep in man the social and mercantile principles of utility during the I9th century, therefore they carried these principles over even into the external world. They simply wanted a reflection of their own thinking, and it was no external facts of nature which forced a Darwinistic view on humanity. So, it is no wonder that, on a closer investigation, one no longer finds these views substantiated. But, as human beings, we have come now to the principle of Utility.

Now Darwin also lived in a certain stream which strove after the principle of Happiness, the Happiness of Human beings, but a stream which was absolutely materialistic. Darwin came very near to that stream which belongs to the doctrine of Malthus. The teaching of Malthus proceeded from a certain definite view, a view that on the Earth in a certain way the means of life increases. That means the fruitfulness of the Earth can increase. But, side by side with this increase in the fruitfulness of the Earth the Malthusians also regarded the increase in the population of the Earth, in such a way as one is only able to regard it, if one does not take into consideration the idea of reincarnation. And they came to see that the fruitfulness of the earth—that is, the means of nourishment,—did not increase at the same rate as the increase in population. They thought: the increase in the nourishment runs its course according to the number [sequence] 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on which we call arithmetical progression; whereas the increase in population happens according to the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8 and so on, which as you know, is geometrical progression. The disciples of Malthus, on the basis of this view, developed the ideas which they thought they had to develop, keeping in mind the Happiness of humanity on the earth. All the time they had in front of them their calculated increase in population, and on the other side an increasing lack in the means of nourishment. From this proceeded the so-called Malthusian ideal—that is, the ideal of the `two children' system. It was said: Since nature has the tendency to impel men forward geometrically and only to impel the means of nourishment forward arithmetically, therefore the population must be restricted, which can be done through the two children system. Now, concerning this special application of the principle of Happiness in the whole stream of Materialism which one gets simply by studying the sequences of Birth according to a materialistic principle (which of course has blinded humanity), we need not speak further now, but Darwin started from the certainty of the principle that for all beings who live on the Earth, the means of nourishment increase in arithmetical progression, whereas the population increases in geometrical progression, And so for him there resulted a certain consequence. He said: If things transpire so the means of nourishment increasing at the rate of 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, whereas the population increases at the rate of 1, 2, 4, 8, then there will be amongst the beings of the Earth an inevitable struggle for existence, and the struggle for existence must be a really operative principle. So, upon Malthusianism,—that means something which was meant absolutely for practical life,—Darwin based his system. Please bear in mind that Darwin did not derive his system from an observation of Nature, but from a theory. It was not an observation of Nature based on Knowledge which gave Darwin his impulse, but simply this principle of utility which said that by regulating the births so that the rate of birth did not grow greater than the rate in the increase of nourishment—one could thereby maintain a balance. Of course, it was thought that one could find the struggle for existence everywhere in Nature, and so the Darwinians said: All beings live immersed in a struggle for existence whereby the unfit are removed and the fit remain over. That means the Darwinian `survival of the fittest.' And so, you see, no cosmic principle full of wisdom is required, because now everything runs on by itself through the survival of the fittest. How suitable for the humanity of the I9th century to strip off everything of a spiritual nature and to live as far as possible only in material existence! One has no need to think of ideals if one lives only under the principle of the survival of the fittest. Nature can then go on entirely without ideals. As a matter of fact, one might even work against the course of Nature if one attempts to realise any ideals, because through one's ideals one might even cause an unfit individual to survive;—an individual who would go under in the struggle for existence!

My dear friends, that principle lived in the humanity of the 19th century everywhere, and was uttered more or less clearly. One lived under the impulse of thinking along these lines, even if one did not always say it quite so clearly. In short, a View of the World arose which sought to satisfy the humanity of the I9th century in this special manner. I just wanted to show you in this where lies the true impulse of Darwinism, because in the beautiful scientific Unions or Scientific Societies in general, people have sought to spread a materialistically coloured Darwinism as a kind of Gospel throughout humanity, without knowing what real impulse lay at the back of them. You see, humanity has a far greater preference for ideas which deceive it than for those which explain the truth. We could go on to bring forward many, many things which would simply be an expression of the fact that in the middle of the 19th century our civilisation and culture had reached a certain crisis, and it was a question for those who knew that certain things must never he quite killed,—things that they knew were necessary for the progress of humanity,—it was a question for those who knew, how, m such an age of mere utility, one could still maintain a spiritual civilisation and culture. And so, it was no accident but something founded in the purpose of the whole of human development, that when that principle of utility brought European development to a crisis in the middle of the 19th century, a personality such as Time. Blavatsky appeared who, through her natural endowment, was capable of revealing to humanity an extraordinary amount from out of the spiritual world itself. if anyone who is an astrologer wanted to consider this matter, he could undertake the following pretty experiment. He could take the point of time of the strongest utilitarian crisis of the 19th century, and for that point of time set up a horoscope. He would get just the same horoscope if he calculates the horoscope of Time. Blavatsky! This is simply a symptom that the self-evolving Cosmic Spirit in the course of time wanted to place a personality in the world through whose soul the opposite of Utilitarianism should come to expression. That principle of utility is absolutely established in Western civilisation, and against all this the Eastern civilisation has always held itself erect. Therefore, we see this peculiar play that, whereas in the West right into the sphere of Knowledge this Western principle is striven for out of a materialistic Darwinism, where a struggle for existence inserts itself into scientific observation,—that brutal struggle for existence against which attacks have always been made by the Russian investigators, whose research work you find collected by Kropotkin in his book, wherein he says that it is not a struggle for existence which lies at the basis of all animal species, but what he calls Mutual Aid. And so, about the middle of the 19th century we have Darwin's “Origin of Species” appearing in the West through the struggle for existence, and in the East, we have brought together by Kropotkin, the labour of a whole series of Russian scientists in his book “Mutual Aid,” which characterises the evolution of species by showing that just those species develop best of all who help each other mutually. Thus, on the one side as it were, at the one pole of the newer spiritual civilisation men are taught that those species develop best who suppress each other most of all, and then from the East, from the other pole, we are taught that those species develop best, the members of which are so endowed that they support each other mutually. That is extraordinarily interesting. One might say, that just as Darwin from out of the milieu of the West works m the middle of the 19th century, so from out of the aura of the East there worked that which was laid down in the soul of Blavatsky, but which could not come fully to development because the time was not yet at hand

We have seen how the West has come forward in a certain way already, whereas the East still stands at the beginning of this development. And so, in Blavatsky there appears a kind of beginning, the announcement of a soul-development. This soul-development of Blavatsky appeared entirely out of a Russian aura, in spite of the fact that her origin was not in itself entirely Russian. This soul, in her mediumship, was developed in a Russian way, but, in the course of her life she was completely led into Western civilisation,—she was so utterly led into Western civilisation that, as you know, she wrote her books in the language of the West; even as far West as America, this figure of Blavatsky was interwoven with the civilisation of our recent age. One might say that in Blavatsky the attempt was made to see how these two things could be intermingled. From all that I have told you concerning the evolution of Blavatsky, you will know that certain things were attempted through her, but, as you also know all meaning, all sense was snatched away from these very exempts. The works of Blavatsky are even chaotic, giving out great significant truths, hut all hopelessly mixed up with the most extraordinary rubbish. Now what, in reality, has proceeded from that impulse which was attempted with Blavatsky? With Blavatsky, the attempt was made to take occultism, which is a merely traditional occultism, and to propagate that. And what has followed from this, after Blavatsky's death right on to our own age? That you have experienced for yourselves right up to the humbug with Alcyone, and what is now developing from Mrs. Besant herself.

Thus, you have this example before you—an attempt to unite occultism with utilitarianism. Now in the way in which it was attempted there, it could not go on any further. Through that peculiar intermingling of something which was born in the East with what existed in the West, Blavatsky, whose soul was of a mediumistic nature, was intended to incorporate the spirituality of the West with the principle of Utilitarianism An Ahrimanic attempt was begun; and that is a terrible, a horrible, but powerful example of how an Ahrimanic attempt inserts itself, which tries, not only to bring out a certain knowledge concerning the supersensible world, but to place it entirely in the service of utility, of Utilitarianism. Blavatsky was surrounded by personalities who strove to keep her entirely in their own hands, but that never quite succeeded because she always slipped away from them in a certain way. But a certain number of men in the Western world endeavoured to get Blavatsky entirely into their own hands, and if that had succeeded, if the ideal of uniting spirituality with the principle of utility had been Utterly realised, we should experience something quite different to-day from that Bureau of Julia (Stead's Bureau); for the Bureau of Julia is only a posthumous, an unsuccessful attempt to amalgamate the principle of utility with spiritualism. What was attempted with Blavatsky was simply only a caricature, but if that had succeeded, we should have everywhere to-day Bureaus where, through mediums, we could get all kinds of information concerning what numbers would win in a lottery, what lady one should marry, whether one should sell out or keep for a time certain stocks and shares. And all that would be arranged from the information to be got from the spiritual world, through mediumship. The spiritual life would be placed utterly at the service of utility. The tragedy of Blavatsky consists in this,—that she was driven to and fro, between both poles, and therefore her life is of such an extraordinary psychological character. In Blavatsky's life, certain doors had to be opened through which one could look into the spiritual world, and so we see this extraordinary phenomenon appearing, of the withdrawal of the Individuality who used Blavatsky as a means of bringing revelations into the world concerning the spirit, while in its place appears that individuality whom Olcott characterises as the reincarnated Sea-Pirate of the 16th century, John King. John King, who then occupied himself in materialising tea cups and things of that kind, when they were especially needed! Into these things there plays a conflict between the principle of Utility and that principle which must work with more Utilitarianism in the course of the further development of humanity,—not by removing utility out of the world, but by directing it spiritually into the right paths. Because, my dear friends, you must not think that any spiritual civilisation of the future will ever be at enmity with life. The task of any true spiritual Science should be to bring Utilitarianism into the right waters.

But of this we shall attempt to speak in the next lecture. We shall then attempt to show the relation between the principle of utility of the most practical life of our present age, and that which should be a spiritual life within this life of practise. And therewith we shall contact one of the most important questions of the life of our present age.

My dear Friends:—The separation which exists to-day between the Life-Ether and the earthly elements, did not as yet exist in the Graeco-Latin age, because at that time they were much more intimately united. As you know, the earthly element only exists in man's body up to 6 per cent. 90 percent of man's body is water; and so you see, man is, really a pillar of water. In the course of evolution, the Life-Ether has, as it were, withdrawn from, the earthly elements, and thereby it has become possible for free spiritual Imaginations to arise in the soul of man through the Life-Ether, and the firm solid earthly elements then exist in man's body as a basis for grasping these Imaginations.

Now with the help and application of certain inner methods we can show that these facts are correct. A Greek statue or drama, or even a poem of Homer is not comprehensible without something further, because at that time the relationship between the Etheric body and Earthly elements was quite different from that existing to-day. Anyone who works with occult methods knows that a person living in that age was quite different from a man of to-day. Whoever experiences, for instance, what Goethe experienced in Italy,—knows that the Greeks created from Nature in a way, a secret way, one absolutely strange to humanity to-day. Without something further, it is not even possible to understand the elements of Greek civilisation. If one really attempts to penetrate into the elements of Greek civilisation, even into their philosophy, one must bring about that fine inner union between the etheric body and the earthly elements; and then one finds that one's etheric body streams through the whole organism—one sees colours quite differently, feels warmth quite differently, one feels everything bound up with the life of the soul in an absolutely different way from what one feels to-day. Then at last one understands such figures as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus, and even Aristotle. As I have told you, the Greeks saw colours quite differently; blue was then far more complicated,—it was a kind of dark veil which had utter darkness behind it. Peelings then were more complicated. A warm object, for instance, felt as if something were spreading over the whole of one's hand when one grasped it. You can understand that the Greeks experienced the whole world of nature in a different way from the way it is experienced to-day. If one understands this, one can understand how it is that the Greeks spoke differently concerning colours than we do now. Evolution has pressed forward since then, and expresses itself in the most different impulses.

Now unless one has Spiritual Science behind one, one is forced to live in the polarities. That is of great significance for the external civilisation, because these polarities work both in the unconscious as well as the conscious faculties of man. As you know, in the West there is a striving to draw the spiritual into the service of purely external physical existence, of which I have given you a shocking example in the Bureau of Julia of William Stead. (For instance, after Dr Steiner had given a lecture, questions used to be written on a piece of paper and passed up and laid on the desk, which Dr. Steiner then answered; but he found after certain lectures that one person or another was even advised through this Julia-Bureau in London to apply to him for material utilitarian aims.) Now practically this whole direction was followed by Spiritualism, which tries to grasp the spirit in a material way. Ordinary science is far more adapted for this,—even earnest science,—than it is for the understanding of Spiritual Science;—the real working and weaving of the spirit in the external world. When scientists have investigated these things, they have often shown this so simply, no less simply than ordinary lay people. One scientist relates what he has experienced with mediums, but we can see how he then let himself be deceived; there has been a pretty play of conjuring before him which he has not understood—and far less has he understood the medium himself. These mediums are often far cleverer than the average learned person to-day because it is a question with them of a sub-conscious cleverness. You see that the same principle of utility plays into all these spheres.

In the West people are seeking after secrets which relate to Birth, to Heredity and so on. That same principle of natural selection which meets us in Darwinism, is applied to man himself. This application I think is called Eugenics, and the question is discussed as to how the healthy man can find a healthy wife, in order to produce a most healthy line of descendants. Even Psycho-Analysis is under the influence of the same impelling forces;—Psycho-Analysis, which is seeking to drag certain complexes out of the human organism, reckons chiefly with sexual relationships, or with relations of power. But behind all these things there are spiritual elements. Through these one comes into contact with certain spiritual beings who are working behind existence. These beings have a one-sided power, i.e. thinking, reasoning; and they seek to form a union with the lower impelling forces of man. These beings attract forces for man's lower desires, sexual and otherwise; and through them the lowest powers of man are stimulated. Thus, we see that Psycho-Analysis comes under the stimulus of beings who excite the lower nature of man. They direct their attention to the impulses of the lower nature, and hence arose the experiments which seek to explain everything from the aspect of man's lower desires, right on from Freud to the greatest, most significant and most spiritual: Laurence Oliphant, born 1822. In his books “Sumpneumata” or “Evolutionary Forces now active in Man,” 1884 and “Scientific Religion,” although these forces are sympathetic and purified, nevertheless all World-History is there turned to a sexual aspect. One can learn a great deal from these extraordinary books, but only the one pole is expressed in them. It is not an attempt to rise from the normal powers of man to a spiritual world, but only an attempt to develop all impulses towards phenomena. Thereby can arise this mystic materialistic character of the will, which expresses itself in an attempt to climb up into the spiritual world, not in a normal way but by placing everything in the service of utility. One thereby seeks to satisfy the spirit in another way.

Now in occult Brotherhoods, Freemasonry, and so on, the attempt is made to insert the other pole, symbolism and ceremonialism,—that which has remained behind through decadent races from earlier times. Now in H. P. Blavatsky's soul there was poured an Indian element of this nature, after she had been rejected by the occultists in the West because she put too high a demand on them, and was therefore excluded. In the Brotherhoods this coupling together of what is taken over from other ages with what exists as a limitation to nationalistic principles, all this has the aim of acquiring power. In these Brotherhoods, it is a question of gaining power. This impulse is then placed also at the service of this lower world. It is used within the Brotherhoods for developing power, and not for a health-giving knowledge. Now if a person has remained behind in connection with former civilisations, he speaks quite differently from one who has taken up ancient knowledge through occult brotherhoods. Hence Ku Hung Ming is far more full of insight then these Europeans; he is an educated Chinaman, at the summit of Chinese culture. He himself has taken into his soul Tibetan substance. The Chinese are the descendants of the last phases of Atlantean evolution, and what stands in this book of Ku Hung Ming is really reminiscent of that, even as the book appears in translation. Ku Hung Ming, stands in quite a different position from the European to-day. He sees certain things far more exactly than we do, therefore many things in his book are worthy of regard, because he is far more unprejudiced than many Europeans, Ku Hung Ming draws a sharp limit between uneducated and educated people. You see, in China the half-educated does not come in between; a man is either educated or not educated. That sharp limit has disappeared in Europe; it began to disappear when Latin was no longer a language only for the educated—and Ku Hung Ming has a sharp eye for such things as this. He has an interesting chapter concerning language, in which he distinguished between the language one writes and the language one speaks; and he describes how this half-educated state belongs to Europe. As a matter of fact, it was not Militarism that was the cause of the war, but this great realm of half-educated people who are the danger for our civilisation m Europe to-day. For instance, a half-educated person will speak concerning such things as materialism, civilisation, and so on. without understanding them. If one reads this interesting book of Qo Ho Ming one can see that his intellect works quite differently from ours. How willingly he makes quotation from Carlyle: -

“The policeman is employed at 15/- a week and he is necessary for the ordering of society. Why does not the policeman turn himself into an Anarchist, for which he has the tendency? Because the concept of honour which is injected into him advocates other people: they require the policeman, but he does not require them. A millionaire is not secure without this `15/- worth.' He is necessary for the protection of the possessor, and that is also injected into him. And so we see how European civilisation rests on deception.”

Ku Ho Ming lets fall there a judgement which is well worth considering. It is necessary that European people should [pay attention] to this Chinaman, who is really considering human nature very well; the judgement of an atavistic man may be far more unprejudiced than the judgement of a man here in the West. The man of the second pole strives for the conquering of that which is the higher thing to the man of the first pole. At the first pole, it is utility which is valuable—Utility, the god of the real bourgeois; at the second pole, it is Sacramentalism which is valuable—Sacramentalism in its widest scope. One has to see the reality from the spiritual aspect. That second pole is more at the beginning, more symbolic, it will observe the world in such a way that it seeks for spiritual connections behind external appearance. That second pole leads into the neighbourhood of spiritual beings also, but it leads into the realm of spiritual beings whose lower powers and forces are related to the highest powers of man, and they seek to tear the higher powers of man away from his lower nature. One has to keep in mind that man is in connection both with super-sensible and sub-sensible forces, while he lives in the world of the senses. We know how beings send down their forces into a sub-sensible region. In Sacramentalism, for instance, in symbolical actions, there streams down forces from a super-sensible into a sub-sensible world. The other polaric impulse leading to one relating oneself to special beings allied to man's lowest powers lead to sexuality in Psycho-Analysis. It is distasteful to go into further details. A synthesis must arise in the union of these two one-sidednesses, these two poles, while one learns to overcome them. One must will to overcome the forces of nature sacramentally. These polaric impulses are playing into everything to-day without man knowing it, and second pole, the pole of Sacramentalism, so often shines into the first pole, that of Utilitarianism. If we return to H. P. Blavatsky, she started from that second impulse that impelled her towards a Sacramental side. The first impulse however led to the materialism of the Theosophical Society, and so we see a tornado of both impulses working round H. P. Blavatsky.

Following a performance of the scene in the study from “Faust I”

Today I would like to take up the subject of what we have just seen, Goethe's “Faust”, in order to gain a unity from it that will then make it possible to arrive at a more comprehensive consideration tomorrow.

We have seen how the transition from the 14th, 15th to the 16th, 17th century marks an extraordinarily significant turning point in the overall development of humanity, the transition from the Greco- Roman age to our fifth post-Atlantic period, to the period in which we now live, from which our impulses for all knowledge and also for all action flow, to the period that will last until the fourth millennium. Now, from all that you know about Goethe's “Faust” and the connection between Goethe's “Faust” and the Faust figure as it comes from the legend of the 16th century, you will realize that both this Faust figure from the 16th century and that which Goethe's perception formed out of it, is intimately connected with all the transitional impulses that the new age has brought forth in spiritual and thus also in external-material terms. Now in Goethe's case it is really true that precisely this problem of the dawning of the new age and the continued working of the impulses of the old age was so tremendously powerful that he was inspired throughout the sixty years during which he created his Faust by the question: What are the most important tasks, the most important attitudes for modern man? And Goethe could truly look back to the past age, which even science today knows so little about, that past age that ends with the 14th, 15th century. What history reports – I have said it often – about the human soul, about human abilities and needs in earlier centuries, is basically something that is very much a gray theory. In the souls of people in earlier centuries, in the centuries that preceded the age of Faust, things looked very different from the souls of people in the present, from the souls of the present human epoch. And Goethe has truly embodied a figure, a personality in his Faust, who looks back on the state of mind of people in earlier centuries, in centuries long past, and who at the same time looks forward to the tasks of the present, to the tasks of the future.

In that Faust first looks back to the times preceding his own, he can, of course, see only the ruins of a perished culture, a spiritual culture. He can see the ruins. We must first of all consider the sixteenth-century Faust, who is a historical figure who really lived and who then became part of the folk legend. This Faust still lived in the old sciences that he had appropriated, lived in magic, in alchemy and in mysticism, which was the wisdom of earlier centuries, namely the wisdom of the time that preceded Christianity; but in the time in which the historical Faust of the 16th century lived, it was already in a state of profound decline. What was regarded as alchemy, magic, mysticism by those among whom Faust lived in the Faust era was already quite a strange stuff; it was a stuff based on traditions, on legacies from older times, but in which people no longer knew their way around. The wisdom that lived in it was no longer known. One had many sound formulas from ancient times, many correct insights from ancient times, but one understood them only poorly.

Thus, in this respect, the historical Faust was placed in an age of decaying spiritual life. And Goethe continually mixed up what the historical Faust experienced with what he had created for the Faust of the 18th century, the Faust of the 19th century, and even the Faust of many centuries to come. Hence we see Goethe's Faust looking back to the old magic, to the old kind of wisdom, mysticism, which did not practice chemistry in today's materialistic sense, which, through its dealings with nature, wanted to come into contact with a spiritual world, but which no longer had the knowledge to do so in the right way, in the right way of earlier times. What was considered to be medicine in centuries long gone is not as foolish as today's science often wants to believe, but the actual wisdom contained in it has been lost, and it was already partly lost in the age of Faust. Goethe was well acquainted with it. But he did not know it intellectually alone, he knew it with his heart, he knew it with all the powers of his soul, which are attached to the welfare and salvation of humanity and which are particularly relevant for the salvation of humanity. He wanted to answer the questions, the riddles, that arose for him from this, in such a way that one could recognize how, proceeding further and further, one could arrive at other wisdoms regarding the spiritual world that were just as suitable for more recent times, as the ancients knew such wisdom, which, according to the course of human development, must necessarily fade away. Therefore, he lets his Faust become a magician. Faust has surrendered to magic, like the Faust of the 16th century. But he remains unsatisfied for the simple reason that the actual wisdom of ancient magic had already faded away. Ancient medicine also came from this wisdom. All knowledge of prescriptions and all medicine was connected with ancient chemistry, alchemy.

Now, such a question immediately touches on the deepest secrets of humanity: that in truth one cannot cure diseases without at the same time being able to create them, for example. The ways to cure diseases are at the same time the ways to create them. We shall hear presently how the principle held good in ancient wisdom that the healer could at the same time be the producer of disease, and how therefore in ancient times the art of healing was associated with a deeply moral world view. But we shall also see shortly afterwards how little could have developed in these ancient times that is called the more recent freedom of human development, which was actually only tackled by humanity in this, our fifth period, following the Greco-Roman period. We shall see how this should have been if the ancient wisdom had remained.

In all fields, however, this wisdom had to perish, so that man had to start from scratch, so to speak, but in such a way that he could strive for freedom with knowledge and action at the same time. He would not have been able to do so under the influence of the old wisdom. In such times of transition as those in which Faust lived, the decay of the old is there; the new has not yet come. Then such moods arise as can be observed in “Faust” in the scene that precedes the one we presented today. In this scene we see quite clearly how out of step Faust is with the times and how he feels out of step. We see how Faust, accompanied by his servant Wagner, goes out of his cell into the countryside, how he first looks at the people celebrating Easter outdoors, in the countryside, and how he himself gets into the Easter mood. But we immediately see how he does not want to accept the homage that the people offer him. An old farmer appears, steps up to Faust and offers homage because the people believe that Faust, the son of an old adept, an old healer, is also an important healer who can bring healing and blessing to the people. An old farmer steps up to Faust and says:

Truly, it is very well done
That you appear on this happy day;
Have you not always meant well with us
In evil days!
Many a man is still alive here
Whose last fever was snatched from you
snatched from the raging feverishness,
When he set the plague a limit.
Even then you, a young man,
you went to every hospital,
Many a corpse was carried away,
But you came out healthy,
Passed many hard tests:
the helper helped the helper above.

So says the old farmer, remembering how Faust is connected with the old healing arts, which, however, were not only related to the healing of physical illnesses, but also to the healing of the moral evils of the people. Faust knows that he no longer lives in an age in which the old wisdom of mankind was truly helpful, but already in a period of decline. And in his soul glows modesty, but at the same time dejection at the untruthfulness he actually faces; and he says:

Only a few steps up to that stone;
Here we want to rest from our wandering.
Here I often sat alone, thoughtful
And tormented myself with prayers and fasting.
In hope, rich, in faith,
With tears, sighs, hand-wringing
I thought to force the end of that plague
From the Lord of Heaven.
The crowd's applause now sounds like scorn to me.
Oh, could you read my mind,
How little father and son
Were worthy of such fame!
My father was a dark honorable man
Who meditated on nature and its sacred circles
In all honesty, but in his own way,
With whimsical effort;
Who, in the company of adepts,
Locked himself in the black kitchen
And, according to endless recipes,
Poured together the adverse.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor.
who wooed a lily in a lukewarm bath.
And then both of them, with open flames,
were tormented from one bridal chamber into another.

Goethe had studied very well how they proceeded in those days, how they treated the “red lion”, the mercury oxide, sulfur mercury, how they treated the various chemicals that were mixed together and left to their processes, how they made medicines out of them. But all this no longer corresponded to the old wisdom. Goethe also knew the terminology; what you had to represent was definitely represented in images. The compounds of substances were depicted as a marriage. That is why he says:

Tormented from one bridal chamber to another.
Then the young queen appeared in the glass with bright colors.

- that was an artistic expression. Just as in today's chemistry, when certain substances have reached a certain state and color, they are called “the young queen”.

Here was the medicine, the patients died.

They died at that time from the fist, as they still do today from many medicines.

Here was the medicine, the patients died,
And no one asked who recovered.
So we have raged with hellish Latwergen
In these valleys, these mountains
Far worse than the plague.
I myself have given the poison to thousands,
They have withered away, I must live to see
That the impudent murderers are praised!

This is Faust's self-knowledge. Faust now stands before himself, he who you know has dabbled in old magical lore in order to penetrate the secrets of nature and the spirit. But through all this he has become spiritualized. Just as Wagner, his familiar, who has been satisfied with the newer wisdom that rests in the written works, that rests in letters, Faust cannot do so. Wagner, on the other hand, is a personality who makes far fewer demands on wisdom and life. And while Faust wants to dream himself into nature to find the spirit of nature, Wagner only thinks of the spirit that flows from the theories, the parchment, the books; what comes over Faust he calls “whimsical hours”:

I myself have often had whimsical hours,

- says Wagner —

but I have never felt such an urge.
One easily gets enough of the forest and fields,
I will never envy the bird's wings.

He never wants to fly out into the world with the bird and see the world!

How differently the joys of the mind carry us
From book to book, from leaf to leaf!
Winter nights become mild and beautiful,
A blissful life warms all the limbs,
And oh! if you unroll a worthy parchment,
Then the whole of heaven descends upon you!

A complete bookworm, a complete theorist!

So, after the people have left, they now stand there: the one who wants to go into the sources of life, who wants to connect his own being with the mysterious forces of nature in order to experience these mysterious forces of nature, Faust, and the one who sees nothing but the external material life and that which is recorded in the books precisely through matter. We need not reflect much on what has gone on in Faust's inner life through all that he has experienced up to this moment, as Goethe presents it to us; but we may say, after all that we find in Faust, that his inner life one might say, has been transformed and reversed, that a real development of the soul has taken place in Faust, that he has attained a certain inner vision; otherwise he would not have been able to call up the earth spirit, which surges up and down in a storm of activity. A certain ability to see the outer world not only in terms of its external appearances, but to see the spirit that lives and moves in everything, that is what Faust has acquired. Then, from afar, a poodle rushes towards them, Faust and Wagner. The way they both see the poodle – an ordinary poodle – the way Faust sees it and the way Wagner sees it, characterizes the two people completely. After Faust has dreamt himself into the living spirit of nature, he sees the poodle:

Do you see the black dog roaming through the crops and stubble?

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.

Faust: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?

Wagner: For a poodle, who in his own way
Plagues himself on the trail of his master.

The poodle goes around in circles.

Faust: Do you notice how in a wide snail's circle
He chases us around and closer and closer?
And if I am not mistaken, a whirlpool of fire is drawing behind him in his tracks.

Faust does not just see the poodle, but something stirs inside Faust; he sees something that belongs to the poodle like a spiritual. That is what Faust sees. Wagner, of course, does not see it. After all, you can't see what Faust sees with your physical eyes.

Wagner: I see nothing but a black poodle;
It may well be an optical illusion for you.

Faust: It seems to me that it magically draws silent loops
Around our feet to bind us in the future.

Wagner: I see him circling around us uncertainly and fearfully,
because he sees two unknowns instead of his master.

Thus, in this simple manifestation, Faust also sees something spiritual. Let us hold on to that. Faust, whose mind is gripped by a certain spiritual connection with this poodle, now goes to his study. Now, of course, Goethe dramatically presents the scene in such a way that the poodle is as he is; that is also good, the drama must present it that way. But basically, we are dealing with something that Faust experiences inwardly. And the way this scene unfolds, how Faust experiences something inwardly here, is truly masterfully expressed by Goethe in every word. They remained outside, Faust and Wagner, until late into the night, when the external light no longer works, when only the twilight has worked. In the twilight, Faust sees what he wants to see spiritually. Now he comes home to his cell. Now he is alone with himself. A person like Faust, after going through all this, left alone with himself, is able to experience self-knowledge, that is, the life of the spirit in one's own self. He expresses how his innermost being has been stirred, but in a spiritual way:

I left the fields and meadows,
Which a deep night covers,
With foreboding, holy horror
In us the better soul awakens.
Now wild instincts have fallen asleep
With every impetuous deed;
Human love stirs,
The love of God stirs now.

The poodle growls. But let us be clear: these are inner experiences; even the poodle's growling is an inner experience, even if it is dramatically portrayed externally. Faust has entered into decaying magic, into an alliance with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles is not a spirit who leads him into progressive, regular spiritual forces; Mephistopheles is the spirit that Faust must first overcome, who is sent to him to overcome him, who is given to him for trial, not for instruction. That is to say, we now see Faust standing before us, on the one hand aspiring to enter into the spiritual world of divinity, which carries forward the evolution of the world, and on the other hand, the forces in his soul are stirring, drawing him down into the ordinary life of instinct, which diverts man from spiritual striving. Precisely when something sacred stirs in his soul, it scoffs; the opposing instincts scoff. This is now wonderfully presented in the form of external events: Faust, so to speak, striving for the divine-spiritual with all his knowledge, and his own instincts, which growl against it, just as the materialistic sense of man growls against spiritual striving. And when Faust says, “Be quiet, Poodle, don't growl,” he is basically calming himself. And now Faust speaks – that is, in this case, Goethe allows Faust to speak in a wonderful way. Only when one delves into the individual words does one find how wonderfully Goethe knows the inner life of the human being in spiritual development:

Oh, when in our narrow cell
The friendly lamp burns again,
Then it becomes light in our bosom,
In the heart that knows itself.

— that is, seeks the spirit in its own self.

Reason begins to speak again

— a very meaningful sentence! For the one who undergoes spiritual development, who is brought into contact with Faust through his life, knows that reason is not just something dead within, who not only knows rational reason, who knows how alive reason becomes, how inner spiritual weaving becomes reason and really speaks. This is not just a poetic image:

Reason begins to speak again,
And hope begins to flourish again.

“Reason begins to speak again” - about the past that has remained alive from the past, “And hope begins to flourish again”, that is, we find our will transformed so that we know: we shall pass through the portal of death as a spiritually living being. The future and the past combine wonderfully. Goethe wants Faust to say that Faust knows how to find the inner life of the spirit through self-knowledge.

One longs for the streams of life,
alas! for the source of life.

And now Faust seeks to get closer to what he is yearning for: the source of life. He first seeks one path: the path of religious uplift; he reaches for the New Testament. And the way he reaches for the New Testament is a wonderful representation of Goethe's wisdom-filled drama. He reaches for the one containing the most profound words of wisdom of modern times, the Gospel of John. He wants to translate this into his “beloved German”. The fact that Goethe chooses the moment of translation is significant. He who is familiar with the workings of deep world and spiritual realities knows that when wisdom is transferred from one language to another, all spirits of confusion arise and intervene. In the borderlands of life, the powers that oppose human development and human salvation are particularly evident. Goethe deliberately chooses the translation to place the spirit of wrongdoing, even the spirit of lies, which is still in the poodle, next to the spirit of truth. If you consider the feelings and sensations that can flow out of such a scene, the wonderful spiritual depth that lives in these scenes becomes apparent. All the temptations that I have just characterized, which come from what is in the poodle, which rise up to distort the truth into untruth, all this has an ongoing effect and has an effect precisely in an act of Faust, which gives one the opportunity to distort truth into untruth. And how little we actually notice that Goethe intended this is shown today by the various interpreters of Faust, for what do these various interpreters of Faust say about this scene? Well, you can read it; it says: Goethe is a man of the outer life, for whom the “word” is not enough. He has to correct the Gospel of John, he has to find a more correct translation; not: “In the beginning was the word,” the Logos, but: “In the beginning was the deed!” That is what Faust finds out after much hesitation. That is a profound Goethean wisdom. This wisdom is not a Faustian wisdom, it is a genuine Wagnerian wisdom, a true Wagnerian wisdom, just like the wisdom that is so often emphasized that Faust later says such beautiful words to Gretchen about religious life: Who can name him, who confess him, the all-embracing one who holds and carries everything, and so on, is a Gretchen wisdom. What Faust says to Gretchen has been quoted over and over again, and it is repeatedly presented as a profound piece of wisdom by the gentlemen who cite it, the learned gentlemen.

Who may name it?
And who confess:
I believe it?
Who feel
And dare
To say: I do not believe it?
The All-embracing,
The All-sustaining,
Does it not embrace and sustain
You, me, itself?
Does not the sky arch up there?
Does not the earth lie down here firmly?
And do not friendly looking
eternal stars rise up?
Do I not look you in the eye,
and does not everything
press towards you as head and heart

and so on. What Faust says is often presented as a profound piece of wisdom. Now, if Goethe had meant it to be the very deepest wisdom, he would not have put it into Faust's mouth at the moment when he wants to educate the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is a piece of wisdom for the ages! You just have to take things seriously. The scholars have only been taken in. They have taken what is a Gretchen saying for profound philosophy. And so, too, what appears as a translation of the Bible in Faust is taken for a particularly profound saying, whereas Goethe intends to depict nothing other than how truth and error toss man to and fro when he sets about such a task. Goethe has portrayed these two souls of Faust in great depth in this translation of the Bible.

It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!”

We know that it is the Greek Logos. This is really written in the Gospel of John. In contrast to this, that which is symbolized by the poodle rears up in Faust and does not want to let him come to the deeper meaning of the Gospel of John. Why did the writer of the Gospel of John choose the word, the Logos? Because the writer of the Gospel of John wants to emphasize that what is most important in human development on earth, what really makes man outwardly human in his development on earth, did not develop gradually, but was there in the very beginning. What distinguishes man from all other beings? Because he can speak, all other creatures, animals, plants, minerals cannot. The materialist believes that man has only come to the word, that is, to language, to the Logos, which is permeated by thinking, after he has gone through the animal development. The Gospel of John takes the matter deeper and says: No, in the beginning was the word. That means: Man's evolution is originally predisposed; man is not merely the highest peak of the animal world in the materialistic-Darwinian sense, but in the very first intentions of the earth's evolution, in the very beginning, in the beginning was the word. And only through this can man develop an ego on earth, which animals do not achieve, that the word is interwoven with human evolution. The word stands for the human ego. But the spirit that is given to Faust, the spirit of untruth, rebels against this truth, and it must go deeper down; it cannot yet understand the profound wisdom that lies in the words of John.

Here I already falter!

But it is actually the poodle, the dog in him, and what is in the poodle that makes him falter. He does not get any higher, on the contrary, he gets lower.

Here I stand still! Who will help me further on?
I cannot possibly value the word so highly;
I must translate it differently
when I am properly enlightened by the spirit.

While he sees Mephistopheles drawing near to him, he believes that he is enlightened by the spirit; but he is darkened by the spirit of darkness and comes down.

Written is: “In the beginning was the mind.”

This is no higher than the word. Sense prevails, as we can easily demonstrate, even in the lives of animals; but the animal does not come to the human word. Man is capable of sense through having an astral body. Faust descends deeper into himself, from the ego into the astral body.

“In the beginning was Sense.”
Consider well the first line,
Lest thy pen be over-hasty.

He thinks he is rising higher, but he is descending lower.

Is it Sense that works and creates all?

No, he descends even lower, from the astral to the denser material etheric body, and writes:

“In the beginning was the power!”

Power is that which lives in the etheric body.

But even as I write this down,
something is already warning me not to dwell on it.
The spirit helps me!

The spirit that is in the poodle!

Suddenly I see the counsel
And write with confidence: “In the beginning was the deed!”

And now he has arrived at complete materialism; now he is at the physical body through which the outer deed is accomplished.

Logos, Word: I
Sense: Astral body
Strength: Etheric body
Deed: Physical body

So you have Faust alive and well in a piece of self-knowledge. He translates the Bible wrongly because the various members of the human being, which we have discussed so often, I, astral body, etheric body, physical body, work together in him in a chaotic way through the Mephistophelian spirit. Now it also shows how these instincts prevail, because the outer barking of the poodle is what rebels against the truth in him. In his knowledge, he cannot yet recognize the wisdom of Christianity. We see this in the way he relates word, meaning, power and deed. But the urge to embrace Christianity is already alive in him. By making active that which lives in him as the Christ, he conquers the opposing spirit. At first he tries what he has retained from ancient magic. The spirit does not retreat, it does not show itself in its true form. He invokes the four elements and their spirits: salamander, sylph, undine, gnome; none of this distracts the spirit that is in the poodle. But when he invokes the Christ-figure, the “maliciously pierced one, poured out through all the heavens,” the poodle must show its true form.

All this is basically self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that Goethe makes very clear. What happens? A traveling scholastic! Faust is truly practicing self-knowledge; he is basically confronting himself. First, in the form of the poodle, the wild instincts that have rebelled against the truth have taken effect, and now, to a certain extent, he becomes clear, clearly unclear: the traveling scholastic stands before him; but it is only the other self of Faust. He himself has become little more than a wandering scholastic with all the fallacies that are to be found in the wandering scholastic. Only now, through his union with the spiritual world, he has come to know the drives more precisely, and so the wandering scholastic, that is, his own self, as he has appropriated it so far, now confronts him more crudely and thoroughly. He has learned like a scholastic, like Faust; only then he has surrendered to magic, and through magic, scholasticism has been demonized. What has become of the old good Faust, when he was still a wandering scholastic, he has only become through the fact that he has still relied on the old magic. The wandering scholastic is still in him; he confronts him in a transformed form. It is only his own self. This wandering Scholastic is also the self. The struggle to get rid of everything that rode up as the self is now contained in the further scene.

Goethe always tries to show only Faust's other self in the various forms in which Faust appears together, so that Faust recognizes more and more of himself. Perhaps some of the listeners remember that in earlier lectures I explained how Wagner is also in Faust himself, how Wagner is also only another self of Faust. Even Mephistopheles is only another self. All of this is self-knowledge! Self-knowledge is practiced through knowledge of the world. But all of this is not present in Faust in clear spiritual knowledge; it is all contained in Faust in unclear, dull spiritual-visionary power that one might say is still influenced by ancient atavistic clairvoyance. It is not clarified. It is not bright knowledge; it is dream-like knowledge. We are shown how the dream spirits, which are actually group souls of all those beings that accompany Mephistopheles, beguile Faust, and how he finally awakens. And there Goethe says, there Goethe lets Faust say very clearly:

Am I then again deceived?
Does the ghostly urge thus vanish,
That a dream lied to me about the devil,
And that a poodle sprang from me?

Goethe repeatedly uses the method of hinting at the truth again and again. That he actually means it as an inner experience of Faust is clearly enough expressed in these four lines. This scene also shows us how Goethe struggled to understand the transition from the old age to the new one in which he himself lived, from the fourth post-Atlantic period to the fifth post-Atlantic period. The boundary is in the 14th, 15th, 16th century. As I said earlier, anyone who lives in today's thinking cannot, unless they do special studies, get a good idea of the development of the soul in past centuries. And in Faust's time, only the ruins remained.

You see, we often experience that today people do not want to approach the newer spiritual research that we are striving for, but want to reheat the old wisdom. Many a person believes that by rehashing the knowledge of the ancients, they can arrive at a deeper, magical-mystical wisdom about nature. I would like to say that two fallacies are extremely close to all of man's spiritual endeavors. The first is that people buy old, ancient books, which they then study and value more highly than newer science. They usually value them more only because they do not understand them, because the language can really no longer be understood. That is the one nonsense, that one comes again and again with the content of the old books, which has become gibberish, when one wants to talk about spiritual research. The other thing is that one wants to give the newer endeavors old names if possible and thereby sanctify them. Look at some of the societies that call themselves occult or secret or whatever: their whole endeavor is to date themselves back as far as possible, to explain as much as possible about a legendary past, to take pleasure in old naming. That is the second nonsense. You don't need to go along with any of this if you really understand the needs and impulses of our time and the necessary future. You can open any book from the time when traditions were still present, so to speak. You can pick out any book where traditions were still present: from the way it is presented, you can see that legacies, traditions, were present from an ancient, primordial wisdom that humanity possessed, but that this wisdom had fallen into decline. The language, everything is still there, even quite late.

I have a book at hand that was printed in 1740, so it was only published in the 18th century. I would like to read a short passage from it, a passage that is certain to make many people who are seeking spiritual knowledge today think, “Abyssmal, profound wisdom!” Oh, what is contained in it all! - There are even some who believe that they understand such a passage. Now, I will first read the passage I mean:

"The king's crone shall be of pure gold, and a chaste bride shall be given him in marriage.” Therefore, if you want to work through our bodies, take the ravenous gray wolf, which is subjugated to the warlike Mars in name but is by birth a child of the old Saturn, found in the valleys and mountains of the world, and possessed of great hunger. Cast him for the body of the king, that he may have his sustenance."

That is how these chemical processes that were set up were called in ancient times; that is how certain chemical processes were spoken of, which Faust also alludes to when he talks about how a red lion marries the lily in the glass and so on. It is not proper to mock these things, for the simple reason that the way chemistry is spoken of today will sound to people who come later just as it does to us. But we should be clear that this has also just emerged, even in a very late period of decline. The term “gray wolf” is used; this refers to a certain ore that can be found everywhere in the mountains and that is subjected to a certain procedure. “King” was the term used to describe a certain state of substances; and what is being described here is meant to indicate a certain handling. They took the gray ore and treated it in a certain way; this gray ore was called the “gluttonous gray wolf,” and the other was the “golden king,” where the gold, after being treated in a certain way, was the “golden king.” And so a connection arose. He describes this connection as follows:

And when he had swallowed the king – so it happens that the “gray, ferocious wolf”, that is, the gray ore that had been found in the mountains, merged with the golden king – that is a certain state of the gold after it has been chemically treated; the gold has disappeared into the gray ore. He depicts it:

“And when he has swallowed the king, make a great fire and throw the wolf into it.

– So the wolf that has eaten the gold, the golden king, is thrown into the fire –

”so that he may be completely consumed by the fire, and the king will be redeemed again.

The gold appears again!

“When this happens three times, the lion has conquered the wolf and will find nothing more to consume in him; then our body is complete, at the beginning of our work.”

So he does something in this way. If you wanted to know what he does, you would have to describe these procedures in great detail, especially how the golden king is made, but it cannot be described here. These procedures are no longer carried out today. But what does the man expect to achieve by this? He promises himself something that is not entirely out of thin air, because he has now done something. What did he actually do it for? That is, the person who had it printed will probably not have done it at all, but will have copied it from old books. But why was it done in the time when people still understood the things? You can see this from the following:

“And know that this alone is the right way to thoroughly cleanse our bodies, for Leo cleanses himself with the blood of Wolf, and the blood tincture combines wonderfully with the tincture of the lion, because the two bloods are closely related in the family tree.”

So now he praises what he has created. He has received a kind of medicine.

“And when the lion has gorged himself, his spirit has become stronger than before, and his eyes give off a proud glow like the bright sun.”

That is all the property of what he has in the test tube!

"His inner being can do a lot, and is useful for all the things he is required to do, and when he is brought to his readiness, the children of men, burdened with serious illnesses and multiple plagues, follow him, desiring to drink of the blood of his soul, and all who have ailments rejoice greatly in his spirit; for whoever drinks from this golden fountain feels a complete renewal of nature, an acceptance of evil, a strengthening of the blood, a vigor of the heart, and a perfect health of all limbs.

You see, it is indicated that you are dealing with a medicine; but it is also sufficiently indicated here that it has something to do with what appears as a moral quality in man. Because, of course, if someone who is healthy takes it in the appropriate amount, then what the man describes occurs. That is what he means, and that is how it was with the ancients who still understood something about these things.

“For whoever drinks from this golden fountain will feel a complete renewal of nature”

– in other words, through this art, which he has described, he has striven for a tincture through which real vital energy enters the human being:

“Heart strength, blood strength and perfect health of all limbs, whether they are closed inside or sensitive outside the body, for it opens up all the nerves and pores so that evil can be expelled and the good can dwell there in peace.”

I read this out first to show how even in these ruins of an old wisdom, there is a reflection of what was aspired to in ancient times. They strove to stimulate the body through external means that they had created from nature, that is, to achieve certain abilities not only through inner, moral striving, but through means of nature itself, which they had created. Hold on to that for a moment, because it leads us to something important that distinguishes our period from earlier ones. Today, it is quite easy to scoff at ancient superstition, because then you are rewarded for it by being considered an intelligent person before the whole world; whereas otherwise you are not considered an intelligent person if you see something sensible in ancient knowledge. Something that has even been lost to mankind and was bound to be lost for certain reasons, because in this pursuit of the ancient times, people could never have come to freedom. But look, you will find in old books, which now go back to older times than this book, which belongs to a very late period of decay, you will find in old books, which you know well, sun and gold with a common sign, with this sign: ©; you find moon and silver with this sign: €. For today's man, this sign, applied to gold and sun, and this sign, applied to moon and silver, for soul abilities that today's man necessarily has, is of course complete nonsense; and it is complete nonsense how literature, which often also calls itself “esoteric” literature, about these things, because most of the time one does not have the means to recognize why in ancient times the sun and gold and the moon and silver were designated with the same sign.

Let us start with moon and silver with this sign: €. You see, if we go back in time, say a few millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, before the Christian era, then people not only had the abilities that were already in ruins at the time when such things came into being, but they had even higher abilities. When a person of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture said “silver”, they did not mean what we mean when we say silver. When a person used the word in his ancient language that meant silver to him, he applied it quite differently. Such a person had inner abilities and meant a certain kind of power that is not only found in a piece of silver, but he meant something that basically extends over the whole earth. He meant: We live in gold, we live in copper, we live in silver. He meant certain types of forces that live there and that in particular flowed strongly towards him from the moon, and he sensed that in the coarsest material sense, sensitively, also in the piece of silver. He really found the same forces emanating from the moon, but also on the whole earth, and particularly in the material sense in the piece of silver. Now, today's enlightened man says: Yes, the moon, it shines so silvery white; they just believed that it was made of silver. — It was not, but rather, one had an inner soul experience with the moon, something that lived in the entire earth's sphere as a force, and, translated into the material, with the piece of silver. So the power contained in the silver must be spread over the whole earth, so to speak.

Today, of course, people consider this to be complete nonsense when you tell them, and yet in terms of today's science it is not complete nonsense. It is not nonsense at all, not nonsense at all, because I will tell you one thing that science knows today, even if it does not always say it. Modern science knows that a body, thought of as a cube, one English nautical mile long, contains a little over four pounds of silver, finely distributed. This is simply a scientific truth that can be tested today. The ocean contains two million tons of silver, finely distributed, in the most extreme homeopathic dilution, one might say. It is truly as if the silver were spread out over the Earth. Today, when we verify this with normal knowledge, we do so by scooping up seawater and methodically testing it with all kinds of meticulous examinations. But then, using the means of today's science, we find that the world's oceans contain two million tons of silver. These two million tons of silver are not contained in it in such a way that they have somehow dissolved or something similar, but they belong to the world ocean; they belong to its nature and essence. And this was known to ancient wisdom; it knew this through the still existing fine, sensitive powers that came from ancient clairvoyance. And it knew that when one imagines the earth, one does not have to imagine this earth merely as today's geology imagines it, but that silver is dissolved in this earth in the finest way.

I could go on now, and show how gold is also dissolved, how all these metals, in addition to being deposited here and there materially, are really contained in the earth in a fine dissolution. So the ancient wisdom was not wrong when it spoke of silver. That is contained in the earth's sphere. But it was known as a force, as certain types of force. The sphere of silver contains other forces, the sphere of gold contains other forces, and so on. Much more was known about what is spread out as silver in the sphere of the earth; it was known that the power that causes the tides lies in this silver, because a certain vitalizing power of this entire terrestrial body lies in this silver, or is identical with this silver. Otherwise, there would be no tides; this peculiar movement of the sea is originally fueled by the silver content. This has nothing to do with the moon, but the moon has to do with the same force. Therefore, the tides occur in a certain relationship with the lunar movements, because both, lunar movements and tides, depend on the same system of forces. And these forces lie in the silver content of the universe.

One can, even without clairvoyant insight, merely go into such things and one will be able to prove with a certainty of proof, which is otherwise not attained in any field of science except at most in mathematics, that there was an ancient science that knew such things, that knew such things well. And connected with this knowledge and skill was what ancient wisdom was, that wisdom which really dominated nature and which must first be won again through spiritual research from the present into the future. We are living in the very age in which an old kind of wisdom has been lost and a new kind of wisdom is only just emerging. What was the consequence of this old wisdom? It had the consequence that I have already indicated. If you really knew the secrets of the universe, you could make your own human being more efficient. Do you think that people could be made more capable through external means! So the possibility existed that a person could acquire abilities simply by taking certain substances in the appropriate quantities, which today we rightly assume that a person can only have as innate abilities, as genius, as talent, and so on. It is not the fantastic dreams of Darwinism that are at the beginning of the development of the Earth, but the possibility of dominating nature and giving man moral and spiritual abilities through the treatment of nature. You will now understand that this treatment of nature must therefore be kept within very definite limits; hence the secrets of the most ancient mysteries. Whoever was to attain such knowledge, which really had something to do with these secrets of nature, which were not merely concepts and ideas and sensations, not merely beliefs, who was to attain such knowledge had first to prove himself to be completely suited to it, to want to achieve nothing, but also nothing at all for himself with this knowledge, but to apply these insights, these skills, which he acquired through this knowledge, solely in the service of the social order. That is why these insights were kept so secret, let us say, in the Egyptian mysteries. The preparation consisted of the fact that the one to whom such knowledge was transmitted gave a guarantee that he would continue to live the life he had led before in exactly the same way, that he would not gain the slightest advantage for himself, but would merely apply the proficiency he now acquired in the treatment of nature in the service of the social order. Under this condition, individuals were allowed to become initiates, who then led that ancient culture, whose wonders can be seen and are not understood because it is not known from what they arose.

But humanity could never have become free in this way. Man would have had to be turned into an automaton through the influence of nature, so to speak. An age had to come when man would work through mere inner moral forces. Thus nature is veiled from him, as it were, because he would have profaned it by releasing his instincts in the new age. And his instincts have been most released since the 14th, 15th century. Therefore the old wisdom fades away; there remains only a bookish wisdom that is not understood. For no one today would be deterred if he really understood such things as only the sentence I read to you, no one today would be deterred from using these things for his own benefit. But that would give rise to the worst instincts in human society, worse instincts than those groping advances that are produced in the scientific work of today, where one finds out in the laboratory, without being able to see into things, that this substance affects the other in this way, — where one finds out something without looking into things, well, that is now the content of chemistry. We are thus adrift; and spiritual science will first have to find its way into the secrets of nature again. But at the same time it will have to found a social order that is quite different from today's social order, so that man can recognize what holds nature together at its core without therefore being seduced into the struggle of the wildest instincts.

There is meaning and there is wisdom in human development, and that is what I have been trying to prove to you through a series of lectures. What happens in history happens, even if often through destructive forces, but in such a way that there is a meaning to historical development, even if it is often not the meaning that people dream up, and even if people have to suffer a lot as a result of the paths that the meaning of history often takes. Everything that happens in the course of time, it certainly happens so that the pendulum sometimes swings after evil, sometimes after less evil; but through this swinging, certain states of equilibrium are nevertheless achieved. And so it was that at least a few natural forces were known about until the 14th or 15th century, knowledge of which has been lost because people in more recent times would not have the right attitude towards it.

You see, it is beautifully described in the symbol that expresses the power of nature in the Egyptian legend of Isis. This image of Isis makes a moving impression on us when we imagine it standing there in stone, but at the same time veiled from top to bottom: the veiled image at Sais. And the inscription reads: I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil. This has led to an extremely clever explanation, although very clever people have taken this clever explanation, it must be said. It is said that Isis thus expresses the symbol of wisdom, which can never be attained by man. Behind this veil is a being that must remain hidden forever, for the veil cannot be lifted. — And yet the inscription is this: I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil. All the clever people who say, “You cannot fathom the essence” are saying, logically, roughly the same thing as someone saying, “My name is Miller; you will never learn my name.” It is exactly the same as what you always hear people say about this picture: “My name is Miller; you will never learn my name.” If you interpret “I am the past, the present and the future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil,” then, of course, this interpretation is complete nonsense. Because it says what Isis is: past, present and future – flowing time! We will talk about these things in more detail tomorrow. It is flowing time. But something quite different from what this so-called ingenious explanation wants is expressed in the words: No mortal has yet lifted my veil. What is meant is that one must approach this wisdom as one would those women who had taken the veil, whose virginity had to remain intact: with reverence, with an attitude that excludes all selfish urges. That is what is meant. She is like a veiled nun, this wisdom of earlier times. The attitude is indicated by speaking of this veil.

And so it was important that in the times when ancient wisdom was alive, people approached this wisdom in the appropriate way, or were not allowed at all if they did not approach it in the appropriate way. But in more recent times, man had to be left to his own devices. He could not have the wisdom of ancient times, the forms of wisdom of ancient times. Knowledge of certain natural forces was lost, those natural forces that cannot be recognized without simultaneously experiencing them inwardly, without simultaneously experiencing them inwardly. And in the age in which, as I explained to you eight days ago, materialism reached a certain peak, in the 19th century, at the beginning of the 19th century, a natural force arose that is characterized in its special nature by the fact that everyone today says: We have the natural force, but one cannot understand it; for science it is hidden. You know how the natural force of electricity in particular came into human use; and electrical power is such a force that man cannot experience it internally through his normal powers, it remains external to him. And more than one might think has come into being in the nineteenth century through electricity. It would be easy to show how much, how infinitely much, depends on electrical power in our present culture, and how much more will depend in the future when electrical power is used in the modern way, without going into the inner being. Much more! But it is precisely electricity that has been put in the place of the old, familiar power in the development of human culture, and through which man is to mature in a moral sense. Today, he does not think of any morality when using it. Wisdom is in the continuous historical development of humanity. Man will mature by developing still deeper damage for a while — and damage, as our days show, is sufficiently available — in his lower ego-bearer, in wild egoism; if man still had the old powers, that would be completely out of the question. It is precisely the electrical power as a cultural force that makes this possible; steam power in a certain way too, but it is even less the case there.

Now the situation is such that, as I explained to you earlier, the first fifth of our cultural period, which will last into the 4th millennium, is over. Materialism has reached a certain peak. The social forms in which we live, which have led to such sad events in our years, are really such that they will no longer sustain humanity for fifty years without a fundamental change in human souls. For those who have a spiritual understanding of world development, the electrical age is at the same time an invitation to seek a spiritual deepening, a real spiritual deepening. For the spiritual power must be added to that power, which remains unknown on the outside for sensory observation, in the souls, which rests so hidden in the deepest interior, like the electrical forces, which must also first be awakened. Imagine how mysterious the electrical power is; it was only brought out of its secret hiding places by Galvani, Volta. Something similar is true of the hidden forces that lie in human souls and are the subject of spiritual science. The two must come together, like north and south poles. And just as the discovery of electricity as a hidden force in nature was inevitable, so the power that spiritual science seeks as the hidden force in the soul will inevitably be discovered. Although many people today what spiritual science wants, now, as roughly one would have confessed at the time when Galvani was preparing the frogs and noticed from the twitching of the leg that a force was at work in this twitching frog's leg. Did science know then that this frog's leg contained everything there is to be known about electricity, including static electricity? Imagine the time when Galvani was in his simple experimental house, hanging his frog's leg outside the window hook and it began to twitch, and he observed this for the first time! It is not a question of electricity, is it, which is excited, but of contact electricity. When Galvani first realized this, could he assume: With the power with which the frog's leg is attracted, one day trains will be driven over the earth, with that power one day one will be able to send thoughts around the globe? It is not so very long ago that Galvani observed this force in his frog legs. Anyone who had already said at that time what would flow from this knowledge would certainly have been considered a fool. So it also happened that today someone who has to present the first beginnings of a spiritual science is considered a fool. A time will come when that which proceeds from spiritual science will be just as significant for the world, but now the moral, spiritual and soul world, as that which proceeded from the Galvani frog's leg was for the material world, for material culture. This is how progress is made in human development. Only if we pay attention to such things do we also develop the will to go along with what can only be in its beginnings. If the other power, the electrical power, which has been drawn from its hiddenness, is only of importance for the outer material culture and only indirectly for the moral world, then that which comes from spiritual science will have the greatest social significance. For the social orders of the future will be regulated by what spiritual science can give to people, and everything that will be external material culture will also be indirectly stimulated by this spiritual science. Today, at the end, I can only point this out.

Tomorrow we will expand the image of Faust, who, as I have already mentioned, is still half in the old and half in the new era, to create a kind of worldview image.