The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Christmas festival can be the occasion for comparing the Mystery upon which it is based with Mysteries that were the outcome of different conditions in the evolution of humanity. The Christmas Mystery—when it is conceived as a Mystery—belongs paramountly to Winter. It arose from conceptions of the spiritual world that had primarily to do with the link established between man and the scene of his life on Earth at the beginning of Winter.

When we turn our attention to Mysteries that were celebrated in certain parts of Asia long before the founding of Christianity and in which many sublime cosmic thoughts were given expression, or when we compare the Christmas festival with Mysteries that were celebrated also in pre-Christian times, in Middle, Northern and Western Europe, we are struck by the fact that they were preeminently Summer Mysteries, connected with the union between man and all that takes place in earthly life during the time of Summer. To understand the essential meaning of these Mysteries we must think, first of all, of that part of the evolution of humanity which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha.

Looking back into very ancient times we find that the Mysteries were institutions of men still possessed of the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. In certain states of consciousness between those of full sleep and waking, in states where dreams were expressions of reality, the men belonging to that ancient humanity were still able to gaze into the spiritual worlds whence the human being descends into his physical body on the Earth. Every human being in those times could speak and think about the spiritual worlds, just as a man today can speak about the ordinary knowledge he has learnt at school. I have, as you know, often said that what the men of those olden times beheld of the spiritual-supersensible world presented itself to them in pictures—not the pictures of dreams but somewhat resembling them. Whereas we know quite well that the pictures in our dreams are woven from our reminiscences, that they rise up from the organism and, unlike our thoughts, do not mirror reality, through the very nature of the Imaginations of the old clairvoyance men knew that they were the expressions—not, it is true, of any external, material reality nor of any historical reality, but of a spiritual world lying hidden behind the physical world. Thus the spiritual world was revealed to men in pictures.

But it must not be imagined that those men of an earlier epoch had no thoughts. They had thoughts, but they did not acquire them as man acquires his thoughts today. If a man of the modern age is to have thoughts, he must exert himself inwardly; he must elaborate his thoughts by dint of inner effort. A similar kind of activity was, it is true, exercised by the men of old in connection with the pictures which mirrored for them a spiritual form of existence; but the thoughts came with the pictures. One may well be amazed at the power and brilliance of the thoughts of that old humanity; but the thoughts were not formulated by dint of effort; they were received as revelations.

Now just as we today have schools and colleges, so in those times there were Mysteries—institutions in which science, art and religion were undivided. No distinction was made between belief and knowledge. Knowledge came in the form of pictures; but belief was based securely on knowledge. Nor was any distinction made between what men fashioned out of various materials into works of art, and what they acquired as wisdom. Today the distinction is made by saying: What man acquires in the form of wisdom must be true; but what he embodies in his materials as a painter, sculptor or musician—that is fantasy!

Goethe was really the last survivor of those who did not hold this view. He regarded as truth both what he embodied in his materials as an artist and what he took to be science. The philistinism expressed in the distinction between the artistic and the scientific did not, in fact, appear until comparatively late, indeed after Goethe's time. Goethe was still able, when he saw the works of art in Italy, to utter the beautiful words: “I have the idea that in the creation of their works of art the Greeks proceeded by the same laws by which Nature herself creates and of which I am on the track.” In Weimar, before going to Italy, he and Herder had studied the philosophy of Spinoza together. Goethe had striven to deepen his realization that all the beings in man's environment are permeated by the divine-spiritual. He also tried to discover the manifestations of this divine-spiritual in details, for example in the leaf and flower of the plant. And the way in which he built up for himself a picture of the plant form and animal-form in his botanical and zoological studies was identical as an activity of soul with the procedure he adopted in his artistic creations.

Today it is considered unscientific to speak of one and the same truth in art, in science and in religion. But as I have said, in those ancient centres of learning and culture, art, science and religion were one. It was actually the leaders in these Mysteries who began gradually to separate out particular thoughts from those that were revealed to men with their instinctive clairvoyance and to establish a wisdom composed of thoughts. On all sides we see a wisdom composed of thoughts emerging in the Mysteries from clairvoyant vision. Whereas the majority of men were content with pictorial vision, were satisfied to have the revelation of this spiritual vision presented to them in the form of myths, fairy-tales and legends by those who were capable of doing so, the leaders of the Mysteries were working at the development of a wisdom composed of thoughts. But they were fully aware that this wisdom was revealed, not acquired by man's own powers.

We must try to transport ourselves into this quite different attitude of soul. I will put it in the following way.—When the man of today conceives a thought, he ascribes it to his own activity of thinking. He forms chains of thoughts in accordance with rules of logic—which are themselves the product of his own thinking. The man of olden times received the thoughts. He paid no heed at all to how the connections between thoughts should be formulated, for they came to him as revelations. But this meant that he did not live in his thoughts in the way we live in ours. We regard our thoughts as the possession of our soul; we know that we have worked to acquire them. They have, as it were, been born from our own life of soul, they have arisen out of ourselves, and we regard them as our property. The man of olden time could not regard his thoughts in this way. They were illuminations; they had come to him together with the pictures. And this gave rise to a very definite feeling and attitude towards the wisdom-filled thoughts. Man said to himself as he contemplated his thoughts: “A divine Being from a higher world has descended into me. I partake of the thoughts which in reality other Beings are thinking—Beings who are higher than man but who inspire me, who live in me, who give me these thoughts. I can therefore only regard the thoughts as having been vouchsafed to me by Grace from above.” It was because the man of old held this view that he felt the need at certain seasons to make an offering of these thoughts to the higher Beings, as it were through his feelings. And this was done in the Summer Mysteries.

In the Summer the Earth is more given up to its own environment, to the atmosphere surrounding it. It has not contracted because of the cold or enveloped itself in a raiment of snow; it is in perpetual intercourse with its atmospheric environment. Hence man too is given up to the wide cosmic expanse. In the Summer he feels himself united with the Upper Gods. And in those ancient times man waited for the Midsummer season—the time when the Sun is at the zenith of its power—in order at this season and in certain places he regarded as sacred, to establish contact with the Upper Gods. He availed himself of his natural connection in Summer with the whole etheric environment, in order out of his deepest feelings to make a sacrificial offering to the Gods who had revealed their thoughts to him.

The teachers in the Mysteries spoke to their pupils somewhat as follows. They said: “Every year at Midsummer, a solemn offering must be made to the Upper Gods in gratitude for the thoughts they vouchsafe to man. For if this is not done it is all too easy for the Luciferic powers to invade man's thinking and he is then permeated by these powers. He can avoid this if every Summer he is mindful of how the Upper Gods have given him these thoughts and at the Midsummer season lets his thoughts flow back again, as it were, to the Gods.” In this way the men of olden times tried to safeguard themselves from Luciferic influences. The leaders of the Mysteries called together those who were in a sense their pupils and in their presence enacted that solemn rite at the culmination of which the thoughts that had been revealed by the Upper Gods were now offered up to them in upward-streaming feelings.

The external rite consisted in solemn words being spoken into rising smoke which was thus set into waves. This act was merely meant to signify that the offering made by man's inmost soul to the Upper Gods was being inscribed into an outer medium—the rising smoke—through form-creating words. The words of the prayer inscribed into the rising smoke the feelings which the soul desired to send upwards to the Gods as an offering for the thoughts they had revealed.

This was the basic mood of soul underlying the celebration of the Midsummer Mysteries. These Midsummer festivals had meaning only as long as men received their thoughts by way of revelation.

But in the centuries immediately preceding the Mystery of Golgotha—beginning as early as the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.—these thoughts that were revealed from above grew dark, and more and more there awakened in man the faculty to acquire his thoughts through his own efforts. This induced in him an entirely different mood. Whereas formerly he had felt that his thoughts were coming to him as it were from the far spaces of the universe, descending into his inner life, he now began to feel the thoughts as something unfolding within himself, belonging to him like the blood in his veins. In olden times, thoughts had, been regarded more as something belonging to man like the breath—the breath that is received from the surrounding atmosphere and continually given back again. Just as man regards the air as something which surrounds him, which he draws into himself but always gives out again, so did he feel his thoughts as something which he did not draw into himself but which was received by him through revelation and must ever and again be given back to the Gods at the time of Midsummer.

The festivals themselves were given a dramatic form in keeping with this attitude. The leaders of the Mysteries went to the ceremonies bearing the symbols of wisdom; and as they conducted the sacrificial rites they divested themselves of the symbols one by one. Then, when they went away from the ceremonies, having laid aside the symbols of wisdom, they appeared as men who must acquire their wisdom again in the course of the year. It was like a confession on the part of those sages of olden times. When they had made the solemn offering it was as though they declared to the masses of those who were their followers: “We have become nescient again.”

To share in this way in the course taken by the seasons of the year, entering as Midsummer approaches into the possession of wisdom, then passing into a state of nescience (Torheit) before becoming wise again—this was actually felt by men to be a means of escape from the Luciferic powers. They strove to participate in the life of the cosmos. As the cosmos lets Winter alternate with Summer, so did they let the time of wisdom alternate in themselves with the time of entry into the darkness of ignorance.

Now there were some whose wisdom was needed all the year round, and who for this reason could not act or adopt the same procedure as the others. For example, there were teachers in the Mysteries who practised the art of healing—for that too was part of the Mysteries. Naturally it would not do for a doctor to become ignorant in August and September—if I may use the present names of the months—so these men were allowed to retain their wisdom, but in return they made the sacrifice of being only servants in the Mysteries. Those who were the leaders became ignorant for a certain time every year.

Reminiscences of this have remained here and there, for example in the figure described by Goethe in his poem Die Geheimnisse as the ‘Thirteenth,’ the one who was the leader of the others but was himself in a state of dullness rather than wisdom.

All these things are evidence that the attitude towards the guiding wisdom of mankind was entirely different from what it afterwards became when men began to regard their thoughts as produced by themselves. Whereas formerly man felt that wisdom was like the air he breathes, later on he felt that his thoughts were produced within himself, like the blood. We can therefore say: In ancient times man felt his thoughts to be like the air of the breath and in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha he began to feel that they were like the blood within him.

But then man also said to himself: “What I experience as thought is now no longer heavenly, it is no longer something that has descended from above. It is something that arises in the human being himself, something that is earthly.”—This feeling that the thoughts of men are earthly in origin was still significantly present at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha among those who were the late successors of the leaders of the ancient Mysteries. Those who stood at that time at the height of cultural life said to themselves: Man can no longer have such thoughts as had the sages of old, who with their thoughts lived together with the Gods; he must now develop purely human thoughts. But these purely human thoughts are in danger of falling prey to the Ahrimanic powers. The thoughts that were revealed to man from above were in danger of succumbing to the Luciferic powers; the human thoughts, the self-produced thoughts, are in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic powers.

Those who were capable of thinking in this way in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha—by the 4th century, however, the insight was lost—such men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as the true redemption of mankind. They said to themselves: The spiritual Power indwelling the Sun could hitherto be attained only by superhuman forces. This Power must now be attained by human faculties, for man's thoughts are now within his own being. Hence he must inwardly raise these thoughts of his to the Divine. Now that he is an earthly thinker, he must permeate his thoughts inwardly with the Divine, and this he can do through uniting himself in thought and feeling with the Mystery of Golgotha.

This meant that the festival once celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer became a Winter festival. In Winter, when the earth envelops herself in her raiment of snow and is no longer in living interchange with the atmosphere around her, man too is fettered more strongly to the earth; he does not share in the life of the wide universe but enters into the life that is rooted beneath the soil of the earth.—But the meaning of this must be understood.

We can continually be made aware of how in the earth's environment there is not only that which comes directly from the Sun but also that which partakes in the life of the earth beneath the surface of the soil. I have spoken of this before by referring to some very simple facts.—Those of you who have lived in the country will know how the peasants dig pits in the earth during Winter and put their potatoes in them. Down there in the earth the potatoes last splendidly through the Winter, which would not be the case if they were simply put in cellars. Why is this?—Think of an area of the earth's surface. It absorbs the light and warmth of the Sun that have streamed to it during the Summer. The light and the warmth sink down, as it were, into the soil of the earth, so that in Winter the Summer is still there, under the soil. During Winter it is Summer underneath the surface of the earth. And it is this Summer under the surface of the earth in Winter time that enables the roots of the plants to thrive. The seeds become roots and growth begins. So when we see a plant growing this year it is actually being enabled to grow by the forces of last year's Sun which had penetrated into the earth.

When therefore we are looking at the root of a plant, or even at parts of the leaves, we have before us what is the previous Summer in the plant. It is only in the blossom that we have this year's Summer, for the blossom is conjured forth by the light and warmth of the present year's Sun. In the sprouting and unfolding of the plant we still have the previous year and the present year comes to manifestation only in the blossom. Even the ovary at the centre of the blossom is a product of the Winter—in reality, that is, of the previous Summer. Only what surrounds the ovary belongs to the present year. Thus do the seasons interpenetrate. When the earth dons her Winter raiment of snow, beneath that raiment is the continuation of Summer. Man does not now unite himself with the wide expanse but turns his life of soul inwards, into the interior of the earth. He turns to the Lower Gods.

This was the conception held by men who were in possession of the heritage of the ancient wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was this that made them realize: It is in what is united with the earth that we must seek the power of the Christ, the power of the new wisdom which permeates the future evolution of the earth. Having passed to the stage of self-produced thoughts, man felt the need to unite these thoughts inwardly with the Divine, to permeate them inwardly with the Divine, in other words, with the Christ Impulse. This he can do at the time when he is most closely bound to the earth—in deep Winter; he can do it when the earth shuts herself off from the cosmos. For then he too is shut off from the cosmos and comes nearest to the God who descended from those far spaces and united Himself with the earth.

It is a beautiful thought to connect the Christmas festival with the time when the earth is shut off from the cosmos, when in the loneliness of earth man seeks to establish for his self-produced thoughts communion with divine-spiritual-supersensible reality, and when, understanding what this means, he endeavors to protect himself from the Ahrimanic powers, as in ancient times he protected himself from the Luciferic powers through the rites of the Midsummer Mysteries.

And as under the guidance of the teachers in the Mysteries the man of olden time became aware through the Midsummer festival that his thoughts were fading into a state of twilight, the man of today who rightly understands the Christmas Mystery should feel strengthened when at Christmas he steeps himself in truths such as have now once more been expressed. He should feel how through developing a true relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, the thoughts he acquires in the darkness of his inner life can be illumined. For it is indeed so when he realizes that once in the course of the earth's evolution the Being who in pre-Christian ages could only be thought of as united with the Sun, passed into earthly evolution and together with mankind indwells the earth as a Spiritual Being. In contrast to the old Midsummer festivals where the aim was that a man should pass out of himself into the cosmos, the Christmas festival should be the occasion when man tries to deepen inwardly, to spiritualize, whatever knowledge he acquires about the great world.

The man of old did not feel that knowledge was his own possession but that it was a gift bestowed upon him, and every year he gave it back again. The man of today necessarily regards his world of thought, his intellectual knowledge, as his own possession. Therefore he must receive into his heart the Spirit Being who has united with the Earth; he must link his thoughts with this Being in order that instead of remaining with his thoughts in egotistic seclusion, he shall unite these thoughts of his with that Being of Sun and Earth who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

In a certain respect the ancient Mysteries had what might be called an ‘aristocratic’ character. Indeed the principle of aristocracy really had its origin in those old Mysteries, for it was the priests who enacted the sacrifice on behalf of all the others.

The Christmas festival has a ‘democratic’ character. What modern men acquire as that which really makes them man, is their inner store of thoughts. And the Christmas Mystery is only truly celebrated when the one does not make the sacrificial offering for another, but when the one shares with the other a common experience: equality in face of the Sun Being who came down to the Earth. And in the early period of Christian evolution—until about the 4th century—it was this that was felt to be a particularly significant principle of Christianity. It was not until then that the old forms of the Egyptian Mysteries were resuscitated and made their way via Rome to Western Europe, overlaying the original Christianity and shrouding it in traditions which will have to be superseded if Christianity is to be rightly understood. For the character with which Christianity was invested by Rome was essentially that of the old Mysteries. In accordance with true Christianity, this finding of the spiritual-supersensible reality in man must take place at a time not when he passes out of himself and is given up to the Cosmos, but when he is firmly within himself. And this is most of all the case when he is united with the Earth at the time when the Earth herself is shut off from the cosmic expanse—that is to say, in Midwinter.

I have thus tried to show how it came about that in the course of the ages the Midsummer festivals in the Mysteries changed into the Midwinter Christmas Mystery. But this must be understood in the right sense. By looking back over the evolution of humanity we can deepen our understanding of what is presented to us in the Christmas Mystery. By contrasting it with olden times we can feel the importance of the fact that man has now to look within himself for the secrets he once sought to find outside his own being.

It is from this point of view that my Occult Science is written. If such a book had been written in ancient times (then, of course, it would not have been a book but something different!) the starting-point of the descriptions would have been the starry heavens. But in the book as it is, the starting-point is man: contemplation, first of the inner aspect of man's being and proceeding from there to the universe. The inner core of man's being is traced through the epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and extended to the future epochs of the Earth's evolution.

In seeking for knowledge of the world in ancient times, men started by contemplating the stars; then they endeavored to apply to the inner constitution of the human being what they learned from the stars. For example, they contemplated the Sun which revealed a very great deal to the Imaginative cognition of those days. To the orthodox modern scientist, the Sun is a ball of gas—which of course it cannot be for unbiased thought. When the man of ancient time contemplated the Sun externally, it was to him the bodily expression of soul-and-spirit, just as the human body is an expression of soul-and-spirit. Very much was learnt from the Sun. And when man had read in the Cosmos what the Sun had revealed to him, he could point to his own heart, and say: Now I understand the nature of the human heart, for the Sun has revealed it to me!—And similarly in the other heavenly bodies and constellations, man discovered the secrets of his organism.

It was not possible to proceed in this way in the book Occult Science. Although it is too soon yet for all the relevant details to have been worked out, the procedure is that we think, first, of the human being as a whole, with heart, lungs, and so on, and in understanding the organs individually we come to understand the universe. We study the human heart, for example, and what we read there tells us what the Sun is, tells us something about the nature of the Sun. Thus through the heart we learn to know the nature of the Sun; that is to say, we proceed from within outwards. In ancient times it was the other way about: first of all, men learnt to know the nature of the Sun and then they understood the nature of the human heart. In the modern age we learn what the heart is, what the lung is ... and so, starting from man, we learn to know the universe.

The ancients could only give expression to their awareness of this relation of man to the universe by looking upwards to the Sun and the starry heavens at the time of Midsummer, when conditions were the most favorable for feeling their union with the Cosmos. But if we today would realize with inner intensity how we can come to know the universe, we must gaze into the depths of man's inner being. And the right time for this is in Midwinter, at Christmas.

Try to grasp the full meaning of this Christmas thought, my dear friends, for there is a real need today to give life again to old habits such as these. We need, for example, to be sincere again in our experience of the course of the year. All that numbers of people know today about Christmas is that it is a time for giving presents, also—perhaps, a time when in a very external way, thought is turned to the Mystery of Golgotha!

It is superficialities such as these that are really to blame for the great calamity into which human civilization has drifted today. It is there that much of the real blame must be placed; it lies in the clinging to habits, and in the unwillingness to realize the necessity of renewal—the need, for example, to imbue the true Christmas thought, the true Christmas feeling, with new life.

This impulse of renewal is needed because we can only become Man again in the true sense by finding the spiritual part of our being. It is a ‘World-Christmas’ that we need, a birth of spiritual life. Then we shall once again celebrate Christmas as honest human beings; again there will be meaning in the fact that at the time when the Earth is shrouded in her raiment of snow, we try to feel that our world of thought is permeated with the Christ Impulse—the world of thought which today is like the blood within us, in contrast to the old world of thought which was like the breath.

We must learn to live more intensely with the course of the seasons than is the custom today. About 20 years ago the idea occurred that it would be advantageous to have a fixed Easter—a festival which is still regulated by the actual course of time. The idea was that Easter should be fixed permanently at the beginning of April, so that account books might not always be thrown into confusion owing to the dates of the festival varying each year. Even man's experience of the flow of time was to be drawn into the materialistic trend of evolution. In view of other things that have happened as well, it would not be surprising if materialistic thought were ultimately to accept this arrangement. For example, men begin the year with the present New Year's Day, the 1st of January, in spite of the fact that December (decern) is the tenth month, and January and February quite obviously belong to the previous year; so that in reality the new year can begin in March at the earliest—as indeed was actually the case in Roman times. But it once pleased a French King (whom even history acknowledges to have been an imbecile) to begin the year in the middle of the Winter, on the 1st of January, and humanity has followed suit.

Strong and resolute thoughts are needed to admit honestly to ourselves that the saving of human evolution depends upon man allying himself with wisdom. Many things indicate that he has by no means always done so but has very often allied himself with ignorance, with nescience. The Christmas thought must be taken sincerely and honestly, in connection with the Being who said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But the way to the Truth and to the Life in the Spirit has to be deliberately sought, and for this it is necessary for modern humanity to plunge down into the dark depths of midnight in order to find the light that kindles itself in man.

The old tradition of the first Christmas Mass being read at midnight is not enough. Man must again realize in actual experience that what is best and most filled with light in his nature is born out of the darkness prevailing in himself. The true light is born out of the darkness. And from this darkness light must be born—not further darkness.

Try to permeate the Christmas thought with the strength that will come to your souls when you feel with all intensity that the light of spiritual insight and spiritual vision must pierce the darkness of knowledge of another kind. Then in the Holy Night, Christ will be born in the heart of each one of you, and you will experience together with all mankind, a World-Christmas.

If we would deepen our thoughts at this time in a manner suitable for the present age, this will best be done in the way indicated yesterday, namely, by looking back over the process of human evolution in order to recognize from the spiritual guidance vouchsafed to mankind hitherto, what tasks devolve upon men today. It must not, of course, be forgotten that the point of salient importance in the Christmas thought is that in the night just beginning the Light of Christ shone into the evolution of humanity at the point of time when through this Event, through this integration, as it were, of the Mystery of Golgotha into earthly life, meaning was given to man's life on Earth, and therewith to the Earth herself.

Yesterday I spoke to you of how in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha an important rôle was played by the festivals that were celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer, when man, together with the Earth, opens his being to the Cosmos and when his soul can enter into union with Powers belonging to realms beyond the Earth. We heard how among certain peoples the leaders of the Mysteries, following the path along which, at Midsummer, at our St. John's tide, the human soul can be led into the divine-spiritual worlds, offered up their thoughts and feelings to the divine-spiritual Powers. They did this because they realized that whatever revealed itself to them in the course of the year was exposed to the temptations of the Luciferic powers unless at Midsummer, when the Earth spreads wide her wings into the cosmic expanse, these thoughts were felt to be Grace bestowed by the divine-spiritual Beings.

I went on to show how the evolutionary process brought it about that for a certain section of mankind, the Midwinter festival quite naturally replaced the Midsummer festival. Even in our present vapid Christmas thoughts something is still left of this Midwinter festival. The birth of the Saviour in the Midwinter night is either celebrated in religious communities, or, because a man feels that he must again find the way to the light of the Spirit, he celebrates Christmas in the stillness of his own heart, conscious that at this time of the year he is closest to the Earth and her life when he is alone with himself. For the Earth too, at this time, is shut off from the Cosmos; enveloped in her raiment of snow she lives in cosmic space as a being indrawn and isolated.

Christmas thoughts played a part even in the times when among certain peoples the Midsummer festival was still of paramount importance, but in the pre-Christian era the meaning of the Christmas thought was not the same as it is today. At that time the sublime Sun Spirit still belonged to the Cosmos, had not yet come down to the Earth. The whole condition of the human soul at Midwinter, when together with the Earth man felt himself to be in a kind of cosmic isolation, was different from what it is today. And we learn to know what this condition was if we turn our attention to certain Mysteries that were celebrated mainly in the South in times long, long before the Mystery of Golgotha. Initiation in those Mysteries was conferred upon candidates in the old way, the Initiation-Science of that day was imparted to them. And among certain ancient peoples this Initiation-Science consisted in the candidate learning to read the Book of the World—I do not mean anything that is conveyed by dead letters written on paper, but what the Beings of the universe themselves communicate. Those who have insight into the secrets of the Cosmos know that everything growing and thriving on the Earth is an image of what shines down from the stars out of the cosmic expanse.

A man who learnt this cosmic reading as we today learn the far simpler kind of reading by means of dead letters, knew that he must see in every plant a sign revealing to him something of the secrets of the Universe, and that when he let his gaze survey the world of plants or animals, this survey was itself a form of reading. And it was in such a way that the Initiates of certain ancient Mysteries taught their pupils. They did not read to them out of a book but communicated to them what they experienced under the inspiration of the so-called Year-God concerning the secrets of the course of the year and their significance for human life.

It was in this way that an ancient wisdom related world-beings and world-happenings to what concerned the life of man. When the sages of old communicated such things to their pupils, they were inspired by divine-spiritual Beings such as the Year-God.

Who was this Year-God who belonged to the rank of the Primal Powers, or Archai, in the Hierarchies? Who was this Year-God? He was a Being to whom certain of those who were versed in Initiation-Science lifted their hearts and in so doing were endowed by him with the power and inner light enabling them to read one thing from the budding plants in Spring, another from the ripening of the early fruits in Summer, another when the leaves redden in Autumn and the fruits ripen, and yet another when the trees glitter under the snowflakes and the Earth with her rocks is covered with a veil of snow. This ‘reading’ lasted for a whole year—through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; and in this reading the secrets of Man himself were unveiled in the intercourse between teachers and pupils. And then the cycle of the year began anew.

Some idea of what these ancient Initiates taught to their pupils under the inspiration of the Year-God may be conveyed in the following way. The attention of the pupils was drawn, first of all, to what is revealed in Spring, when the snow is over and the Sun is gaining strength, when the first buds of the plants are appearing and the forces of the Earth are being renewed. The pupils were made aware of how a plant growing in the meadows and a plant growing in the shade of the trees in a forest, speak differently of the secrets of the universe. They were made aware of how in the various plants the warmth and light of the Sun speak differently from the cosmic expanse in the round or serrated leaves.

And what could be revealed in this way under the influence and inspiration of the Year-God through the the letters budding forth from the Earth herself, unveiled to the pupils of the teachers in the Mysteries, in the manner of that time, secrets of the physical body of man.

The teachers pointed to the physical productiveness of the Earth, to the force of the Earth shooting into the plant. At every single place on the Earth to which the pupil's attention was directed, there was a different ‘letter.’ These letters—which were living plant-beings, or living animal forms—were then combined as we today combine single letters into words. In sharing thus in the life of Spring, man was reading in Nature. The Initiations bestowed by the Year-God consisted in this reading. And when Spring came to an end, at about the time of the month of May, man had the impression: Now I understand how out of the womb of the universe the human physical body takes shape and is formed.

Then came the Summer. The same letters and words of the great cosmic Logos were used, but it was pointed out to the pupils how under the Sun's rays which stream differently now, under its light and warmth which now work in a different way, the letters change their forms, how the first buds, which had spoken of the secrets of the human physical body, open themselves to the Sun in the blossoms. These many-colored blossoms were now letters used by the pupil; each blossom made him feel how the Sun's ray lovingly kisses the plant-forces springing up from the Earth. And in the wonderfully delicate and tender process of the cosmic forces weaving over the Earth-forces in the blossoming plants, he read the words which conveyed to him how the Earth strives outwards into the cosmic expanse. Man lived in union with the Earth as she opened herself to the Cosmos, to the distant stars, lived with the Earth herself in the infinitudes.

What lay hidden in these infinitudes revealed itself to man as he gazed at the letters which were the blossoming plants. He read out of these letters what the conditions of life had been for the human being who has descended from the spiritual worlds to physical existence on the Earth; how he had gathered together etheric substance from every quarter of the heavens to form his own etheric body. Man was thus able to read the secrets enshrined in this etheric body from everything that was now coming to pass again between the Earth and the Cosmos. The signs of the Cosmic Word are inscribed upon the very surface of the Earth when the plants blossom and particular forms of life become manifest in the animal world at the time of Midsummer.

When Autumn approached, men saw how the letters of the Cosmic Word were again changing. At this time the warmth and light of the Sun are withdrawing and the plants are obliged to have recourse to what the Sun itself has conveyed to the Earth during Summer; in return, the Earth breathes out the blossoming life she has received during Summer but at the same time develops within herself the ripening fruit which brings the cycle of plant-life to completion, inasmuch as the plant bears within it the seed, the forces of germination. Again man was able to unveil what the Cosmic Word inscribes on the surface of the Earth herself in the ripening plants; again he was able to unriddle what the forms taken by animal life in the Autumn can reveal. He read very deep secrets of the universe in the flight of birds, in all the changes that take place in the lower animals and in the insect world as Autumn approaches. The way in which the insect world becomes silent and seeks refuge in the Earth, the changes of form it undergoes—all this conveyed to him that in Autumn the Earth is in process of withdrawing into herself, communing with herself.

This was brought to expression in certain festivals that were celebrated in the latter half of September and have still left traces in country districts in the form of the Michaelmas festival. Through these festivals man reminded himself that when all the paths in the Earth which led out into the Cosmos have failed, he must unite himself with something that is not bound up with the happenings of the physical and etheric worlds, he must turn his soul to the spiritual content of the Cosmos. And even in the kind of festival that is now celebrated at Michaelmas, there is still a reminiscence of humanity turning to that Spirit of the Hierarchies who will lead men in a spiritual way when external guidance through the Stars and through the Sun has lost its power.

Through everything that man read in this way in the Autumn—a reading that was also contemplation—he steeped himself in the secrets of the human astral body. Autumn was the season when those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God read with him the secrets of the human astral body and contemplated them under his inspiration. It was at this Autumn season that the Initiates said to their pupils: “Hold fast to the Being who stands before the Face of the Sun! (The name Micha-el is still reminiscent of this.) Think of this Being, for you will need the power when you have passed through the gate of death into the supersensible worlds, when you have to go through again whatever has remained in your astral being from Earth-existence.” Secrets of the human astral body were thus drawn from what revealed itself not only in the ripening, but also in the withering plants, and in the insects creeping away into the Earth. Man already knew that if they wished to make the astral body worthy of true manhood, their gaze must be turned to the spiritual worlds. It was for this reason that the souls of those who were candidates for Initiation were directed to the Being whom we can commemorate under the name of Micha-el.

But then came the season at the middle of which is our present Christmas. This was the time when those who were inspired and initiated by the Year-God pointed out to their pupils the mysteries that are revealed when water covers the Earth in the beautiful forms of snowflakes. The reading which in Autumn had already become reflection and contemplation, now became inner, active life; what in earlier seasons of the year had been observation, running parallel with the outer physical world, now became inner spiritual effort and activity. Life was deepened inwardly. Man knew that he can only comprehend the deepest essence of his Ego when he listens to the secrets projected by the Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Logos, into everything that takes place in Nature at the time when the Earth is swathed in her mantle of snow and when life around and on the Earth is contracted by cold. It was incumbent upon those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God to learn to understand his writing from the indications that were given in the season of Winter. Their observation was sharpened so that it could follow the processes at work in the seeds which had been laid into the Earth, and how the insects hibernate within the closely contracting forces of the Earth. Man's gaze was led from physical light into physical darkness.

There were certain Mysteries where the pupils were told: “Now you must gaze at the Midnight Sun! You must behold the Sun through the Earth. If the eyes of your soul are filled with the power which can follow the plants and the lower animals into the Earth, then the Earth herself will become transparent to your inmost soul.” It is at the time when the Earth's forces are most contracted that man can eventually see through the Earth and behold the Sun as the Midnight Sun, for the Earth is now inwardly spiritualized; whereas at Midsummer, he beholds the Sun with his physical senses when he turns his gaze from the Earth to the Cosmos. To behold the Sun at the Midnight Hour in a deep Winter night was something which the pupils of the Initiates of the Year-God must learn. And it was their duty to communicate the secrets revealed to them by the Midnight Sun to those who were faithful followers of the Mysteries but could not themselves become Initiates or actual pupils of the Mysteries.

And more and more it came about in those ancient times that when the Initiates pointed to the Sun at the Midnight Hour in the depth of Winter, they were obliged to make known to their pupils that man on Earth feels his Ego deserted and forsaken in a certain way. The festival of Midwinter became for those possessed of the greatest knowledge more and more a festival of sadness and mourning through which it was to be brought home to man that within earthly existence he cannot find the way to his Ego, that he must learn from what is to be read in the signs written by the Logos on the Earth in Midwinter, how he with his Ego had been forsaken by the Cosmos. For it was the Earth alone of which he was aware at this time, and that for which the Ego yearns—the power of the Sun—was covered by the Earth. The Sun did indeed appear at the Midnight Hour, but man felt that the strength which would enable him to reach the Sun-Being was continually waning. At the same time, the very fact that man was made aware in this way of the loneliness of the human Ego in the Cosmos, was the prophetic indication that the Sun Being would come to the Earth, would in the course of evolution permeate the being of man, would appear in order to heal a humanity ailing on account of its loneliness in the Cosmos.

Thus even in those ancient times, intimation was given of what was to come in the evolution of man, whereby the Winter festival of sorrow and mourning would be changed—especially among the people of the South—to a festival of inner joy through the appearance of Christ upon Earth. And when this revelation descended from the Cosmos into earthly existence, those who announced the Event declared how to all men on Earth the message had gone forth that the ancient festival of mourning was now transformed into a festival of rejoicing. In the inmost depths of the Shepherds' hearts, where their dreams were woven, the words resounded: “The Godhead is revealing Himself in the Heights of the Cosmos, and peace will spring forth on Earth in men who are of good will.” Such was the proclamation in the hearts of simple Shepherds.

And at the other pole, to those who were the most deeply imbued with magical knowledge, there could come from the surviving relics of ancient Star Wisdom, the message of the entry of the Cosmic Spirit into earthly matter.

Today, when we speak of the Christmas Mystery, we must think of all that is experienced through it against the background of the ancient festival of mourning; we must think of how there has entered into the course of human evolution the power by which man can wrest himself free from everything that fetters him to the Earth. We must be able to formulate the Christmas thought in such a way that we say to ourselves: The inspirations of the Year-God which revealed to the old Initiates how in the depths of Winter the Earth withdraws from the Universe and enters into a time of self-contemplation—those inspirations are still true; man can still understand how the secret of the human Ego is connected with this secret of the year. But out of his human insight, out of his discerning feeling, out of the wisdom of his heart, he can surround himself with pictures of Christ Jesus entering into the life of men on Earth, can learn to experience in all its depths the thought of the Holy Night.

But he will only be able to experience it truly if he also has the will to follow the Christ as He reveals Himself through all the ages. The task of the Initiates of the ancient Initiation-Science was to unveil the mysteries of human nature through a profound understanding of the course of the year. We too must understand what the year reveals but we must also be able to penetrate into the inner nature of Man. And when we do this, anthroposophical Spiritual Science shows us how the letters which are written in heart and lungs, in the brain and in every part of the human organism, unveil the secrets of the Cosmos, just as those secrets were unveiled to men inspired by the Year-God in the letters of the Logos which they read in the budding plants, in the animals, and their manner of life on the Earth. We in our time must learn to look into the inner being of Man—which must become for us a script from which we read the course of human evolution, and then devote ourselves to understanding the meaning and purpose of that evolution. Through deepened vision we must unite ourselves with the spiritual forces that weave through the evolution of humanity. And because this evolution is forever advancing, we must experience the Mystery of Golgotha, the Mystery of the Holy Night, anew in every epoch. We must realize the full depth of meaning contained in words spoken by the Spirit who sought out for Himself the body that was born in Bethlehem on Christmas night: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the days of Earth.” We must also have a spiritual ear for the perpetual revelation of the Logos through the being of Man himself. Humanity must learn to listen to the inspirations of this God of mankind, who is Christ Himself, as men learned long ago to listen to the inspirations of the Year-God.

Humanity will then not confine itself to contemplation of what is transmitted in the Bible concerning the spiritual sojourn on Earth of Christ Jesus, but will understand that ever since then, Christ has united Himself with man in earthly life, and that He reveals Himself perpetually to those who are willing to listen. Humanity in our time will then learn to understand that just as the Christmas festival once followed the Michael festival of Autumn, so the Michael-revelation which began at a time in the Autumn in the last third of the 19th century, should be followed by a sacred Christmas festival through which men will come to understand the spirit-birth needed along their path on Earth, in order that the spiritualized Earth may eventually be able to pass into future forms and conditions of existence. We are now living in an age when there should not merely be a yearly Michaelmas festival followed by a yearly Christmas festival, but when we should understand in the depths of our souls, out of our own human nature, the Michael-revelation of the last third of the 19th century, and then seek for the path leading to the true Christmas festival—when with increasing knowledge of the Spirit we shall be permeated by that same spirit.

Then we shall understand the words in the Gospel: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Humanity is so constituted that it is capable of bearing more and more of Christ's teaching. Humanity is not intended only to listen to those who want to hinder progress, who point to what was once written down in barren letters concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and who do not want the power of that Mystery to reveal itself to men as a living reality through the ages. Today is not the time to listen to those who would like to remain at a standstill in the Springtime of the world, which reveals outer physical nature in its brightest glory, but cannot reveal the Spiritual. Today is the time when the path must be found from the Michael festival to the Midwinter festival, when there should come to pass a Sunrise of the Spirit. We shall never find this path if in the evolution of man on the Earth we surrender to the illusion that there is light in external life, in external civilization, in external culture today; we must realize that in those spheres there is darkness. But in this darkness we must seek for the light which it was Christ's will to bring into the world through Jesus.

Let us then follow, with the same devotion with which the Shepherds and the Magi from the East sought the way to the Manger on that Christmas night—with the same devotion let us follow the signs which can be read in the being of man himself, in letters that are still indistinct, but will become clearer and clearer. Then it will be granted to us to celebrate anew the Christ Mystery of the Holy Night ... but only if we have the will to seek in the darkness for the light.

Today we often call by the name of ‘science,’ not that which explains the world but which instead of bringing light, sheds darkness and obscurity. These darknesses must reach out and take hold of the light!

If men do but try with depth and tenderness of feeling and with strongest power of will to find in the darkness the light of the Spirit, then that light will shine as did the Stars of heaven when the birth of Jesus was announced to the Shepherds and the Magi.

We must learn to place the Christmas thought into the historic evolution of humanity. We have not to wait for a new Messiah, for a new Christ. Much has been revealed to humanity through Nature—which in the course of the last few centuries has been leading men deep into the darkness of matter—and we must wait for what can now be revealed to humanity through understanding of the ever-living Christ Jesus.

We must not fasten the Christmas thought in a conventional yearly festival, but make it fluid and radiant, so that it will shine for us as did the Star at Bethlehem.

It was of this Light, this radiant Star, that I wished to speak to you, my dear friends, on this Christmas Eve. I would like to have done something to ensure that with the will that is inspired in you by anthroposophical Spiritual Science, you will unite that other will to follow the Star which in very truth shines forth to man all through the Holy Night. In deep and intimate stillness to permeate oneself with this Light—that is the deepest and truest Christmas consecration for our time. Everything else is in reality no more than an outward sign for this true Christmas feeling which we can carry over from this Christmas evening to Christmas morning tomorrow. Then this Holy Night can be for us not merely a symbol but a symbol that can become a living force. And we shall also be mindful of how deeply we ought to unite with the spiritual striving that in all good men leads on into the future, and at the same time is the true Christmas striving—the striving towards that Spirit who willed to incarnate in the body born in Bethlehem on the historic Christmas Night.

The object of the lectures I gave here immediately before Christmas was to indicate man's connection with the whole Cosmos and especially with the forces of spirit-and-soul pervading the Cosmos. Today I shall again be dealing with the subject-matter of those lectures but in a way that will constitute an entirely independent study.

The life of man, as far as it consists of experiences of outer Nature as well as of the inner life of soul and spirit, lies between two poles; and many of the thoughts which necessarily come to man about his connection with the world are influenced by the realization that these two polar opposites exist.

On the one side, man's life of thinking and feeling is confronted by what is called ‘natural necessity.’ He feels himself dependent upon adamantine laws which he finds everywhere in the world outside him and which also penetrate through him, inasmuch as his physical and also his etheric organisms are part and parcel of this outer world. On the other hand, he is deeply sensible—it is a feeling that is bound to arise in every healthy-minded person—that his dignity as man would not be fully attained if freedom were not an integral element in his life between birth and death. Necessity and freedom are the polar opposites in his life.

You are aware that in the age of natural science—the subject with which I am dealing in another course of lectures¹ here there is a strong tendency to extend the sway of necessity that is everywhere in evidence in external Nature, to whatever originates in the human being himself, and many representative scientists have come to regard freedom as an impossibility, an illusion that exists only in the human soul, because when a man is faced with having to make a decision, reasons for and reasons against it work upon him. These reasons themselves are, however, under the sway of necessity; hence—so say these scientists—it is really not the man who makes the decision but whatever reasons are the more numerous and the weightier. They triumph over the other less numerous and less weighty reasons, which also affect him. Man is therefore carried along helplessly by the victors in the struggle between impulses that work upon him of necessity. Many representatives of this way of thinking have said that a man believes himself to be free only because the polarically opposite reasons for and against any decision he may be called upon to make, present such complications in their totality that he does not notice how he is being tossed hither and thither; one category of reasons finally triumphs; one scale in a delicately poised balance is weighed down and he is carried along in accordance with it.

Against this argument there is not only the ethical consideration that the dignity of man would not be maintained in a world where he was merely a plaything of conflicting yes-and-no impulses, but there is also this fact, that the feeling of freedom in the human will is so strong that an unbiased person has no sort of doubt that if he can be misled as to its existence, he can equally well be misled by the most elementary sense-perceptions. If the elementary experience of freedom in the sphere of feeling could prove to be deceptive, so too could the experience of red, for instance, or of C or C sharp and so on. Many representatives of modern natural scientific thought place such a high value upon theory that they allow the theory of a natural necessity which is absolute, has no exceptions and embraces human actions and human will, to tempt them into disregarding altogether an experience such as the sense of freedom!

But this problem of necessity and freedom, with all the phenomena associated with it in the life of soul—and these phenomena are very varied and numerous—is a problem linked with much more profound aspects of universal existence than are accessible to natural science or to the everyday experience of the human soul. For at a time when man's outlook was quite different from what it is today, this disquieting, perplexing problem was already a concern of his soul.

You will have gathered from the other course of lectures now being given here that the natural scientific thinking of the modern age is by no means so very old. When we go back to earlier times we find views of the world that were as one-sidedly spiritual as they have become one-sidedly naturalistic today. The farther back we go, the less of what is called ‘necessity’ do we find in man's thinking. Even in early Greek thought there was nothing of what we today call necessity, for the Greek idea of necessity had an essentially different meaning. But if we go still farther back we find, instead of necessity, the working of forces, and these, in their whole compass, were ascribed to a divine-spiritual Providence. Expressing myself rather colloquially, I would say that to a modern scientific thinker, the Nature-forces do everything; whereas the thinker of olden times conceived of everything being done by spiritual forces working with purposes and aims as man himself does, only with purposes far more comprehensive than those of man could ever be. Yet even with this view of the world, entirely spiritual as it was, man turned his attention to the way in which his will was subject to divine-spiritual forces; and just as today, when his thinking is in line with natural science he feels himself subject to the forces and laws of Nature, so in those ancient times he felt himself subject to divine-spiritual forces and laws. And for many who in those days were determinists in this sense, human freedom, although it is a direct experience of the soul, was no more valid than it is for our modern naturalists. These modern naturalists believe that necessity works through the actions of men; the men of olden times thought that divine-spiritual forces, in accordance with their purposes, work through human actions.

It is only necessary to recognize that the problem of freedom and necessity exists in these two completely opposite worlds of thought to realize that quite certainly no examination of the surface-aspect of conditions and happenings can lead to any solution of this problem which penetrates so deeply into all life and into all evolution.

We must look more deeply into the process of world-evolution—world-evolution as the course of Nature on the one side and as the unfolding of spirit on the other—before it is possible to grasp the whole meaning and implications of a problem as vital as this; insight can indeed only come from anthroposophical thinking.

The course of Nature is usually studied in an extremely restricted way. Isolated happenings and processes of a highly specialized kind are studied in the laboratories, brought within the range of telescopes or subjected to experiment. This means that observation of the course of Nature and of world-evolution is confined within very narrow limits. And those who study the domain of soul and spirit imitate the scientists and naturalists. They fight shy of taking into account the whole man when they are considering his life of soul. Instead of this they specialize in order to accentuate some particular thought or sentient experience with important bearings, and hope in this way eventually to build up a psychology, just as efforts are made to build up a body of knowledge of the physical world out of single observations and experiments conducted in chemical and physical laboratories, in clinics and so forth.

Yet in reality these studies never lead to any comprehensive understanding either of the physical world or of the world of soul-and-spirit. As little as it is the intention here to disparage the justification of these specialized investigations—for they are justified from points of view often referred to in my lectures—as strongly it must be emphasized that unless the world itself, unless Nature herself reveals to man somewhere or other what results from the interworking of the details, he will never be able to build up from his single observations and experiments a picture of the structure of the world that is confirmed by the actual happenings. Liver cells and minute activities of the liver, brain-cells and minute cerebral processes can be investigated and greater and greater specialization may take place in these domains; but these investigations, because they lead to particularization and not to the whole, will give no help towards forming a view of the human organism in its totality, unless from the very beginning a man has a comprehensive, intuitive idea of this totality to help him in forming the separate investigations into a unified whole. In like manner, as long as chemistry, astro-chemistry, physics, astro-physics, biology, restrict themselves to the investigation of isolated details, they will never be able to give a picture of how the different forces and laws in our world-environment work together to form a whole, unless man develops the faculty of perceiving in Nature outside something similar to what can be seen as the totality of the human organism, in which all the separate processes of liver, kidneys, hearts, brain, and so forth, are included. In other words, we must be able to point to something in the universe in which all the forces we behold in our environment work together to form a self-contained whole.

Now it may be that certain processes in the human liver and human brain will not for a long time to come be detected with enough accuracy to be accepted by biology. But at all events, as long as men have been able to look at other men, they have always said: The processes of liver, stomach, heart, etc. work together within the boundary of the skin to form a whole. Without being obliged to look at each and all of the separate details, we have before us the sum-total of the chemical, physical and biological processes belonging to man's nature.

Is it possible also to have before us as a complete whole the sum-total of the forces and laws of Nature that are at work around us? In a certain way it is possible. But in order not to be misunderstood I must emphasize the fact that such totalities are always relative. For instance, we can group together the processes of the outer ear and then have a relative whole. But we can also group together the processes in that part of the organ of hearing which continues on to the brain and then we have another relative whole; taking the two groups together, we have another, greater whole, which in turn belongs to the head, and this again to the whole organism. And it will be just the same when we try to comprehend in one complete picture the laws and forces that come primarily into consideration for man.

A first complete whole of this kind is the cycle of day and night. Paradoxical as this seems at first hearing, in this cycle of day and night a number of natural laws around us are gathered together into one whole. During the course of a day and night, processes are going on in our environment and penetrating through us which, if separated out, prove to be physical and chemical processes of every possible different kind. We can say: The cycle of the day is a time-organism, a time-organism embracing a number of natural processes which can be studied individually.

A greater ‘totality’ is the course of the year. If we review all the changes which affect the earth and mankind during the course of the year in the sphere surrounding us—in the atmosphere, for example—we shall find that all the processes taking place in the plants and also in the minerals from one Spring to the next, form in their time-sequence an organic whole, although otherwise they reveal themselves to us and also to different scientific investigations as separate phenomena. They form a whole, just as the processes taking place in the liver, kidneys, spleen and so forth form a whole in the human organism. The course of the year is actually an organic whole—the expression is not quite exact but words of some kind have to be used—the year is an organic sum-total of occurrences and facts which it is customary in natural science to investigate singly.

Speaking in what sounds a rather trivial way, but you will realize that the meaning is very profound, we might say: if man is to avoid having to surrounding Nature the very abstract relationship he adopts to descriptions of chemical and physical experiments, or to what is often taught today in botany and zoology, the time-organisms of the course of the day and the course of the year must become realities for him—realities of cosmic existence. He will then find in them a certain kinship with his own constitution.

Let us begin by thinking of the cycle of the year. Reviewing it as we did in the lecture before Christmas, we find a whole series of processes in the sprouting, growing plants which first produce leaves and, later on, blossoms. An incalculable number of natural processes reveal themselves from the life in the root, on into the life in the green leaves and in the colored petals. And we have an altogether different kind of process before us when we see, in Autumn, the fading, withering and dying of outer Nature.

The cosmic happenings around us form an organic unity. In Summer we see how the Earth opens out all her organs to the Cosmos and how her life and activities rise towards the cosmic expanse. This applies not only to the plant world but to the animal world too in a certain sense—especially to the lower animals. Think of all the activity in the insect world during the Summer, how this activity seems to rise up from the Earth and is given over to the Cosmos, especially to the forces coming from the Sun. During Autumn and Winter we see how everything that from the time of Spring onwards reached out towards the cosmic expanse, falls back again into the earthly realm, how the Earth as it were gradually increases her hold upon all growing life, brings it to the stage of apparent death, or at least to a state of sleep—how the Earth closes all her organs against the influences of the Cosmos. Here we have two contrasting processes in the course of the year, embracing countless details but nevertheless representing a complete whole.

If with the eyes of the soul we contemplate this yearly cycle, which can be regarded as a complete whole because from a certain point it simply repeats itself, recurring in approximately the same way, we find in it nothing else than Nature-necessity. And in our own earthly lives we human beings follow this Nature-necessity. If our lives followed it entirely we should be completely under its domination. Now it is certainly true that those forces of Nature which come especially into consideration for us as Earth-dwellers are present in the course of the year; for the Earth does not change so quickly that the minute changes taking place from year to year make themselves noticeable during a man's life, however old he may live to be.—So by living each year through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, we partake with our own bodies in Nature-necessity.

It is important to think in this way, for it is only actual experience that gives knowledge; no theory ever does so. Every theory starts from some special domain and then proceeds to generalize. True knowledge can only be acquired when we start from life and from experience. We must not therefore consider the laws of gravity by themselves, or the laws of plant life, or the laws of animal instinct, or the laws of mental coercion, because if we do, we think only of their details, generalize them, and then arrive at entirely false conclusions. We must have in mind where the Nature-forces are revealed in their cooperation and mutual interaction—and that is in the cyclic course of the year.

Now even supervisial study shows that man is relatively free in his relation to the course of the year, but Anthroposophy shows this even more clearly. In Anthroposophy we turn our attention to the two alternating conditions in which every human being lives during the 24 hours of the day, namely, the sleeping state and the waking state. We know that during the waking state the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego-organism form a relative unity in the human being. In the sleeping state the physical and etheric bodies remain behind in the bed, closely interwoven, and the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

If with the means provided by anthroposophical research—of which you will have read in our literature—we study the physical and etheric bodies of man during sleep and during waking life, the following comes to light. When the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric organism during sleep, a kind of life begins in the latter which is to be found in external Nature in the mineral and plant kingdoms only. And the reason why the physical and etheric organisms of man do not gradually pass over into a sum-total of plant or mineral processes is simply due to the fact that the Ego and astral body are within them for certain periods. If the return of the Ego and astral body were too long delayed, the physical and etheric bodies would pass over into a mineral and vegetative form of life. As it is, a tendency to become vegetative and mineralized commences in man after he falls asleep, and this tendency has the upper hand during sleeping life.

If with the insight afforded by anthroposophical research, we contemplate the human being while he is asleep, we see in him—of course with the inevitable variations—a faithful copy of what the Earth is throughout Spring and Summer. Mineral and vegetative life begins to bud in him, although naturally in quite a different way from what happens in the green plants which grow out of the Earth. Nevertheless, with one variation, what goes on during sleep in the physical and etheric organism of man is a faithful image of the period of Spring and Summer on the Earth. In this respect, the organism of man of the present epoch is in tune with external Nature. His physical eyes can survey it. He beholds its sprouting, budding life. As soon as he attains to Inspiration and Imagination, a picture of Summer is revealed to him when physical man is asleep. In sleep, Spring and Summer are there for the physical and etheric bodies of man. A budding, sprouting life begins. And when we wake, when the Ego and astral body returns, all this budding life in the physical and etheric bodies withdraws and for the eye of seership, life in the physical and etheric organism begins to be very similar to the life of the Earth during Autumn and Winter. When we follow the human being through one complete period of sleeping and waking life, we have before us in miniature an actual microcosmic reflection of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. If we follow man's physical and etheric organism through a period of 24 hours, contemplating it in the light of Spiritual Science, we pass, in the microcosmic sense, through the course of a year. Accordingly, if we consider only that part of man which remains behind in the bed when he is asleep or moves around when he is awake during the day, we can say that the course of the year is completed microcosmically in him.

But now let us consider the other part of man's being which releases itself in sleep—the Ego and astral body. If again we use the kinds of knowledge available in spiritual investigation, namely Inspiration and Intuition, we shall find that the Ego and astral body are given over while man is asleep to spiritual Powers within which they will not, in the normal condition, be able to live consciously until a later epoch of the Earth's existence. From the time of going to sleep until the time of waking, the Ego and astral body are withdrawn from the world just as the Earth is withdrawn from the Cosmos during Winter. During sleep, Ego and astral body are actually in their Winter period. So that in the being of man during sleep there is an intermingling of conditions which are only present at one and the same time on opposite hemispheres of the Earth's surface; for during sleep man's physical and etheric bodies have their Summer and his Ego and astral body their Winter.

During waking life, conditions are reversed. The physical and etheric organism is then in its Winter period. The Ego and astral body are given over to what can stream from the Cosmos to man in his waking state. So when the Ego and astral body come down into the physical and etheric organism, they (i.e. Ego and astral body) have their Summer period. Once more we have the two seasons side by side, but now Winter in the physical and etheric organism, Summer in the Ego and astral body.

On the Earth, Summer and Winter cannot be intermingled. But in man, the microcosm, Summer and Winter intermingle all the time. When man is asleep his physical Summer mingles with spiritual Winter; when he is awake his physical Winter mingles with spiritual Summer. In external Nature, Summer and Winter are separated in the course of the year. In man, Summer and Winter mingle all the time from two different directions. In external Nature on Earth, Winter and Summer follow one another in time. In the human being, Winter and Summer are simultaneous, only they interchange, so that at one time there is Spirit-Summer together with Body-Winter (waking life), and at another, Spirit-Winter together with Body-Summer (sleeping life).

Thus the laws and forces in external Nature around us cannot neutralize each other in any one region of the Earth, because they work in sequence, the one after the other in time; but in man they do neutralize each other. The course of Nature is such that just as through two opposing forces a state of rest can be brought about, so can an untold number of natural laws neutralize and cancel out each other. This happens in the human being with respect to all laws of external Nature, inasmuch as he sleeps and wakes in the regular way. The two conditions which appear as Nature-necessity only when they succeed each other in time, are coincident and consequently neutralized in man—and it is this that makes him a free being.

Freedom can never be understood until it is realized how the Summer and Winter forces of man's spiritual life can neutralize the Summer and Winter forces of his outer physical and etheric nature.

External Nature presents to us pictures which we must not see in ourselves, either in the waking or in the sleeping state. On no account must this happen. On the contrary, we must say that these pictures of the course and order of Nature lose their validity within the constitution of man, and we must turn our gaze elsewhere. For when the course of Nature within the human being no longer disturbs us, it becomes possible for the first time to gaze at man's spiritual, moral and psychic make-up. And then we begin to have an ethical and moral relationship to him, just as we have a corresponding relationship to Nature.

When we contemplate our own being with the aid of knowledge acquired in this way, we find, telescoped into one another, conditions which in the external world are spread across the stream of time. And there are many other things of which the same could be said. If we contemplate our inner being and understand it rightly in the sense I have indicated today, we bring it into a relationship with the course of time different from the one to which we are accustomed today.

The purely external mode of scientific observation does not reach the stage where the investigator can say: In the being of man you must hear sounding together what can only be heard as separate tones in the flow of Time.—But if you develop spiritual hearing, the tones of Summer and Winter can be heard ringing simultaneously in man, and they are the same tones that we hear in the outer world when we enter into the flow of Time itself. Time becomes Space. The whole surrounding universe also resounds to us in Time: expanded widely in Space, there ring forth what resounds from our own being as from a centre, gathered as it were, in a single point.

This is the moment, my dear friends, when scientific study and contemplation becomes artistic study and contemplation: when art and science no longer stand in stark contrast as they do in our naturalistic age, but when they are interrelated in the way sensed by Goethe when he said that art reveal; those secrets of Nature without which we can never fully understand her. From a certain point onwards it is imperative that we should understand the form and structure of the world as artistic creation. And once we have taken the path from the purely scientific conception of the world to artistic understanding, we shall also be ready to take the third step, which leads to a deepening of religious experience.

When we have found the physical forces and the forces of soul-and-spirit working together in the inner centre of our being, we can also behold them in the Cosmos. Human willing rises to the level of artistic creative power and finally achieves a relationship to the world that is not merely passive knowledge but positive, active surrender. Man no longer looks at the world abstractly, with the forces of his head, but his vision becomes more and more an activity of his whole being. Living together with the course of cosmic existence becomes a happening different in character from his connection with the facts and events of everyday life. It becomes a ritual, a cult, and the cosmic ritual comes into being in which man can have his place at every moment of his life. Every earthly cult and ritual is a symbolic image of this cosmic cult and ritual—which is higher and more sublime than all earthly cults.

If what has been said today has been thoroughly grasped, it will be possible to study the relationship of the anthroposophical outlook to any particular religious cult. And this will be done during the next few days, when we shall consider the relationship between Anthroposophy and different forms of cult.

• 1. The Birth of Natural Science in World-History and Its Subsequent Development. Course of 9 lectures given at Dornach from 24th December, 1922 to 6th January, 1923.

I have often said in this place that in more ancient times in the evolution of humanity, science, art, and religion formed a harmonious unity. Anyone who is able in one way or another to gain knowledge of the nature of the ancient Mysteries knows that within these Mysteries, knowledge was sought as a revelation of the Spiritual in picture form, in the way that was possible in those times. That way can no longer be ours, although in this age we must again advance to a knowledge of the spiritual nature of the world. A pictorial knowledge of the Spiritual lay at the foundation of all ancient conceptions of the world. This knowledge came to direct expression, not merely by being communicated in words, but through forms which have gradually become those of our arts—bodily, plastic presentation in the plastic arts and presentation by means of tone and word in the arts of music and speech. But this second stage was followed by the third stage, that of the revelation of the nature of the world in religious cult or ritual, a revelation through which the whole man felt himself uplifted to the divine-spiritual ground of the world, not merely in thought, nor merely in feeling as happens through art, but in such a way that thoughts, feelings and also the inmost impulses of the will surrendered themselves in reverent devotion to this divine-spiritual principle. And the sacred acts and rites were the means whereby the external actions of man's will were to be filled with spirit. Men felt the living unity in science (as it was then conceived), art, and religion. The ideal of the spiritual life of the present day must be, once more to gain knowledge that can bring to realization what Goethe already divined: a knowledge that raises itself to art, not symbolical or allegorical art, but true art—which means creative, formative activity in tones and in words—an art which also deepens into direct religious experience.

Only when anthroposophical Spiritual Science is seen to contain this impulse within it, is its true being understood. Obviously humanity will have to take many steps in spiritual development before such an ideal can be realized. But it is just the patient devotion to the taking of these steps which must bring blessing to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Now I should like, in the series of lectures now being given, to speak from one particular aspect on this impulse in the Anthroposophical Movement to which reference has just been made. Perhaps, my dear friends, at the close of what I have to say, you will understand what is really the deeper cause of my words. Let me say in the first place that already for a long time now the Anthroposophical Movement has not coincided with the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Anthroposophical Society, if it would fulfill its task, must really carry the whole impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. The Anthroposophical Movement has laid hold of wider circles than merely the Anthroposophical Society. Hence it has come about that in more recent years the way of working had necessarily to be different for the Anthroposophical Movement from what it was when the Anthroposophical Movement was essentially contained within the Anthroposophical Society. But the Anthroposophical Society can only fulfill its real nature when it feels itself as the kernel of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Now in order not to speak merely theoretically but to make what I have just said really intelligible, I must tell you a little about something that has recently taken place in connection with a Movement that is distinct from the Anthroposophical Movement, because, if I did not do this, misunderstanding might easily arise.

I will therefore narrate briefly the manner in which a certain Movement having a religious, cultic character has arisen, a Movement which indeed has much to do with the Anthroposophical Movement, but should not be confused with it: it is the religious movement which calls itself ‘The Movement for Religious Renewal,’ [This Movement was the beginning of The Christian Community as it has since been called.] for the renewal of Christianity. The position of this Movement with respect to the Anthroposophical Movement will become clear if we take our start from the forms in which this Movement for Religious Renewal has developed.

Some time ago a few enthusiastic young theological students came to me. They were about to conclude their theological studies and enter upon the practical duties of ministers of religion. What they said to me was to the following effect: When at the present time a student receives with a really devoted Christian heart the theology offered to him at the universities, he feels at last as if he had no firm ground under his feet for the practical work of a minister that is before him. The theology and religion of our time has gradually assumed forms that do not really enable it to instil into its ministers for their practical work and their care of souls the impulse that must proceed as a living power from the Mystery of Golgotha, from the consciousness that the Christ Being Who formerly lived in spiritual worlds, has since united Himself with human life on earth and now works on further in that life.—I perceived that in the souls of those who came to me there was the feeling that if Christianity is to be kept alive, a renewal of the entire theological impulse and of the entire religious impulse is necessary; otherwise Christianity cannot be the really vital force for our whole spiritual life. And it is indeed clear that the religious impulse only assumes its true significance and meaning when it lays hold of a man so deeply that it pervades everything he brings forth out of his thinking, feeling, and will.

I remarked first of all to those who came to me in this way for help in what they were seeking and could only find where anthroposophical Spiritual Science is making its way into the world today—I pointed out to them that one cannot work from the enthusiasm of a few single individuals, but that it is a question of gathering together, as it were, similar strivings in wider circles, even though the striving may be more or less unconscious. I said to these people that theirs was obviously not an isolated striving; rather was it the case that they were feeling in their hearts—perhaps more intensely than others—what countless human beings of the present day are also feeling; and I showed them that if it is a question of religious renewal, one must start from a broad basis whereon can be found a large number of persons out of whose hearts springs the impulse to strive for that renewal.

After a while the people in question came to me again. They had fully accepted what I had said to them and now they were able to tell me that they had been joined by a considerable number of other young theological students who were in the same position, that is to say, who were dissatisfied with the present theological and religious aims at the universities and yet were about to enter upon the practical duties of ministers of the church; and there seemed every prospect of the circle being increased.

I said: It is quite obvious first of all that it is not only a question of having a band of preachers and ministers, but into such a movement for religious renewal should be drawn not only those who can teach and perform the duties of pastors, but above all those—and they are very numerous—who possess more or less dimly in their hearts a strong religious impulse, a specifically Christian impulse, which, in view of the way in which theological religion has developed, cannot be satisfied. I pointed out, therefore, that there are circles of people in the population who are not within the Anthroposophical Movement, and who, from the whole tenor of their mind and heart, do not immediately find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I remarked further, that for the Anthroposophical Movement it is ultimately a case of seeing clearly and distinctly that we are living in an age when, simply through the world's evolution, a number of spiritual truths, truths regarding the actual spiritual content of the world, can be found by men when they become spiritual researchers. And if men do not become spiritual researchers but strive after the truth in the way in which it must disclose itself to man when he is conscious of his human dignity, then the truths discovered by-spiritual researchers can be understood by such persons by means of their ordinary, sound human intellect—provided it is really sound.

I went on to say that the Anthroposophical Movement is founded upon the principle that he who finds his way into it knows that what is important above all is that the spiritual truths now accessible to humanity should lay hold of men's hearts and minds as knowledge. The essential thing is that knowledge should enter the spiritual life of man. It is of course not the case that one who is in the Anthroposophical Movement need be versed in the various sciences. One may be in the Anthroposophical Movement without possessing any impulse or any inclination towards natural science, for the truths of Anthroposophy are perfectly comprehensible to the human intellect if only it is healthy and unclouded by prejudice. If already at the present time a sufficiently large number of persons out of the natural tendencies of their heart and mind were to find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement, then all that is necessary for religious aims and religious ideals would also gradually develop together with anthroposophical knowledge out of the Anthroposophical Movement. But there are, as I have already said, a great number of people who have the above-mentioned urge towards a renewal of religion, that is to say towards a renewal of Christian religion, and who, simply through being in certain circles of the cultural life, cannot find their way into the Anthroposophical Movement. What is necessary for these people at the present time is that a path suited to them should be found, leading to the spiritual life appropriate to the humanity of the present day.

I pointed out that it was a matter of forming communities; that what is to be reached in Anthroposophy can be attained first of all in the single individual, but that, out of the knowledge thus gained in an individual way, there must flow by an absolute inner necessity the ethical and religious social activity that is requisite for the future of humanity.

It is therefore a question of giving something to those people who are at first unable to set out directly along the path to the Anthroposophical Movement. The spiritual path for them must be sought by forming communities in which heart and soul and spirit work together—a path adapted to human evolution at its present stage.

What I then had to say out of the needs of our human evolution to those persons who came to me may be summed up approximately in the words: it is necessary for the evolution of humanity at the present time that the Anthroposophical Movement should grow more and more, in accordance with the conditions which underlie it, and which consist especially in this—that the spiritual truths which want to come to us from the spiritual world should first of all enter the hearts of men directly, so that men may be strengthened by these spiritual truths. They will then find the way, which will be on the one hand an artistic way, and on the other a religious, ethical, and social way. The Anthroposophical Movement has gone along this path since its inception, and for the Anthroposophical Movement no other path is necessary, if only this path be rightly understood. The need for another path arises for those who cannot directly take this one, but who through community-building and corporate endeavor within the community, must follow a different path, one which only later will join the anthroposophical path.

In this way the prospect was opened for two movements to travel side by side. There is the Anthroposophical Movement, which attains its true aims when it adheres with intelligence and vigor to the meaning and purpose originally contained in it and is not led astray by any special fields of work that are bound to open up as time goes on. Even the field of scientific work, for example, must not encroach upon the impulse of the general Anthroposophical Movement. We must clearly understand that it is the anthroposophical impulse which constitutes the Anthroposophical Movement, and although various fields of scientific work have recently been started within the Anthroposophical Movement it is absolutely necessary that the power and energy of the general anthroposophical impulse should not be weakened. In particular, the anthroposophical impulse must not be drawn into the forms of thinking and ideation prevailing in various fields of science—which ought actually to be vitalized by it—and be colored by them to such an extent that Anthroposophy becomes, let us say, chemical as Chemistry is today, physical as Physics is today, or biological as Biology is today. That must not happen on any account; it would strike at the very heart of the Anthroposophical Movement. What is essential is that the Anthroposophical Movement shall preserve its spiritual purity, but also its spiritual energy. To this end it must embody the essential nature of the anthroposophical spirituality, must live and move in it and bring forth out of the spiritual revelations of the present day everything that seeks to penetrate also into the life of science.

Side by side with this—so I said at that time—there might be such a movement for religious renewal, which of course has no significance for those who find the way into Anthroposophy, but is intended for those who, to begin with, cannot find this way. And as there are numbers of such people, a movement such as this is not only justified, but also necessary.

Taking for granted therefore that the Anthroposophical Movement will remain what it was and what it ought to be, I gave something, quite independently of the Anthroposophical Movement, to a number of persons who, from their own impulse, not mine, wished to work for the Movement for Religious Renewal; I gave what I was in a position to give in respect of what a future theology needs; and I also gave the contents of the ceremonial and ritual required by this new community.

What I have been able to give to these people out of the conditions pertaining to spiritual knowledge at the present time, I have given as a man to other men. What I have given them has nothing to do with the Anthroposophical Movement. I have given it to them as a private individual, and in such a way that I have emphasized with the necessary firmness that the Anthroposophical Movement must not have anything to do with this Movement for Religious Renewal; above all that I am not the founder of this Movement, and I rely upon this being made quite clear to the world; to individuals who wished to found this Movement for Religious Renewal I have given the necessary counsels—which are consonant with the practice of an authentic and inwardly vital cult, filled with spiritual content, to be celebrated in a right way with the forces out of the spiritual world. When I gave this advice I never performed a ritualistic act myself; I only showed, step by step, to those who wished to enact the ceremonies, how they have to be performed. That was necessary. And today it is also necessary that within the Anthroposophical Society this should be correctly understood.

The Movement for Religious Renewal, therefore, was founded independently of me, independently of the Anthroposophical Society. I only gave advice. The one who started it, the one who performed the very first ceremony in this Movement, performed it under my guidance, but I had no part whatever in the founding of this Movement. It is a Movement which originated of itself but received counsel from me because, when advice is justifiably asked in any particular sphere of work, is is a human duty, if one can give the advice, to do so.

Thus it must be understood, in the strictest sense of the word, that alongside the Anthroposophical Movement another Movement has started, founded out of itself (not out of the Anthroposophical Movement), for the reason that outside the Anthroposophical Society there are numbers of people who cannot find their way into the Anthroposophical Movement itself, but who will be able to come to it later on. Therefore strict distinctions must be made between the Anthroposophical Movement, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Movement for Religious Renewal. And it is important that Anthroposophy should not be looked upon as the founder of this Movement for Religious Renewal.

This has nothing to do with the fact that the advice which makes this religious Movement into a real spiritual community in a form suited to the present stage of human evolution, was given in all love and also in all devotion to the spiritual Powers who are able to place such a Movement in the world today. So that this Movement has only originated in the right way when it considers what is within the Anthroposophical Movement as something that gives it a sure ground and when it puts its trust in the Anthroposophical Movement, and seeks help and counsel from those who are within the Anthroposophical Movement, and so on. Taking into account the fact that the opponents of the Anthroposophical Movement today consider every method of attack justifiable, points such as these must be made quite clear, and I must here declare that everyone who is honest and sincere with respect to the Anthroposophical Movement would be obliged to deny any statement to the effect that the Movement for Religious Renewal was founded at Dornach in the Goetheanum and by the Goetheanum. For that is not the case, the facts are as I have just presented them.

Thus in view of the way in which I myself have helped this Movement for Religious Renewal to find its feet, I have necessarily had to picture to myself that this Movement—which puts its trust in the Anthroposophical Movement and regards the Anthroposophical Movement as its forerunner—will look for adherents outside the Anthroposophical Society, and that it would consider it a grave mistake to carry into the Anthroposophical Society the work and aims which are indeed necessary outside that Society. For the Anthroposophical Society is not understood by one who belongs to it unless his attitude is that he can be a counsellor and helper of this religious Movement, but cannot directly immerse himself in it. If he were to do so, he would be working for two ends: firstly, for the ruin and destruction of the Anthroposophical Society; secondly, to make fruitless the Movement for Religious Renewal. All the movements which arise among humanity in a justifiable way must indeed work together as in one organic whole, but this working together must take place in the right way. In the human organism it is quite impossible for the blood system to become nervous system, or for the nervous system to become blood system. The several systems have to work in the human organism distinct and separate from one another; it is precisely then that they will work together in the right way. It is therefore necessary that the Anthroposophical Society, with its content Anthroposophy, shall remain unweakened in any way by the other Movement; and that one who understands what the Anthroposophical Movement is, should—not in any presumptuous, arrogant sense, but as one who reckons with the tasks of the age—be able to see that those who have once found their way into the Anthroposophical Society do not need a religious renewal. For what would the Anthroposophical Society be if it first needed religious renewal!

But religious renewal is needed in the world, and because it is needed, because it is a profound necessity, a hand was extended to aid in founding it. Matters will therefore go on in the right way if the Anthroposophical Society remains as it is, if those who wish to understand it grasp its essential nature and do not think that it is necessary for them to belong to another movement which has taken what it possesses from Anthroposophy—although it is true in a real sense that Anthroposophy has not founded this Movement for Religious Renewal but that it has founded itself.

Anyone therefore who does not clearly distinguish these things and keep them apart, is actually—by becoming lax as regards the essential impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement—working for the destruction of the Anthroposophical Movement and for the removal of the ground and backbone of the Movement for Religious Renewal. If anyone who stands on the ground of the Movement for Religious Renewal thinks he must extend this Movement to the Anthroposophical Movement, he removes the ground from under his own feet. For everything of the nature of cult and ritual is finally bound to dissolve away when the ‘backbone’ of knowledge is broken.

For the welfare of both Movements it is essential that they should be held clearly apart. Therefore in the beginning, since everything depends on our developing the strength to carry out what we have set our will to do, it is absolutely necessary in these early days that the Movement for Religious Renewal should work in all directions in circles outside the Anthroposophical Movement; that therefore, neither as regards the acquisition of material means—in order that the matter be clearly understood I must also speak about these things—should it encroach on sources which in any event only flow with great difficulty for the Anthroposophical Movement, nor, because it does not at once succeed in finding adherents among non-Anthroposophists, should it, for example, make proselytes within the ranks of the Anthroposophists. Were it to do so, it would be doing something that would inevitably lead to the destruction of both Movements. It is really not a matter today of going forward with a certain fanaticism, but of being conscious that we can do what is necessary for man only when we work out of the necessity of the thing itself.

What I am now stating as consequences, were also equally the preliminary conditions for lending my assistance in the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, for only under these conditions could I assist it. If these preliminary conditions had not been there, the Movement for Religious Renewal would never have originated through my advice.

Therefore, I beg you to understand that it is necessary for the Movement for Religious Renewal to know that it must adhere to its starting point, that it has promised to look for its adherents outside the sphere of the Anthroposophical Movements, for it is there that they can be found in the natural way, and there they must be sought.

What I have said to you has not been said because of any anxiety lest something might be dug away from the Anthroposophical Movement, and it has certainly not been said out of any personal motive, but solely out of the necessity of the case itself. And it is also important to understand in what way alone it is possible to work rightly in each of these spheres of activity. It is indeed necessary that with regard to important matters we should state quite clearly how the case stands, for there is at the present time far too great a tendency to blur things and not to see them clearly. But clarity is essential today in every sphere.

If therefore someone were to exclaim: The very one who himself put this Movement for Religious Renewal into the world now speaks like this!! ... well, my dear friends, the whole point is that if I had at any time spoken differently about these things, I should not have lent a hand towards founding this Movement for Religious Renewal, it must remain at its starting point. What I am now saying, I am of course saying merely in order that these things may be correctly understood in the Anthroposophical Society and so that it shall not be said (as is reported to have happened already): The Anthroposophical Movement did not get on very well, and so now they have founded the Movement for Religious Renewal as the right thing.

I am quite sure that the very excellent and outstanding individuals who have founded the Movement for Religious Renewal will oppose any such legend most vigorously, and will also sternly refuse to make proselytes within the Anthroposophical Movement.—But, as has been said, the matter must be rightly understood within the Anthroposophical Movement itself.

I know, my dear friends, that there are always some who find it unpleasant to hear explanations such as these—which are necessary from time to time, not in order to complain in one direction or another, nor for the sake of criticism, but solely in order to present something once and for all in its true light. I know there are always some who dislike it when clarity is substituted for nebulous obscurity. But this is absolutely essential for the welfare and growth of the Anthroposophical Movement as well as of the Movement for Religious Renewal. The Movement for Religious Renewal cannot flourish if it in any way damages the Anthroposophical Movement.

This must be thoroughly understood, especially by Anthroposophists, so that whenever it is necessary to stand up for the rights of the matter, they may really be able to do so. When, therefore, there is any question about an anthroposophist's attitude towards religious renewal, he must be clear that his attitude can only be that of an adviser, that he gives what he can give in the way of spiritual possessions, and when it is a case of participating in the ceremonies, that he is conscious of doing so in order to help these ceremonies on their way. He alone can be a spiritual helper of the Movement for Religious Renewal who is himself first a good anthroposophist. But this Movement for Religious Renewal must be sustained, in every direction, by persons who, because of the particular configuration and tendencies of their spiritual life, cannot yet find their way into the Anthroposophical Society itself.

I hope that none of you will now go to someone who is doing active work in the Movement for Religious Renewal and say: This or that has been said against it in Dornach.—Nothing has been said against it. In love and in devotion to the spiritual world the Movement for Religious Renewal has been given counsel from out of the spiritual world, in order that it might rightly found itself. But the fact must be known by Anthroposophists that it has founded itself out of itself, that it has formed—not, it is true, the content of its ritual, but the fact of its ritual, out of its own force and its own initiative, and that the essential core of the Anthroposophical Movement has nothing to do with the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Certainly no wish could be stronger than mine that the Movement for Religious Renewal shall grow and flourish more and more, but always in adherence to the original intentions. Anthroposophical Groups must not be changed into communities for religious renewal, either in a material or in a spiritual sense.

I was obliged to say this today, for, as you know, counsel and advice had to be given for a Cult, a Cult whose growth in our present time is earnestly desired by me. In order that no misunderstanding should arise in regard to this Cult when I speak tomorrow of the conditions of the life of Cult in the spiritual world, I felt it necessary to insert these words today as an episode in our course of lectures.

The fire which destroyed the First Goetheanum was discovered one hour after this lecture had finished.

The day before yesterday I spoke of how the cycle of the year can also be found in man. I pointed out that the forces of Nature around us group themselves into a sort of time-organism which we call the cycle of a year, so that we can see, during the course of a year, the interaction and cooperation of occurrences which otherwise appear like isolated processes and facts in Nature.

Now the essential difference between this Nature-cycle and its image in man is that events which take place successively in a particular region of the Earth, take place concurrently in man. Man, it is true, taken as a whole, resembles the Earth-globe taken as a whole, inasmuch as when it is Winter in one hemisphere it is Summer in the other, and so forth. In the case of the Earth, however, if we take the Winter influences as they work in one region and the simultaneous Summer influences working in another region, the two flow away from one another and neither is disturbed or weakened in its operation by the other. But now consider how it is with man. When he is asleep, his physical and etheric bodies are in a kind of Summer condition—a budding and sprouting life. Spiritual sight shows us this budding and sprouting Summer condition of man's physical and etheric bodies during sleep, when the Ego and astral body are separated from them. We can say that while man is asleep, there is a kind of successive Spring and Summer condition in the physical and etheric organism which he has left behind. At the same time the Ego and astral body, which still co-operate in supporting the human organism as a whole, are in a sort of Winter condition. Thus here again there are simultaneous Summer and Winter conditions, but in man they are not turned away from one another; on the contrary, they work into one another. And it is the same in our waking life. As long as man is awake, his physical and etheric bodies are in a kind of Autumn and Winter condition. Their organic life is waning, so to speak. On the other hand, the Ego and the astral body, stirred by external impressions and by the thoughts to which these impressions give rise in man, are in full Summer or full Spring conditions. So that once more we find inner Spring, inner Summer and inner Winter working together in man, not turning away from one another, but irradiating each other.

This is what actually takes place, as disclosed by the researches of Spiritual Science. If we wished to compare the entire Earth with man in respect to Winter and Summer, we should have to turn the Summer in the one hemisphere right round and superimpose it on the Winter in the other hemisphere. Were this possible we should have actually what may be described as Summer conditions cancelling Winter conditions, and Winter conditions cancelling Summer conditions—producing a kind of equilibrium. Now this is an important fact, not yet realized by external science, which in consequence is bound to misunderstand the essential nature of man. For in man, Summer and Winter—if I may allow myself the expression, for it really corresponds to what actually takes place—cancel one another.

It is true that man bears surrounding Nature in himself, but its activities cancel one another and a condition sets in which actually brings the activities of Nature to a state of rest. Even as in a balance that has weights in either scale, the pointer will come to rest at a certain spot and will at that spot be affected neither by the weight to the right nor by the weight to the left, but there will be equilibrium in respect to the forces which otherwise affect the beam, so there is in man a counterpoise resulting from opposing natural forces.

Anyone who studies what I said very briefly in my book Riddles of the Soul, about man as a threefold being—studying it really carefully, as people are not yet accustomed to do—will find that what I am now going to say is true. Man is membered into an organism of nerves and senses, a rhythmic organism, and an organism of trunk, limbs and metabolism. These three organisms work together and into one another. We may say that the organism of nerves and senses has its principal activity in the head. But the whole of man is head, after a fashion, functionally. And the same may be said of the other systems. If we take the two outer organisms, that of the nerves and senses and that of the trunk, limbs and metabolic activities, we find an actual opposition between them which is very plainly visible to a spiritual-scientific anatomy and physiology. Say, for example, we are walking. There is motion in our limb-organism, movement in space. To this motion there corresponds in a certain portion of our nerves and senses organism, our head organism, a kind of rest, proportional to the amount of activity or movement in our limb organism. Please try to understand this correctly. I said: a proportional amount of rest. Rest is generally thought of as absolute. A person who is seated, is seated, and people do not notice the degree of intensity with which he sits! This is permissible in ordinary life, where there is no need to make such fine distinctions. But it is not permissible in dealing with the organism of nerves and senses. If we run fast, if our limb organism moves fast, then in our nerves and senses organism there is a stronger desire to be at rest than if we were sauntering along slowly. And everything that happens in our limb organism—or indeed in our metabolic organism, when, for example, the digestive fluids are being kept active by intestinal movements—produces a tendency to rest in our nerves and senses organism. The fact comes to expression externally, as we know.

The head, the principal seat of the nerves and senses organism, is a lazybones compared with the limb organism. It behaves much like a man who sits in a cab and lets himself be drawn along by the horse. The man is at rest; and so does our head sit quietly on the rest of our organism. The head is not even interested if, for instance, I wave my arms! When I wave my left arm, a tendency to rest is set up in the right half of my head. And to this tendency to rest is to be ascribed our ability to accompany our movements with thoughts and ideas. It is quite a mistaken notion of materialistic philosophy that ideas originate from movements in the nerves. On the contrary, if they are ideas about motion in space, they are caused by tendencies to rest in the nervous system. The nervous system quiets down; and because it becomes quiet and abates its vital activities, thoughts find their way into this state of rest and become real for us. Anyone who can look at man with the vision of Spiritual Science and see what happens when he thinks and when ideas occur to him, can never be a materialist, for he knows that in the very same measure that thoughts, in their nature as soul-and spirit substance, become active and busy—in the same measure do the nerves grow quiet, lose their vitality and energy and even become numb. The nervous system must cease its material activities before it can make room for the soul-and-spirit element of thought. This will help to show us why we have materialism at all. Materialism dates from the time when science no longer understood matter. For material science is characterized by a total inability to conceive the nature of material occurrences, which it therefore endows with a number of non-existent attributes!

So you see there are opposite conditions in man, tending towards equilibrium. Just as there are present at Midsummer natural forces and activities that are directly opposed to those of the depth of Winter, so do we find opposing forces in the human organism, which however hold each other in balance. Yet we shall not think quite correctly about these opposing forces which balance one another until we divide man once more by separating his middle system, the rhythmic system, into two halves, a rhythm of the breath and a rhythm of the blood-circulation—even this discrimination is not absolutely exact, but it is near enough for our purpose—and speak of an upper and lower rhythmic system. Between the upper and lower halves is that part of man which, because it is influenced and permeated from above and below by opposite natural forces, strives most energetically to maintain equilibrium. So that man is divided as it were into two halves, an upper and a lower. The upper half embraces the nerves and senses system which extends, of course, over the whole body. The state of things therefore which I have to picture, is on the one hand a nerves and senses system with a breathing system belonging to it, and on the other hand a trunk, limbs and metabolic system with a circulatory system of the blood belonging to it. These two main systems work in opposite directions and cancel one another.

The organ in man in which the adjustment takes place, in which there is a continual struggle upwards and downwards to maintain equilibrium, is the human heart—which is far from being a pump, as modern physiology would have it, for the purpose of pumping blood through the body! It is, on the contrary, the organ which keeps the upper and lower systems in equilibrium. Therefore even in man's outer physical organism we find an expression of the spiritual events taking place within him, when we observe how Summer and W inter conditions are incessantly offsetting one another within him.

On Earth, Winter can prevail in one region precisely because Summer does not occur at the same time. Otherwise the Summer would balance the Winter, that is to say, there would be neither Winter nor Summer but only equilibrium. This is the real state of things in man. Man is a part of Nature, but since the natural forces oppose each other in his organism they cancel one another and it is as though he were a part of Nature no longer. But for that very reason, man is a free being. Natural laws cannot be applied to him, for in him there is not one set of natural laws, but two, working against one another, and cancelling each other out. And in this realm where natural forces cancel one another are to be found the soul and spirit of man, unaffected by the working of Nature and only to be recognized in their obedience to the laws of soul and spirit.

From this you can see what a fundamental change of method is necessary when we come to the observation of man, and why a mere application of the external laws of Nature, which are orientated in one direction only, is of no use at all.

But now that we have set before us the true nature of man, let us see what results follow. We have seen that man cannot be understood unless he is regarded as bearing within him, as it were, a piece of Nature, in such a manner that the counteracting natural forces cancel one another; and if we examine this piece of Nature in man with the eyes of Spiritual Science, we find it to be penetrated as to the physical and etheric bodies during sleep by mineral and vegetable modes of activity, which are seen to be in the Summer condition. If we are now able to observe in the right way this budding, sprouting life, we may learn to understand its real significance.

When does this budding and sprouting take place? When the Ego and astral body are not present, when they are away during sleep. And whence comes this budding and sprouting process? That is precisely what spiritual vision shows us. Let us picture man asleep. His physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed. Spiritual vision sees them as soil, as mineral matter, out of which plant life is sprouting. It is a different form of plant life, of course, from the one we see around us, but recognizable as such by spiritual sight. Above gleam the Ego and astral body like a flame, unable to approach the physical and etheric. Sleeping man therefore is a sort of budding, sprouting plot of ground, with a gleaming Ego and astral body belonging to it, but detached.

And when man is awake? I must describe this state as follows. The mineral and vegetable portions are seen to be withering and collapsing, while the Ego and astral body gleam down into them, and as it were, burn them up. This is waking man, with the mineral matter crumbling within him. The mineral element of man crumbles during his waking hours. There is a sort of plant-like activity which, although quite different in appearance, gives a general and universal impression of autumn foliage, of drooping, withering leaves which are dying and vanishing; and all through this fading substance, big and little flames are gleaming and glowing. These big and little flames are the astral body and the Ego which are now living in the physical and etheric bodies. And then the question arises: What happens to these gleaming and glowing flames during sleep, when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies?

When this problem is attacked by the methods of occult science we find the solution to be a consequence you could yourselves draw from a comparison of various descriptions that I have given from time to time. The power which drives away the flame and gleam of the Ego and astral body, and which is then actively at work in the budding and sprouting vegetative life of the summer-like, sleeping physical body, and also in its mineral element, causing even that too to evolve a kind of life, so that in the course of its infinitesimal subdividing, it looks like a mass of melting atoms, a continuous mobile mass, everywhere active, fluid-mineral and yet airlike, at all points permeated by sprouting life—what is this inner power? It is the reverberating wave of our life before birth, whose pulsations beat upon our physical and etheric bodies during sleep. When we are awake during earthly life we still the pulsating vibrations. So long as the flame and gleam of the Ego and astral body are united with the physical and etheric bodies, we annul those impulses which spring from an existence preceding our earthly life and which we experience during sleep, we bring them to quiescence. And now we learn for the first time, from an inspection of ourselves, how to regard external Nature in the right way. For all natural laws and energies affecting external vegetable and mineral Nature resemble that which is mineral and vegetable in ourselves, permeated with sprouting life, during sleep. And so this means that as our sleeping physical and etheric bodies point to our own past, to a spiritual life in which we lived before birth, so does all external Nature that is vegetable or mineral point to a past. As a matter of fact, if we are to comprehend aright the natural laws and forces of our external environment, exclusive of the animal element and physical man, we must recognize that they point to the Earth's past, to the dying-away of the Earth. And the thoughts we entertain about external Nature are really directed to the dying element in Earth existence.

Now if this decaying Earth-nature is to be brought to life so that it can receive impulses for the future, this can come about in no other way than it does in man, that is to say, by the insertion of soul and spirit into mineral and vegetable. In the case of the animals, the soul element enters in, and then with man, spirit enters in.

Looked at in this way, the whole world may be said to be divided into two parts. When we look out upon external Nature, in so far as this is mineral and vegetable—and these constitute the principal part of it—we can compare it only with our sleeping physical and etheric organism. When we consider external physical activities, we must admit that all of them depend upon the physical activities in mineral and vegetable matter. Consider the process of nourishment. It begins with the taking in of mineral and vegetable matter. The animal takes it a step further in preparing it as food for man. But all external Nature depends, so far as its physical and etheric activities are concerned, on such an order of things as we find in our sleeping physical and etheric organism. Now in man the Ego and astral organism which we bear within us, and which, during our waking moments while our physical and etheric organism is in its Winter sleep, is in a condition of Summer, being stimulated by the outer senses and the thoughts that form themselves—this Ego and astral organism balances in waking hours the Winter condition of the physical and etheric bodies.

And when we come to apply the methods of Spiritual Science to the cycle of the year, we find in it too a spiritual Summer condition belonging to its Winter and a spiritual Winter condition belonging to its Summer. These conditions do not, however, balance one another as they do in man. On the contrary, they express themselves in opposite hemispheres, so that on the Earth, physical Winter is strengthened by the Winter of the soul and spirit, and physical Summer by spiritual Summer. Nevertheless these occurrences point to the fact that all surrounding Nature bears within it its past and its future, even as man does.

We have actually the present only in waking hours in our physical body in respect to its activities and laws. For during the sleep of our physical and etheric bodies we experience the inworking of a past, a past moreover that was spent in the spiritual world. We find the same thing in the vegetable and mineral worlds as we see them before us and experience their effects upon us. They too are a result of past existence. And they only become present through the Earth being permeated with soul and spirit even as man is. And in the present is contained the germ of the future. But if it is true—and the description I have given you is true—that our physical and etheric organism is an expression of the past precisely when it is independent of the activities of the soul and spirit, then in order to find that which works over into the future we must look to our Ego and astral body; and for the Earth too we must seek the future in that which is spiritual.

Man has evolved to a point when, by help of forces which of course are quite elemental, he has brought the Ego and astral body into companionship with his physical and etheric bodies. The mineral and vegetable world has not yet accomplished this. The Earth's ego and astral body surround the Earth with soul and spirit but do not permeate her mineral and vegetable activities. The mineral nature of the Earth, as observed by us, shows itself unable to let soul and spirit enter into it, and able only to let them surround it with light. The vegetable nature shows itself also unable to admit soul, but in a certain way the upper parts of the plant may be said to be touched with soul and spirit. Spiritual Science gives us the following picture of a plant. If I draw it with the root below, the stem in the middle and the blossom above, then I have to represent it as in contact with the astral world through its blossom. The astral world does not penetrate the plant; it merely touches it, and this touching is the origin of the blossom. The astral substance surrounding the Earth touches the uppermost portion of the plant, and the flower appears. I have often spoken of this in an analogy (which must of course be received with proper delicacy), saying that the flowering of the plant is the kiss exchanged between the Sun's light and the plant. It is an astral influence in which there is no more than a ‘touching.’

So that when we look into surrounding Nature, we do not see in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms exactly what we see in man. In ourselves as man we behold a mineral nature, a plant nature, an astral nature and an Ego nature, all belonging to one another. (We will leave the animals out for the time being and speak of them on some future occasion.) But we have to see in the mineral and vegetable world themselves that on which physical activity essentially depends. These worlds show themselves, in external Nature, altogether lacking in astral thought, as well as in self-conscious spiritual intelligence which is the product of the Ego. The latter are not to be found in the world outside, neither in the mineral nor in the plant. For mineral and plant are fundamentally results of the past.

If we observe the Earth's crust and its vegetation aright, we shall look upon all the life of the Earth and say: You crystals, you mountains, you budding and sprouting plants, I see in you monuments of a living, creative past which is now in process of dying. But in man himself, if we are able to have the right insight into this dying element that draws its energy from pre-earthly existence and exhausts itself and dies away in the physical and etheric bodies—in man we see this physical and etheric organism permeated by an astral body and Ego throwing light across into the future and able to unfold freely, on a plane of balanced natural energies, a life of thought and ideation. It may be said that we see in man past and future side by side. In Nature on the other hand, so far as she is mineral or vegetable, we see only the past. That element which already functions as future during man's present, is the element that confers freedom upon him; and this freedom is not to be found in external Nature. If external Nature were doomed to remain just what her mineral and vegetable kingdoms make her, she would be doomed to die, in the same way that the mere physical and etheric organism of man perishes. Man's physical and etheric organisms die, but man does not, because the nature of the astral and Ego within him carries within it, not death but an arising, a coming into being.

If therefore external Nature is not to perish, she must be given that which man has through his astral body and his Ego. This means that as man through his astral body and his Ego has self-conscious ideas, he must, in order to ensure a future to the Earth, insert into the Earth too, the supersensible and invisible that he has within himself. Even as man must derive his reincarnation in another earth-life from that in him which is supersensible and invisible, since his dying physical and etheric bodies are powerless to confer it, so can no future arise for the Earth from the mineral and vegetable globe that surrounds us. Only when we place into the Earth that which she has not herself, only then can an Earth of the Future arise. And what is not there of itself on the Earth is principally the active thoughts of man, as they live and weave in his own Nature-organism, which holds always a balance and is on this account self-dependent. If he brings these independent thoughts to a real existence, he confers a future on the Earth. But he must first have them. Thoughts that we make in our ordinary knowledge of Nature—thoughts about that which is dying away, are mere reflections—not realities. But thoughts we receive from spiritual research are quickened in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. If we accept them they become forms having independent existence in the life of the Earth.

Concerning these creative thoughts, I once said in my book entitled A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, that such thinking represents the spiritual form of communion among mankind. For as long as man gives himself up to his mirror-thoughts about external Nature, he does nothing but repeat the past. He lives in corpses of the Divine. When he himself brings life into his thoughts, then, giving and receiving communion through his own being, he allies himself with the element of Divine Spirit which permeates the world and assures its future.

Spiritual knowledge is thus a veritable communion, the beginning of a cosmic ritual that is right and fitting for the man of today, who is then able to grow because he begins to realize how he permeates his own physical and etheric organism with his astral body and Ego, and how, as he quickens the spirit in himself, he charms it also into the dead and dying matter that surrounds him. And a new experience is then his.

When he looks upon his own organism in its solid condition, he feels that it links him to the starry universe. In so far as the starry universe is a being at rest, maintaining, e.g. in the signs of the Zodiac a position at rest in relation to the Earth, man is connected in his physical organism with these constellations in space. But by allowing his powers of soul and spirit to pour into this ‘form picture’ in space, he himself changes the world.

Man is also traversed in like manner by streams of fluid. The etheric organism lives in the fluids and juices of the body. It is the etheric body that causes the blood to circulate and that brings into movement the other fluids and juices in man. Through this etheric organism he is brought into touch, if I may so express it, with the deeds of the stars, with the movements of the planets. Just as the resting pictures in the heaven of the fixed stars act upon, or stand in relation to, the solid structure of the human organism, so do the planetary movements of the system to which we belong stand in relation to the fluids in man.

But as the world presents itself to our immediate vision, it is a dead world. Man transforms it by means of his own spirit, when he shares his spirit with the world, by quickening his thoughts to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, thus fulfilling the spiritual Communion of mankind. It is important that man should become conscious of this. The more lively and alert this consciousness becomes, the more easily does man find the way to this spiritual Communion. I should like to give you today some words that may serve as a foundation for this consciousness, words which, when allowed to act rightly upon the soul—and this means, they must be made to live over and over again in the soul until the soul experiences to the full their moving, living meaning—will then bring something into existence in the human soul which transforms the dead environment with which man is connected into a living one, and quickens the past to life in order that from out of its death may arise the life of the future. This can only happen when man becomes aware of his connection with the Cosmos in the following way:

In Earth-activity—(I am imagining the earthly matter which I take into myself with that which fashions the solid structure of my organism.)

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars.

For it is a fact that when we take something that serves us as food and look upon its form, then we find in it a copy of the constellations of the fixed stars. We take it into ourselves. With the substance of the Earth that is contained in Earth-activity, we take into us the being of the stars, the being of the heavens. But we must be conscious that we as human beings, by a deliberate, loving act of human will, transform that which has become matter, back again into spirit. In this manner we perform a real act of trans-substantiation. We become aware of our own part in the world and so the spiritual thought-life is quickened within us.

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars.
In Willing I see them transformed with Love!

And when we think of that which we take into ourselves to permeate the fluid part of our organism, the circulation of the blood and juices, then that, in so far as it originates on Earth, is a copy not of the heavens or of the stars but of the deeds of the stars, that is to say, the movements of the planets. And I can become conscious how I spiritualize that, if I stand rightly in the world; and I can speak the following formula:

In Watery life stream into me,
Forming me through with power of substance-force,
The Heavenly Deeds of the Stars—

that is to say, the deeds of the planetary movements. And now:

In Feeling I see them transformed with Wisdom!

While I can see how in will the being of the stars changes lovingly into the spiritual content of the future, I can also see how in feeling a wise change takes place when I receive into me, in what permeates my fluid organism, a copy of heavenly deeds. Man can experience in this way in his will and in his feeling how he is placed into the world. Surrendering himself to the supreme direction of the universe that is all around him, he can carry out in living consciousness the act of trans-substantiation in the great temple of the Cosmos—standing within it as one who is celebrating a sacrifice in a purely spiritual way.

What would otherwise be mere abstract knowledge achieves a relationship of will and feeling to the world. The world becomes the Temple, the House of God. When man as knowing man summons up also powers of will and feeling, he becomes a sacrificing being. His fundamental relationship to the world rises from knowledge into cosmic ritual.

The first beginning of what must come to pass if Anthroposophy is to fulfil its mission in the world is that man's whole relationship to the world must be recognized to be one of cosmic ritual or cult.

I have wished to say this to you, as it were, as a beginning. Next Friday I will speak further about the nature of this ritual in its relation to a real knowledge of Nature. I appointed this lecture for this particular day with a special end in view. For today, when that being of Time which is given in the cycle of the year is brought before our souls, when this year, at any rate for outward perception and experience, comes to an end, we should realize the nature of our relationship to Time—how it rests with us out of the past to form and shape the future, to work actively for the future, in order to create in the spirit.

One of the poems recited this afternoon began with these words: “Every year finds new graves!” That is profoundly true. But equally true is it that every year finds new cradles. As this year touches the past, so does it also touch the future. And today it is man's first obligation to grasp this future, to reflect that the budding and sprouting life in the external world contains within it the seeds of death, and that we must seek for life with our own power of action. Every New Year is a symbol of this truth. If we see on the one hand the graves, let us behold on the other hand, self-renewing life waiting to receive the seed of the future into itself.

It is our great task this day to observe how in the world around us it is New Year's Eve—all is passing and disappearing and dying away; but how in the hearts of men who are conscious of their real manhood, of their divine humanity, there must be the mood of New Year, the mood of the beginning of a new era, of the uprising of new life. Let us not merely turn with a superficial festiveness from a symbolical New Year's Eve to a symbolical New Year's Day; but let us so turn our thoughts that they may indeed grow powerful and creative, as evolution requires them to be. Let us turn our thoughts away from the dying phenomena which confront us everywhere in modern civilization, like old graves, away from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, to the day of the Cosmic New Year. But that day will never dawn till man himself decides to bring it to pass.

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars—
In WILLING I see them transformed with love!

In Watery life stream into me,
Forming me through with power of substance-force,
The Heavenly Deeds of the Stars—
In FEELING I see them transformed with Wisdom.

Geistige Kommunion.

Es nahet mir im Erdenwirken,
In Stoffes Abbild mir gegeben,
Der Sterne Himmelswesen:
Ich seh' im Wollen sie sich liebend wandeln.

Es dringen in mich im Wasserleben,
In Stoffes Kraftgewalt mich bildend,
Der Sterne Himmelstaten:
Ich seh' im Fühlen sie sich weise wandeln.

The Christmas festival can be the occasion for comparing the Mystery upon which it is based with Mysteries that were the outcome of different conditions in the evolution of humanity. The Christmas Mystery—when it is conceived as a Mystery—belongs paramountly to Winter. It arose from conceptions of the spiritual world that had primarily to do with the link established between man and the scene of his life on Earth at the beginning of Winter.

When we turn our attention to Mysteries that were celebrated in certain parts of Asia long before the founding of Christianity and in which many sublime cosmic thoughts were given expression, or when we compare the Christmas festival with Mysteries that were celebrated also in pre-Christian times, in Middle, Northern and Western Europe, we are struck by the fact that they were preeminently Summer Mysteries, connected with the union between man and all that takes place in earthly life during the time of Summer. To understand the essential meaning of these Mysteries we must think, first of all, of that part of the evolution of humanity which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha.

Looking back into very ancient times we find that the Mysteries were institutions of men still possessed of the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. In certain states of consciousness between those of full sleep and waking, in states where dreams were expressions of reality, the men belonging to that ancient humanity were still able to gaze into the spiritual worlds whence the human being descends into his physical body on the Earth. Every human being in those times could speak and think about the spiritual worlds, just as a man today can speak about the ordinary knowledge he has learnt at school. I have, as you know, often said that what the men of those olden times beheld of the spiritual-super-sensible world presented itself to them in pictures—not the pictures of dreams but somewhat resembling them. Whereas we know quite well that the pictures in our dreams are woven from our reminiscences, that they rise up from the organism and, unlike our thoughts, do not mirror reality, through the very nature of the Imaginations of the old clairvoyance men knew that they were the expressions—not, it is true, of any external, material reality nor of any historical reality, but of a spiritual world lying hidden behind the physical world. Thus the spiritual world was revealed to men in pictures.

But it must not be imagined that those men of an earlier epoch had no thoughts. They had thoughts, but they did not acquire them as man acquires his thoughts today. If a man of the modern age is to have thoughts, he must exert himself inwardly; he must elaborate his thoughts by dint of inner effort. A similar kind of activity was, it is true, exercised by the men of old in connection with the pictures which mirrored for them a spiritual form of existence; but the thoughts came with the pictures. One may well be amazed at the power and brilliance of the thoughts of that old humanity; but the thoughts were not formulated by dint of effort; they were received as revelations.

Now just as we today have schools and colleges, so in those times there were Mysteries-institutions in which science art and religion were undivided. No distinction was made between belief and knowledge. Knowledge came in the form of pictures; but belief was based securely on knowledge. Nor was any distinction made between what men fashioned out of various materials into works of art, and what they acquired as wisdom. Today the distinction is made by saying: What man acquires in the form of wisdom must be true; but what he embodies in his materials as a painter, sculptor, or musician—that is fantasy!

Goethe was really the last survivor of those who did not hold this view. He regarded as truth both what he embodied in his materials as an artist and what he took to be science. The philistinism expression in the distinction between the artistic and the scientific did not, in fact, appear until comparatively late, indeed after Goethe's time. Goethe was still able, when he saw the works of art in Italy, to utter the beautiful words: “I have the idea that in the creation of their works of art the Greeks proceeded by the same laws by which Nature herself creates and of which I am on the track.” In Weimar, before going to Italy, he and Herder had studied the philosophy of Spinoza together. Goethe had striven to deepen his realization that all the beings in man's environment are permeated by the divine-spiritual He also tried to discover the manifestations of this divine-spiritual in details, for example in the leaf and flower of the plant. And the way in which he built up for himself a picture of the plant-form and animal-form in his botanical and zoological studies was identical as an activity of soul with the procedure he adopted in his artistic creations.

Today it is considered unscientific to speak of one and the same truth in art, in science and in religion. But as I have said, in those ancient centres of learning and culture, art, science and religion were one. It was actually the leaders in these Mysteries who began gradually to separate out particular thoughts from those that were revealed to men with their instinctive clairvoyance and to establish a wisdom composed of thoughts. On all sides we see a wisdom composed of thoughts emerging in the Mysteries from clairvoyant vision. Whereas the majority of men were content with pictorial vision, were satisfied to have the revelation of this spiritual vision presented to them in the form of myths, fairy-tales and legends by those who were capable of doing so, the leaders of the Mysteries were working at the development of a wisdom composed of thoughts. But they were fully aware that this wisdom was revealed, not acquired by man's own powers.

We must try to transport ourselves into this quite different attitude of soul. I will put it in the following way.—When the man of today conceives a thought, he ascribes it to his own activity of thinking. He forms chains of thoughts in accordance with rules of logic—which are themselves the product of his own thinking. The man of olden times received the thoughts. He paid no heed at all to how the connections between thoughts should be formulated, for they came to him as revelations. But this meant that he did not live in his thoughts in the way we live in ours. We regard our thoughts as the possession of our soul; we know that we have worked to acquire them. They have, as it were, been born from our own life of soul, they have arisen out of ourselves, and we regard them as our property. The man of olden time could not regard his thoughts in this way. They were illuminations; they had come to him together with the pictures. And this gave rise to a very definite feeling and attitude towards the wisdom-filled thoughts. Man said to himself as he contemplated his thoughts: “A divine Being from a higher world has descended into me. I partake of the thoughts which in reality other Beings are thinking—Beings who are higher than man but who inspire me, who live in me, who give me these thoughts. I can therefore only regard the thoughts as having been vouchsafed to me by Grace from above.” It was because the man of old held this view that he felt the need at certain seasons to make an offering of these thoughts to the higher Beings, as it were through his feelings. And this was done in the Summer Mysteries.

In the Summer the Earth is more given up to its own environment, to the atmosphere surrounding it. It has not contracted because of the cold or enveloped itself in a raiment of snow; it is in perpetual intercourse with its atmospheric environment. Hence man too is given up to the wide cosmic expanse. In the Summer he feels himself united with the Upper Gods. And in those ancient times man waited for the Midsummer season—the time when the Sun is at the zenith of its power—in order at this season and in certain places he regarded as sacred, to establish contact with the Upper Gods. He availed himself of his natural connection in Summer with the whole etheric environment, in order out of his deepest feelings to make a sacrificial offering to the Gods who had revealed their thoughts to him.

The teachers in the Mysteries spoke to their pupils somewhat as follows. They said: “Every year at Midsummer, a solemn offering must be made to the Upper Gods in gratitude for the thoughts they vouchsafe to man. For if this is not done it is all too easy for the Luciferic powers to invade man's thinking and he is then permeated by these powers. He can avoid this if every Summer he is mindful of how the Upper Gods have given him these thoughts and at the Midsummer season lets his thoughts flow back again, as it were, to the Gods.” In this way the men of olden times tried to safeguard themselves from Luciferic influences. The leaders of the Mysteries called together those who were in a sense their pupils and in their presence enacted that solemn rite at the culmination of which the thoughts that had been revealed by the Upper Gods were now offered up to them in upward-streaming feelings.

The external rite consisted in solemn words being spoken into rising smoke which was thus set into waves. This act was merely meant to signify that the offering made by man's inmost soul to the Upper Gods was being inscribed into an outer medium—the rising smoke—through form-creating words. The words of the prayer inscribed into the rising smoke the feelings which the soul desired to send upwards to the Gods as an offering for the thoughts they had revealed.

This was the basic mood of soul underlying the celebration of the Midsummer Mysteries. These Midsummer festivals had meaning only as long as men received their thoughts by way of revelation.

But in the centuries immediately preceding the Mystery of Golgotha—beginning as early as the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.—these thoughts that were revealed from above grew dark, and more and more there awakened in man the faculty to acquire his thoughts through his own efforts. This induced in him an entirely different mood. Whereas formerly he had felt that his thoughts were coming to him as it were from the far spaces of the universe, descending into his inner life, he now began to feel the thoughts as something unfolding within himself, belonging to him like the blood in his veins. In olden times, thoughts had been regarded more as something belonging to man like the breath—the breath that is received from the surrounding atmosphere and continually given back again. Just as man regards the air as something which surrounds him, which he draws into himself but always gives out again, so did he feel his thoughts as something which he did not draw into himself but which was received by him through revelation and must ever and again be given back to the Gods at the time of Midsummer.

The festivals themselves were given a dramatic form in keeping with this attitude. The leaders of the Mysteries went to the ceremonies bearing the symbols of wisdom; and as they conducted the sacrificial rites they divested themselves of the symbols one by one. Then, when they went away from the ceremonies, having laid aside the symbols of wisdom, they appeared as men who must acquire their wisdom again in the course of the year. It was like a confession on the part of those sages of olden times. When they had made the solemn offering it was as though they declared to the masses of those who were their followers: “We have become nescient again.”

To share in this way in the course taken by the seasons of the year, entering as Midsummer approaches into the possession of wisdom, then passing into a state of nescience (Torheit) before becoming wise again—this was actually felt by men to be a means of escape from the Luciferic powers. They strove to participate in the life of the cosmos. As the cosmos lets Winter alternate with Summer, so did they let the time of wisdom alternate in themselves with the time of entry into the darkness of ignorance.

Now there were some whose wisdom was needed all the year round, and who for this reason could not act or adopt the same procedure as the others. For example, there were teachers in the Mysteries who practised the art of healing—for that too was part of the Mysteries. Naturally it would not do for a doctor to become ignorant in August and September—if I may use the present names of the months—so these men were allowed to retain their wisdom, but in return they made the sacrifice of being only servants in the Mysteries. Those who were the leaders became ignorant for a certain time every year.

Reminiscences of this have remained here and there, for example in the figure described by Goethe in his poem Die Geheimnisse as the ‘Thirteenth,’ the one who was the leader of the others but was himself in a state of dullness rather than wisdom.

All these things are evidence that the attitude towards the guiding wisdom of mankind was entirely different from what it afterwards became when men began to regard their thoughts as produced by themselves. Whereas formerly man felt that wisdom was like the air he breathes, later on he felt that his thoughts were produced within himself, like the blood. We can therefore say: In ancient times man felt his thoughts to be like the air of the breath and in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha he began to feel that they were like the blood within him.

But then man also said to himself: “What I experience as thought is now no longer heavenly, it is no longer something that has descended from above. It is something that arises in the human being himself, something that is earthly.”—This feeling that the thoughts of men are earthly in origin was still significantly present at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha among those who were the late successors of the leaders of the ancient Mysteries. Those who stood at that time at the height of cultural life said to themselves: Man can no longer have such thoughts as had the sages of old, who with their thoughts lived together with the Gods; he must now develop purely human thoughts. But these purely human thoughts are in danger of falling prey to the Ahrimanic powers. The thoughts that were revealed to man from above were in danger of succumbing to the Luciferic powers; the human thoughts, the self-produced thoughts, are in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic powers.

Those who were capable of thinking in this way in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha—by the 4th century, however, the insight was lost—such men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as the true redemption of mankind. They said to themselves: The spiritual Power indwelling the Sun could hitherto be attained only by superhuman forces. This Power must now be attained by human faculties, for man's thoughts are now within his own being. Hence he must inwardly raise these thoughts of his to the Divine. Now that he is an earthly thinker, he must permeate his thoughts inwardly with the Divine, and this he can do through uniting himself in thought and feeling with the Mystery of Golgotha.

This meant that the festival once celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer became a Winter festival. In Winter, when the earth envelops herself in her raiment of snow and is no longer in living interchange with the atmosphere around her, man too is fettered more strongly to the earth; he does not share in the life of the wide universe but enters into the life that is rooted beneath the soil of the earth.—But the meaning of this must be understood.

We can continually be made aware of how in the earth's environment there is not only that which comes directly from the Sun but also that which partakes in the life of the earth beneath the surface of the soil. I have spoken of this before by referring to some very simple facts.—Those of you who have lived in the country will know how the peasants dig pits in the earth during Winter and put their potatoes in them. Down there in the earth the potatoes last splendidly through the Winter, which would not be the case if they were simply put in cellars. Why is this?—Think of an area of the earth's surface. It absorbs the light and warmth of the Sun that have streamed to it during the Summer. The light and the warmth sink down, as it were, into the soil of the earth, so that in Winter the Summer is still there, under the soil. During Winter it is Summer underneath the surface of the earth. And it is this Summer under the surface of the earth in Winter time that enables the roots of the plants to thrive. The seeds become roots and growth begins. So when we see a plant growing this year it is actually being enabled to grow by the forces of last year's Sun which had penetrated into the earth.

When therefore we are looking at the root of a plant, or even at parts of the leaves, we have before us what is the previous Summer in the plant. It is only in the blossom that we have this year's Summer, for the blossom is conjured forth by the light and warmth of the present year's Sun. In the sprouting and unfolding of the plant we still have the previous year and the present year comes to manifestation only in the blossom. Even the ovary at the centre of the blossom is a product of the Winter—in reality, that is, of the previous Summer. Only what surrounds the ovary belongs to the present year. Thus do the seasons interpenetrate. When the earth dons her Winter raiment of snow, beneath that raiment is the continuation of Summer. Man does not now unite himself with the wide expanse but turns his life of soul inwards, into the interior of the earth. He turns to the Lower Gods.

This was the conception held by men who were in possession of the heritage of the ancient wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was this that made them realize: It is in what is united with the earth that we must seek the power of the Christ, the power of the new wisdom which permeates the future evolution of the earth. Having passed to the stage of self-produced thoughts, man felt the need to unite these thoughts inwardly with the Divine, to permeate them inwardly with the Divine, in other words, with the Christ Impulse. This he can do at the time when he is most closely bound to the earth—in deep Winter; he can do it when the earth shuts herself off from the cosmos. For then he too is shut off from the cosmos and comes nearest to the God who descended from those far spaces and united Himself with the earth.

It is a beautiful thought to connect the Christmas festival with the time when the earth is shut off from the cosmos, when in the loneliness of earth man seeks to establish for his self-produced thoughts communion with divine-spiritual-super-sensible reality, and when, understanding what this means, he endeavors to protect himself from the Ahrimanic powers, as in ancient times he protected himself from the Luciferic powers through the rites of the Midsummer Mysteries.

And as under the guidance of the teachers in the Mysteries the man of olden time became aware through the Midsummer festival that his thoughts were fading into a state of twilight, the man of today who rightly understands the Christmas Mystery should feel strengthened when at Christmas he steeps himself in truths such as have now once more been expressed. He should feel how through developing a true relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, the thoughts he acquires in the darkness of his inner life can be illumined. For it is indeed so when he realizes that once in the course of the earth's evolution the Being who in pre-Christian ages could only be thought of as united with the Sun, passed into earthly evolution and together with mankind indwells the earth as a Spiritual Being. In contrast to the old Midsummer festivals where the aim was that a man should pass out of himself into the cosmos, the Christmas festival should be the occasion when man tries to deepen inwardly, to spiritualize, whatever knowledge he acquires about the great world.

The man of old did not feel that knowledge was his own possession but that it was a gift bestowed upon him, and every year he gave it back again. The man of today necessarily regards his world of thought, his intellectual knowledge, as his own possession. Therefore he must receive into his heart the Spirit Being who has united with the Earth; he must link his thoughts with this Being in order that instead of remaining with his thoughts in egotistic seclusion, he shall unite these thoughts of his with that Being of Sun and Earth who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

In a certain respect the ancient Mysteries had what might be called an ‘aristocratic’ character. Indeed the principle of aristocracy really had its origin in those old Mysteries, for it was the priests who enacted the sacrifice on behalf of all the others.

The Christmas festival has a ‘democratic’ character. What modern men acquire as that which really makes them man, is their inner store of thoughts. And the Christmas Mystery is only truly celebrated when the one does not make the sacrificial offering for another, but when the one shares with the other a common experience: equality in face of the Sun Being who came down to the Earth. And in the early period of Christian evolution—until about the 4th century—it was this that was felt to be a particularly significant principle of Christianity. It was not until then that the old forms of the Egyptian Mysteries were resuscitated and made their way via Rome to Western Europe, overlaying the original Christianity and shrouding it in traditions which will have to be superseded if Christianity is to be rightly understood. For the character with which Christianity was invested by Rome was essentially that of the old Mysteries. In accordance with true Christianity, this finding of the spiritual-super-sensible reality in man must take place at a time not when he passes out of himself and is given up to the Cosmos, but when he is firmly within himself. And this is most of all the case when he is united with the Earth at the time when the Earth herself is shut off from the cosmic expanse—that is to say, in Midwinter.

I have thus tried to show how it came about that in the course of the ages the Midsummer festivals in the Mysteries changed into the Midwinter Christmas Mystery. But this must be understood in the right sense. By looking back over the evolution of humanity we can deepen our understanding of what is. presented to us in the Christmas Mystery. By contrasting it with olden times we can feel the importance of the fact that man has now to look within himself for the secrets he once sought to find outside his own being.

It is from this point of view that my Occult Science is written. If such a book had been written in ancient times (then, of course, it would not have been a book but something different!) the starting-point of the descriptions would have been the starry heavens. But in the book as it is, the starting-point is man: contemplation, first of the inner aspect of man's being and proceeding from there to the universe. The inner core of man's being is traced through the epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and extended to the future epochs of the Earth's evolution.

In seeking for knowledge of the world in ancient times, men started by contemplating the stars; then they endeavored to apply to the inner constitution of the human, being what they learned from the stars. For example, they contemplated the Sun which revealed a very great deal to the Imaginative cognition of those days. To the orthodox modern scientist the Sun is a ball of gas—which of course it cannot be for unbiased thought. When the man of ancient time contemplated the Sun externally, it was to him the bodily expression of soul-and-spirit, just as the human body is an expression of soul-and-spirit. Very much was learnt from the Sun. And when man had read in the Cosmos what the Sun had revealed to him, he could point to his own heart, and say: Now I understand the nature of the human heart, for the Sun has revealed it to me!—And similarly in the other heavenly bodies and constellations, man discovered the secrets of his organism.

It was not possible to proceed in this way in the book Occult Science. Although it is too soon yet for all the relevant details to have been worked out, the procedure is that we think, first, of the human being as a whole, with heart, lungs, and so on, and in understanding the organs individually we come to understand the universe. We study the human heart, for example, and what we read there tells us what the Sun is, tells us something about the nature of the Sun. Thus through the heart we learn to know the nature of the Sun; that is to say, we proceed from within outwards. In ancient times it was the other way about: first of all men learnt to know the nature of the Sun and then they understood the nature of the human heart. In the modern age we learn what the heart is, what the lung is ... and so, starting from man, we learn to know the universe.

The ancients could only give expression to their awareness of this relation of man to the universe by looking upwards to the Sun and the starry heavens at the time of Midsummer, when conditions were the most favorable for feeling their union with the Cosmos. But if we today would realize with inner intensity how we can come to know the universe, we must gaze into the depths of man's inner being. And the right time for this is in Midwinter, at Christmas.

Try to grasp the full meaning of this Christmas thought, my dear friends, for there is a real need today to give life again to old habits such as these. We need, for example, to be sincere again in our experience of the course of the year. All that numbers of people know today about Christmas is that it is a time for giving presents, also—perhaps, a time when in a very external way, thought is turned to the Mystery of Golgotha!

It is superficialities such as these that are really to blame for the great calamity into which human civilization has drifted today. It is there that much of the real blame must be placed; it lies in the clinging to habits, and in the unwillingness to realize the necessity of renewal—the need, for example, to imbue the true Christmas thought, the true Christmas feeling, with new life.

This impulse of renewal is needed because we can only become Man again in the true sense by finding the spiritual part of our being. It is a ‘World-Christmas’ that we need, a birth of spiritual life. Then we shall once again celebrate Christmas as honest human beings; again there will be meaning in the fact that at the time when the Earth is shrouded in her raiment of snow, we try to feel that our world of thought is permeated with the Christ Impulse—the world of thought which today is like the blood within us, in contrast to the old world of thought which was like the breath.

We must learn to live more intensely with the course of the seasons than is the custom today. About 20 years ago the idea occurred that it would be advantageous to have a fixed Easter—a festival which is still regulated by the actual course of time. The idea was that Easter should be fixed permanently at the beginning of April, so that account books might not always be thrown into confusion owing to the dates of the festival varying each year. Even man's experience of the flow of time was to be drawn into the materialistic trend of evolution. In view of other things that have happened as well, it would not be surprising if materialistic thought were ultimately to accept this arrangement. For example, men begin the year with the present New Year's Day, the 1st of January, in spite of the fact that December (decem) is the tenth month, and January and February quite obviously belong to the previous year; so that in reality the new year can begin in March at the earliest—as indeed was actually the case in Roman times. But it once pleased a French King (whom even history acknowledges to have been an imbecile) to begin the year in the middle of the Winter, on the 1st of January, and humanity has followed suit.

Strong and resolute thoughts are needed to admit honestly to ourselves that the saving of human evolution depends upon man allying himself with wisdom. Many things indicate that he has by no means always done so but has very often allied himself with ignorance, with nescience. The Christmas thought must be taken sincerely and honestly, in connection with the Being who said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But the way to the Truth and to the Life in the Spirit has to be deliberately sought, and for this it is necessary for modern humanity to plunge down into the dark depths of midnight in order to find the light that kindles itself in man.

The old tradition of the first Christmas Mass being read at midnight is not enough. Man must again realize in actual experience that what is best and most filled with light in his nature is born out of the darkness prevailing in him. The true light is born out of the darkness. And from this darkness light must be born—not further darkness.

Try to permeate the Christmas thought with the strength that will come to your souls when you feel with all intensity that the light of spiritual insight and spiritual vision must pierce the darkness of knowledge of another kind. Then in the Holy Night, Christ will be born in the heart of each one of you, and you will experience together with all mankind, a World-Christmas.

I have often said in this place that in more ancient times in the evolution of humanity, science, art, and religion formed a harmonious unity. Anyone who is able in one way or another to gain knowledge of the nature of the ancient Mysteries knows that within these Mysteries, knowledge was sought as a revelation of the Spiritual in picture form, in the way that was possible in those times. That way can no longer be ours, although in this age we must again advance to a knowledge of the spiritual nature of the world. A pictorial knowledge of the Spiritual lay at the foundation of all ancient conceptions of the world. This knowledge came to direct expression, not merely by being communicated in words, but through forms which have gradually become those of our arts—bodily, plastic presentation in the plastic arts and presentation by means of tone and word in the arts of music and speech. But this second stage was followed by the third stage, that of the revelation of the nature of the world in religious cult or ritual, a revelation through which the whole man felt himself uplifted to the divine-spiritual ground of the world, not merely in thought, nor merely in feeling as happens through art, but in such a way that thoughts, feelings and also the inmost impulses of the will surrendered themselves in reverent devotion to this divine-spiritual principle. And the sacred acts and rites were the means whereby the external actions of man’s will were to be filled with spirit. Men felt the living unity in science (as it was then conceived), art, and religion. The ideal of the spiritual life of the present day must be, once more to gain knowledge that can bring to realization what Goethe already divined: a knowledge that raises itself to art, not symbolical or allegorical art, but true art—which means creative, formative activity in tones and in words—an art which also deepens into direct religious experience.

Only when anthroposophical Spiritual Science is seen to contain this impulse within it, is its true being understood. Obviously humanity will have to take many steps in spiritual development before such an ideal can be realized. But it is just the patient devotion to the taking of these steps which must bring blessing to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Now I should like, in the series of lectures now being given, to speak from one particular aspect on this impulse in the Anthroposophical Movement to which reference has just been made. Perhaps, my dear friends, at the close of what I have to say, you will understand what is really the deeper cause of my words. Let me say in the first place that already for a long time now the Anthroposophical Movement has not coincided with the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Anthroposophical Society, if it would fulfill its task, must really carry the whole impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. The Anthroposophical Movement has laid hold of wider circles than merely the Anthroposophical Society. Hence it has come about that in more recent years the way of working had necessarily to be different for the Anthroposophical Movement from what it was when the Anthroposophical Movement was essentially contained within the Anthroposophical Society. But the Anthroposophical Society can only fulfill its real nature when it feels itself as the kernel of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Now in order not to speak merely theoretically but to make what I have just said really intelligible, I must tell you a little about something that has recently taken place in connection with a Movement that is distinct from the Anthroposophical Movement, because, if I did not do this, misunderstanding might easily arise.

I will therefore narrate briefly the manner in which a certain Movement having a religious, cultic character has arisen, a Movement which indeed has much to do with the Anthroposophical Movement, but should not be confused with it: it is the religious movement which calls itself ‘Movement for Religious Renewal,’ [This Movement was the beginning of The Christian Community as it has since been called.] for the renewal of Christianity. The position of this Movement with respect to the Anthroposophical Movement will become clear if we take our start from the forms in which this Movement for Religious Renewal has developed.

Some time ago a few enthusiastic young theological students came to me. They were about to conclude their theological studies and enter upon the practical duties of ministers of religion. What they said to me was to the following effect: When at the present time a student receives with a really devoted Christian heart the theology offered to him at the universities, he feels at last as if he had no firm ground under his feet for the practical work of a minister that is before him. The theology and religion of our time has gradually assumed forms that do not really enable it to instil into its ministers for their practical work and their care of souls the impulse that must proceed as a living power from the Mystery of Golgotha, from the consciousness that the Christ Being Who formerly lived in spiritual worlds, has since united Himself with human life on earth and now works on further in that life.—I perceived that in the souls of those who came to me there was the feeling that if Christianity is to be kept alive, a renewal of the entire theological impulse and of the entire religious impulse is necessary; otherwise Christianity cannot be the really vital force for our whole spiritual life. And it is indeed clear that the religious impulse only assumes its true significance and meaning when it lays hold of a man so deeply that it pervades everything he brings forth out of his thinking, feeling, and will. I remarked first of all to those who came to me in this way for help in what they were seeking and could only find where anthroposophical Spiritual Science is making its way into the world today—I pointed out to them that one cannot work from the enthusiasm of a few single individuals, but that it is a question of gathering together, as it were, similar strivings in wider circles, even though the striving may be more or less unconscious. I said to these people that theirs was obviously not an isolated striving; rather was it the case that they were feeling in their hearts—perhaps more intensely than others—what countless human beings of the present day are also feeling; and I showed them that if it is a question of religious renewal, one must start from a broad basis whereon can be found a large number of persons out of whose hearts springs the impulse to strive for that renewal.

After a while the people in question came to me again. They had fully accepted what I had said to them and now they were able to tell me that they had been joined by a considerable number of other young theological students who were in the same position, that is to say, who were dissatisfied with the present theological and religious aims at the universities and yet were about to enter upon the practical duties of ministers of the church; and there seemed every prospect of the circle being increased.

I said: It is quite obvious first of all that it is not only a question of having a band of preachers and ministers, but into such a movement for religious renewal should be drawn not only those who can teach and perform the duties of pastors, but above all those—and they are very numerous—who possess more or less dimly in their hearts a strong religious impulse, a specifically Christian impulse, which, in view of the way in which theological religion has developed, cannot be satisfied. I pointed out, therefore, that there are circles of people in the population who are not within the Anthroposophical Movement, and who, from the whole tenor of their mind and heart, do not immediately find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I remarked further, that for the Anthroposophical Movement it is ultimately a case of seeing clearly and distinctly that we are living in an age when, simply through the world’s evolution, a number of spiritual truths, truths regarding the actual spiritual content of the world, can be found by men when they become spiritual researchers. And if men do not become spiritual researchers but strive after the truth in the way in which it must disclose itself to man when he is conscious of his human dignity, then the truths discovered by spiritual researchers can be understood by such persons by means of their ordinary, sound human intellect—provided it is really sound.

I went on to say that the Anthroposophical Movement is founded upon the principle that he who finds his way into it knows that what is important above all is that the spiritual truths now accessible to humanity should lay hold of men’s hearts and minds as knowledge. The essential thing is that knowledge should enter the spiritual life of man. It is of course not the case that one who is in the Anthroposophical Movement need be versed in the various sciences. One may be in the Anthroposophical Movement without possessing any impulse or any inclination towards natural science, for the truths of Anthroposophy are perfectly comprehensible to the human intellect if only it is healthy and unclouded by prejudice. If already at the present time a sufficiently large number of persons out of the natural tendencies of their heart and mind were to find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement, then all that is necessary for religious aims and religious ideals would also gradually develop together with anthroposophical knowledge out of the Anthroposophical Movement. But there are, as I have already said, a great number of people who have the above-mentioned urge towards a renewal of religion, that is to say towards a renewal of Christian religion, and who, simply through being in certain circles of the cultural life, cannot find their way into the Anthroposophical Movement. What is necessary for these people at the present time is that a path suited to them should be found, leading to the spiritual life appropriate to the humanity of the present day.

I pointed out that it was a matter of forming communities; that what is to be reached in Anthroposophy can be attained first of all in the single individual, but that, out of the knowledge thus gained in an individual way, there must flow by an absolute inner necessity the ethical and religious social activity that is requisite for the future of humanity.

It is therefore a question of giving something to those people who are at first unable to set out directly along the path to the Anthroposophical Movement. The spiritual path for them must be sought by forming communities in which heart and soul and spirit work together—a path adapted to human evolution at its present stage.

What I then had to say out of the needs of our human evolution to those persons who came to me may be summed up approximately in the words: it is necessary for the evolution of humanity at the present time that the Anthroposophical Movement should grow more and more, in accordance with the conditions which underlie it, and which consist especially in this—that the spiritual truths which want to come to us from the spiritual world should first of all enter the hearts of men directly, so that men may be strengthened by these spiritual truths. They will then find the way, which will be on the one hand an artistic way, and on the other a religious, ethical, and social way. The Anthroposophical Movement has gone along this path since its inception, and for the Anthroposophical Movement no other path is necessary, if only this path be rightly understood. The need for another path arises for those who cannot directly take this one, but who through community-building and corporate endeavor within the community, must follow a different path, one which only later will join the anthroposophical path.

In this way the prospect was opened for two movements to travel side by side. There is the Anthroposophical Movement, which attains its true aims when it adheres with intelligence and vigor to the meaning and purpose originally contained in it and is not led astray by any special fields of work that are bound to open up as time goes on. Even the field of scientific work, for example, must not encroach upon the impulse of the general Anthroposophical Movement. We most clearly understand that it is the anthroposophical impulse which constitutes the Anthroposophical Movement, and although various fields of scientific work have recently been started within the Anthroposophical Movement it is absolutely necessary that the power and energy of the general anthroposophical impulse should not be weakened. In particular, the anthroposophical impulse must not he drawn into the forms of thinking and ideation prevailing in various fields of science—which ought actually to be vitalized by it—and be colored by them to such an extent that Anthroposophy becomes, let us say, chemical as Chemistry is today, physical as Physics is today, or biological as Biology is today. That must not happen on any account; it would strike at the very heart of the Anthroposophical Movement. What is essential is that the Anthroposophical Movement shall preserve its spiritual purity, but also its spiritual energy. To this end it must embody the essential nature of the anthroposophical spirituality, must live and move in it and bring forth out of the spiritual revelations of the present day everything that seeks to penetrate also into the life of science.

Side by side with this—so I said at that time—there might be such a movement for religious renewal, which of course has no significance for those who find the way into Anthroposophy, but is intended for those who, to begin with, cannot find this way. And as there are numbers of such people, a movement such as this is not only justified, but also necessary.

Taking for granted therefore that the Anthroposophical Movement will remain what it was and what it ought to be, I gave something, quite independently of the Anthroposophical Movement, to a number of persons who, from their own impulse, not mine, wished to work for the Movement for Religious Renewal; I gave what I was in a position to give in respect of what a future theology needs; and I also gave the contents of the ceremonial and ritual required by this new community.

What I have been able to give to these people out of the conditions pertaining to spiritual knowledge at the present time, I have given as a man to other men. What I have given them has nothing to do with the Anthroposophical Movement. I have given it to them as a private individual, and in such a way that I have emphasized with the necessary firmness that the Anthroposophical Movement must not have anything to do with this Movement for Religious Renewal; above all that I am not the founder of this Movement, and I rely upon this being made quite clear to the world; to individuals who wished to found this Movement for Religious Renewal I have given the necessary counsels—which are consonant with the practice of an authentic and inwardly vital cult, filled with spiritual content, to be celebrated in a right way with the forces out of the spiritual world. When I gave this advice I never performed a ritualistic act myself; I only showed, step by step, to those who wished to enact the ceremonies, how they have to be performed. That was necessary. And today it is also necessary that within the Anthroposophical Society this should be correctly understood.

The Movement for Religious Renewal, therefore, was founded independently of me, independently of the Anthroposophical Society. I only gave advice. The one who started it, the one who performed the very first ceremony in this Movement, performed it under my guidance, but I had no part whatever in the founding of this Movement. It is a Movement which originated of itself but received counsel from me because, when advice is justifiably asked in any particular sphere of work, it is a human duty, if one can give the advice, to do so.

Thus it must be understood, in the strictest sense of the word, that alongside the Anthroposophical Movement another Movement has started, founded out of itself (not out of the Anthroposophical Movement), for the reason that outside the Anthroposophical Society there are numbers of people who cannot find their way into the Anthroposophical Movement itself, but who will be able to come to it later on. Therefore strict distinctions must be made between the Anthroposophical Movement, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Movement for Religious Renewal. And it is important that Anthroposophy should not be looked upon as the founder of this Movement for Religious Renewal.

This has nothing to do with the fact that the advice which makes this religious Movement into a real spiritual community in a form suited to the present stage of human evolution, was given in all love and also in all devotion to the spiritual Powers who are able to place such a Movement in the world today. So that this Movement has only originated in the right way when it considers what is within the Anthroposophical Movement as something that gives it a sure ground and when it puts its trust in the Anthroposophical Movement, and seeks help and counsel from those who are within the Anthroposophical Movement, and so on. Taking into account the fact that the opponents of the Anthroposophical Movement today consider every method of attack justifiable, points such as these must be made quite clear, and I must here declare that everyone who is honest and sincere with respect to the Anthroposophical Movement would be obliged to deny any statement to the effect that the Movement for Religious Renewal was founded at Dornach in the Goetheanum and by the Goetheanum. For that is not the case, the facts are as I have just presented them.

Thus in view of the way in which I myself have helped this Movement for Religious Renewal to find its feet, I have necessarily had to picture to myself that this Movement—which puts its trust in the Anthroposophical Movement and regards the Anthroposophical Movement as its forerunner—will look for adherents outside the Anthroposophical Society, and that it would consider it a grave mistake to carry into the Anthroposophical Society the work and aims which are indeed necessary outside that Society. For the Anthroposophical Society is not understood by one who belongs to it unless his attitude is that he can be a counsellor and helper of this religious Movement, but cannot directly immerse himself in it. If he were to do so, he would be working for two ends: firstly, for the ruin and destruction of the Anthroposophical Society; secondly, to make fruitless the Movement for Religious Renewal. All the movements which arise among humanity in a justifiable way must indeed work together as in one organic whole, but this working together must take place in the right way. In the human organism it is quite impossible for the blood system to become nervous system, or for the nervous system to become blood system. The several systems have to work in the human organism distinct and separate from one another; it is precisely then that they will work together in the right way. It is therefore necessary that the Anthroposophical Society, with its content Anthroposophy, shall remain unweakened in any way by the other Movement; and that one who understands what the Anthroposophical Movement is, should—not in any presumptuous, arrogant sense, but as one who reckons with the tasks of the age—be able to see that those who have once found their way into the Anthroposophical Society do not need a religious renewal. For what would the Anthroposophical Society be if it first needed religious renewal!

But religious renewal is needed in the world, and because it is needed, because it is a profound necessity, a hand was extended to aid in founding it. Matters will therefore go on in the right way if the Anthroposophical Society remains as it is, if those who wish to understand it grasp its essential nature and do not think that it is necessary for them to belong to another movement which has taken what it possesses from Anthroposophy—although it is true in a real sense that Anthroposophy has not founded this Movement for Religious Renewal but that it has founded itself.

Anyone therefore who does not clearly distinguish these things and keep them apart, is actually—by becoming lax as regards the essential impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement—working for the destruction of the Anthroposophical Movement and for the removal of the ground and backbone of the Movement for Religious Renewal. If anyone who stands on the ground of the Movement for Religious Renewal thinks he must extend this Movement to the Anthroposophical Movement, he removes the ground from under his own feet. For everything of the nature of cult and ritual is finally bound to dissolve away when the ‘backbone’ of knowledge is broken.

For the welfare of both Movements it is essential that they should be held clearly apart. Therefore in the beginning, since everything depends on our developing the strength to carry out what we have set our will to do, it is absolutely necessary in these early days that the Movement for Religious Renewal should work in all directions in circles outside the Anthroposophical Movement; that therefore, neither as regards the acquisition of material means—in order that the matter be clearly understood I must also speak about these things—should it encroach on sources which in any event only flow with great difficulty for the Anthroposophical Movement, nor, because it does not at once succeed in finding adherents among non-Anthroposophists, should it, for example, make proselytes within the ranks of the Anthroposophists. Were it to do so, it would be doing something that would inevitably lead to the destruction of both Movements. It is really not a matter today of going forward with a certain fanaticism, but of being conscious that we can do what is necessary for man only when we work out of the necessity of the thing itself.

What I am now stating as consequences, were also equally the preliminary conditions for lending my assistance in the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, for only under these conditions could I assist it. If these preliminary conditions had not been there, the Movement for Religious Renewal would never have originated through my advice.

Therefore I beg you to understand that it is necessary for the Movement for Religious Renewal to know that it must adhere to its starting point, that it has promised to look for its adherents outside the sphere of the Anthroposophical Movements, for it is there that they can be found in the natural way, and there they must be sought.

What I have said to you has not been said because of any anxiety lest something might be dug away from the Anthroposophical Movement, and it has certainly not been said out of any personal motive, but solely out of the necessity of the case itself. And it is also important to understand in what way alone it is possible to work rightly in each of these spheres of activity. It is indeed necessary that with regard to important matters we should state quite clearly how the case stands, for there is at the present time far too great a tendency to blur things and not to see them clearly. But clarity is essential today in every sphere.

If therefore someone were to exclaim: The very one who himself put this Movement for Religious Renewal into the world now speaks like this!! ... well, my dear friends, the whole point is that if I had at any time spoken differently about these things, I should not have lent a hand towards founding this Movement for Religious Renewal. It must remain at its starting point. What I am now saying, I am of course saying merely in order that these things may be correctly understood in the Anthroposophical Society and so that it shall not be said (as is reported to have happened already): The Anthroposophical Movement did not get on very well, and so now they have founded the Movement for Religious Renewal as the right thing.

I am quite sure that the very excellent and outstanding individuals who have founded the Movement for Religious Renewal will oppose any such legend most vigorously, and will also sternly refuse to make proselytes within the Anthroposophical Movement.—But, as has been said, the matter must be rightly understood within the Anthroposophical Movement itself.

I know, my dear friends, that there are always some who find it unpleasant to hear explanations such as these—which are necessary from time to time, not in order to complain in one direction or another, nor for the sake of criticism, but solely in order to present something once and for all in its true light. I know there are always some who dislike it when clarity is substituted for nebulous obscurity. But this is absolutely essential for the welfare and growth of the Anthroposophical Movement as well as of the Movement for Religious Renewal. The Movement for Religious Renewal cannot flourish if it in any way damages the Anthroposophical Movement.

This must be thoroughly understood, especially by Anthroposophists, so that whenever it is necessary to stand up for the rights of the matter, they may really be able to do so. When, therefore, there is any question about an anthroposophist’s attitude towards religious renewal, he must be clear that his attitude can only be that of an adviser, that he gives what he can give in the way of spiritual possessions, and when it is a case of participating in the ceremonies, that he is conscious of doing so in order to help these ceremonies on their way. He alone can be a spiritual helper of the Movement for Religious Renewal who is himself first a good anthroposophist. But this Movement for Religious Renewal must be sustained, in every direction, by persons who, because of the particular configuration and tendencies of their spiritual life, cannot yet find their way into the Anthroposophical Society itself.

I hope that none of you will now go to someone who is doing active work in the Movement for Religious Renewal and say: This or that has been said against it in Dornach.—Nothing has been said against it. In love and in devotion to the spiritual world the Movement for Religious Renewal has been given counsel from out of the spiritual world, in order that it might rightly found itself. But the fact must be known by Anthroposophists that it has founded itself out of itself, that it has formed—not, it is true, the content of its ritual, but the fact of its ritual, out of its own force and its own initiative, and that the essential core of the Anthroposophical Movement has nothing to do with the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Certainly no wish could be stronger than mine that the Movement for Religious Renewal shall grow and flourish more and more, but always in adherence to the original intentions. Anthroposophical Groups must not be changed into communities for religious renewal, either in a material or in a spiritual sense.

I was obliged to say this today, for, as you know, counsel and advice had to be given for a Cult, a Cult whose growth in our present time is earnestly desired by me. In order that no misunderstanding should arise in regard to this Cult when I speak tomorrow of the conditions of the life of Cult in the spiritual world, I felt it necessary to insert these words today as an episode in our course of lectures.

(The following night the first Goetheanum was destroyed by fire.)

I would have to read a book to you if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of intimate connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe. I will therefore only share the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and commitment to the cause. Some of them show how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated to the world from here. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to make this announcement here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly pain-stricken togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. They know them, of course. (The names were read out.)

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were episodically, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in my thoughts to the young and younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come here for this course are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they did on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. The younger friends are, for the most part, those who want to find their way to anthroposophical work from what is called spiritual life today. And in particular, I would like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge from within it – but hardly generated by it – to join with other people within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which anyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because they are also connected, on the other hand, with what is most urgently needed in our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who knows how to properly appreciate the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it must not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can benefit from it if he really tries with all his heart to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thus convince himself that everything imparted from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it is for individuals or perhaps an unlimited number of people to take this serious and difficult path in the present, on the other hand, anyone with unbiased, healthy human understanding can gain insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is completely based on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, so that the objection, which is quite invalid, does not seemingly gain validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for the human being to come to full awareness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that must be spoken of here; that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, more or less, than that the individual sciences approach younger people as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: Many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by, so to speak, more or less as a panorama, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It may sound paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so! For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the most dry of books or lectures can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by their own power, and this can happen even to the heart. But I must say: sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current field of knowledge, but – perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand – but also nothing for their minds.

Today, as a result of the development of natural science, which I have tried to characterize during this natural science course, we have arrived at a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, will be confronted with great world problems, world problems that are often, however, I would say, clothed in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths are present, must be solved as a riddle. Otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when properly approached to the soul and heart, that the highest striving can be kindled.

This is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the field of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present can affect the whole person that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely out of a particularly predisposed yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the natural science era they have reached a state in which, if a young person could devote themselves to them with a guide that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would at least give them what I would call a spiritual sense of breathlessness. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were to be brought to young people with at least a human interest, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once and for all so that further building can be done on them.

But man cannot help it, he is human, full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical and spiritual sciences at the academies themselves, and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in a fully human way. And from what would then live in young people, it would become clear all by itself that the anthroposophical form of science would also become the one necessary for us to advance in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main suffering they had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that for the majority, this suffering is the reason why they came to us. But for many, this suffering belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be caught up with. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth, one can no longer have in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What can replace what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us, to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present.

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know from your own conviction, that it needs you to do, or what you can become convinced of over time in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind, then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: Then you will be able to carry the consciousness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may express myself express myself, the talent will gradually emerge on the part of those within the Anthroposophical Society who, let us say, do not belong to it as young people, to develop a relationship with this youth in this or that respect.

But I believe there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: That the human being who today truly understands himself as a human being can indeed experience this within the Anthroposophical Society, which in turn must be taken seriously if civilization of humanity is to continue, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day that it almost sounds comical when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out that which is subtlest in the spiritual, that which exists outside of the physical and etheric bodies, when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. We will now disregard the significance of the life of sleep for a person here on earth. However, through anthroposophical spiritual science, it can become clear to a person that the subtle, substantial, which, imperceptible to the ordinary consciousness, between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry with him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world.

But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them according to how he has cultivated this spiritual-soul life. Oh my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world, those human soul beings also live a present existence, who are not in a physical body right now, but perhaps have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there, as we physical people are on earth. And in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do earthly people play a part, but so do those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. Just as we reach out our hands, so these beings reach their spirit hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents that deal with earthly matters are recorded, while the true history that unfolds on earth is influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world that are active in those who are between death and a new birth. We also work with people who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, so we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work that is to be done from the invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should realize that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life power; that it is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual, comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And this is not something that applies only to a particular category of people, it is something that certainly applies to young and old alike. But this also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that a spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other, then only will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us take resolutions into our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that sit so deep in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, if we want to make up for the great loss, we will need deeds.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when the young, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss. Let us endeavor to see the good and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength. Only in this way shall we make progress.

In the course of world history, there are symptoms that show internal developmental forces as if they were external phenomena. Sometimes such symptoms appear to be connected with internal developments in an external way. But the connections in the world, in the world of spirit, soul and matter, are so profound that often what appears externally can, on closer inspection, be taken as a real indication of the internal. And in this sense, the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno in the year 1600 may be mentioned as an outward sign of a momentous inner development. The flames of that funeral pyre shine, I might say, to the historical observer as a symbol pointing to the significant transformations that have taken place in the entire developmental history of mankind.

We must not forget that three human personalities appear to us as particularly characteristic of that period of transition from the 16th to the 17th century: a Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno; a shoemaker, Jakob Böhme; and a Lord Chancellor, Bacon, Baco of Verulam - three personalities who seem to be quite unlike each other, but precisely in their dissimilarity are extremely characteristic of what took place in the development of humanity during the emergence of the newer world view, during the twilight of the old world views.

Jakob Böhme had grown up in the simplest of folk conditions, and even as a boy he had listened with a fine spiritual ear to the many wisdoms that still lived in the people of Central Europe at that time, wisdoms that related as much to what people felt within themselves as to the secrets behind natural processes and natural things. All this folk wisdom was already in a state at the time when Jakob Böhme's fine spiritual ear could listen to it, that it was actually impossible to put the deep wisdom, the remnants of which Jakob Böhme still heard, into clear words, so that one was already compelled to express deep wisdom in stammering, often inadequately words. In the case of Jakob Böhme, one must bear in mind that he chewed on words in order to squeeze out of them something that he had actually only absorbed emotionally — I would say from the weight of them — and that this is the wisdom contained in popular tradition.

We see as a second personality Giordano Bruno - grown into the teachings that were particularly in the Dominican Order, those teachings which, now also based on ancient wisdom, brought insights into the relationship of man to the world in finely chiseled terms, which in themselves had a certain strength and intensity of knowledge, but were dulled by ecclesiastical tradition. And we see how, in the personality of Giordano Bruno, the whole urge and passion for knowledge of the age, the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, so to speak, works its way out of the soul with Faustian violence, how Giordano Bruno is so completely a child of his age , how, alongside the fact that the Dominican lives in him, he is, in the most eminent sense, a man of the world of that time, but precisely a man of the world in all the refinement in which one can be when one brings sharply defined, vividly developed ideas into the world. Perhaps no other personality of that time spoke as a result of the general character of the age as did Giordano Bruno. One need only look at how he is compelled, because he must speak from the fullness of world consciousness, but only has the narrowness of the human soul of his time available, to wrap the fine ideas that he absorbed during his studies in a poetic garment; how he becomes a poet of knowledge, a poetizing scientist, because at the moment when he wants to say something, such a rich spiritual content lives in him that this rich spiritual content goes beyond all concepts and he is compelled to surrender to the momentum of the poetic, the poetical, in order to express this abundance of light. |

And on the other hand, in Baco of Verulam, we see a man who has actually lost the ground under his feet, a man who is completely absorbed in the external life of his time. He is a statesman, a Lord Privy Seal; he is a man of great intelligence, but one that is not rooted in any tradition, which for the first time brings forth in a large-scale way that which a person like Fichte would later so despise – from his point of view, justly so: the banality of reason, the banality of rationalism.

Baco of Verulam actually introduced banality into philosophy in a clever way. As I said, he had completely lost the spiritual ground under his feet, had no tradition, he only took that as real which appeared to the senses, but was not yet able to extract anything spiritual from sensory experience. One might say that he was the reverse of Jakob Böhme. While Jakob Böhme, from the old spirituality, which was no longer understood, nevertheless wanted to strike sparks of the soul and also sparks of the material everywhere, wanted to find the secrets of the soul and the secrets of the material from old traditions, which he then uttered in a stammering manner, Baco of Verulam had nothing of the kind in him. He stood, as it were, with his soul like a tabula rasa, with a blank slate, facing the external, sensual world, applying the banality of ordinary human understanding, not of healthy, but of ordinary human understanding, to this external sense world, and nothing else came of it but the beginning of sensory knowledge, which is devoid of all spirituality.

Thus these three personalities stand as contemporaries. Jakob Böhme was born in 1575, Giordano Bruno, older than he, in 1548, and Lord Bacon in 1561. They represent modern civilization in its rising, each in his own special way.

Now, at the present time, when the descending forces are at their strongest, it is extremely difficult to point out the inner workings and life of such souls as these three. For much of what these souls lived in as still quite real spiritual views has now faded away. In the future, when history is looked back upon, it will certainly be characterized as follows: our age, because it is the culmination of materialism, also bears within itself the moral antithesis of this materialism. And this moral antithesis is certainly, on the one hand, the rampant immorality, but on the other hand, above all, the indifference towards everything spiritual. I draw special attention to this indifference because I intend to let these three lectures, which I am now going to give, culminate on Sunday in one that deals with the particular kind of opposition to the anthroposophical world view, and because I would like to create a basis for this today and tomorrow by means of a kind of historical approach.

This indifference to everything spiritual sometimes makes one wonder why people of our time still see anything special in Goethe's “Faust”, for example. It would actually be easier to understand if people of our time would simply say, in line with their views: Goethe's “Faust” belongs to a bygone age. Almost every page of Goethe's “Faust” contains a revelation of ancient superstition. There is a lot about magic and an alliance with the devil.

Now, our time has the excuse that it says: All this is poetic disguise. But on the other hand, our age does admit that Göethe wanted to depict something like a kind of representative of humanity in his Faust. So you have to say that you better understand the great scholar Du Bois-Reymond, who actually considered the whole of Faust to be some kind of nonsense and said: Faust should have become a decent person, married Gretchen honestly and invented the electrostatic generator and the air pump. — That is actually a more honest statement from the point of view of our age than what is very often said about Faust by people who share the views of this age. For they do it only because the opinion has been formed that Goethe's “Faust” is a great work that must not be thrown on the scrapheap. It is, as I said, the complacency that sometimes feels embarrassed, things that it should actually reject, really to reject.

Just imagine how our time would treat these things if such things did not have the traditional judgment attached to them! If Shakespeare had not written “Hamlet” and such a Hamlet drama by an obscure poet from some unknown depths were to appear today, then one would see what people would say about such a Hamlet drama.

Sometimes you really have to think seriously about such things in order to understand the time in the right way. This indifference, because it is embarrassed to do anything else, swings itself to a consideration of Mephistopheles in Goethe's “Faust” or occasionally lends itself to saying all sorts of inappropriate things about the magic in “Faust”. But to look into that which actually existed as a spiritual-soul atmosphere at a time when such decisive things for the spiritual life of modern civilization happened as in the time in which Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme and Baco von Verulam lived, that is actually impossible for the present time.

Now, if we want to look at something like this quite impartially, we have to realize the gigantic ideas that earlier ages had in relation to the present ones! Ideas that, precisely because of their gigantism, are no longer even worthy of indifference today, except perhaps when viewed from a literary-historical perspective.

Look back to the Middle Ages, look at a figure like Merlin! Immermann tried to revive this figure in his time, but the former gigantic stature is so reduced in Immermann that it seems as if everything was written in a dressing gown, with a nightcap on one's head.

Take just the simple straight line of the Merlin saga. What is Merlin to become? Merlin is to become an anti-Christ. He is to become one according to the legends of the Middle Ages: the antithesis of Christ. Christ, according to the Gospels, was born without physical fertilization. Merlin is to do the same. But Christ was born through the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Ghost; Merlin is to be born through the overshadowing of a pious nun by the devil in her sleep. The devil wants to create an antipode of Christ on earth in the person of Merlin; therefore he attacks a pious nun in her sleep. And Merlin does not become the Antichrist only because the nun is too pious. And it is precisely through her true and right morality that the devil's intention is prevented in Merlin.

Just try to realize what such lines mean within the medieval saga. They signify an inner boldness of world-view, an inner energy of thought-formation. Compare all that is said in our time, except in circles such as the anthroposophical ones, about the origin of evil in the world, about the origin of corruption in humanity, and you will have to admit: nothing is more justified than to say that the newer development is that of the philistines. For ultimately, apart from all philosophical inner rigor, with which the origin of evil is sometimes spoken of today, things are bourgeois in relation to an idea that is gigantically developed with regard to evil, like that of the creation of a Merlin, who is only, so to speak, a wayward son of the devil and therefore does not become evil enough.

Consider this: Merlin is one of the leaders of the Arthurian circle. The saga takes him as an aid to illuminate the character of an age. But the saga cannot find a way on earth to characterize this age accurately. Therefore it goes beyond the earthly, goes into the supersensible-evil, needs a wayward son of the devil to explain the earthly. |

I am not saying that we do not need similar elements of saga for our age. I am not saying that in order to characterize many things accurately, it would not be necessary to speak of similar creations. Even the Philistinism of modern times, in its origin and sources, does not need to be explained merely in earthly terms. For the peculiar thing about Philistinism is that its harmfulness is no more grasped by itself than its usefulness.

In the middle ages, the Eucharist controversy arose everywhere. I have already explained that people only began to discuss the Eucharist when they no longer knew what it contained. How one begins to discuss when one knows nothing about a matter. As long as one knows something about a matter, one does not discuss it. For someone who has a glimpse of the secrets of the world, discussions are always a sign of ignorance. So when people get together and discuss things, it is a sign to someone with insight that they all know nothing. As long as reality is there – and you can only know something about realities – you don't discuss. At least I have never heard that when the rabbit is on the table, people discuss whether it is a real rabbit or a not-real rabbit, or where the rabbit originated, or whether the rabbit is eternal, or arose in time, or the like, but they eat it; at most they quarrel over ownership, but not over any kind of knowledge. But behind this dispute about the Lord's Supper lies something quite different, and this very different aspect makes the ideas that one had for the interaction of people in turn seem gigantic compared to the philistine ideas of today, which are sometimes no less devilish, but are just philistine ideas.

People like Trithem of Sponheim, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Georgius Sabellicus, Paracelsus, they were not just slandered in an ordinary philistine way, but it was at least said of them that they were in league with the devil and that they could therefore practice magical arts that were feared. And so, behind the dispute about the Lord's Supper, we see fear of magic. This fear of magic, in turn, is connected with the advent of a new era, whose signature lies precisely with such spirits as Baco van Verulam, Giordano Bruno and Jakob Böhme.

What did they understand by a magician? A magician was understood to be a person who drew knowledge from within himself, through which he could control nature and possibly also people. But the spirit of modern civilization was directed towards making these inner cognitions, which were certainly there and which in those days still figured as remnants of ancient, instinctive clairvoyant insights, disappear, and to allow to arise that which can only be gained from external nature, not from human insight. There was tremendous fear of a person whom one could not observe as he handled all kinds of things, so he put together machines and the like. Because where one was able to see everything, one could also, so to speak, see how the insights entered his mind. Today, of course, this is common practice, because, isn't it, today one is no longer afraid of magic, because it is actually no longer there, because the inner sources of knowledge have already gone down completely. Today it is clear that it makes no difference whether you listen to a person who is imparting knowledge, i.e. listening to his humanity, or whether you watch him tinkering with the machines in the laboratory , because there you can see how the insights first enter his head; and that something else may still be in his head than what you can see is entering, that is not accepted. You always have to be able to see exactly what a person has in his head. Today this is a matter of course.

In Baco von Verulam's time, there were still people who had a certain inner wealth. Therefore, it was still worthwhile for Baco von Verulam to stir up the great campaign against such inner soul wealth and to point out what can come into a person from the outside. One is tempted to say that one is referred back to ancient times, when human minds were still considered to be full, and people wanted to know what was inside because they were convinced that what was inside could not be found outside in nature. And then along came Bacon and declared: That's nonsense, the human head is hollow throughout, everything that goes into it must go into it from the outside, from nature.

Now that was theory. In the early Middle Ages, however, there was a tremendous fear that something in man could grow independently within, that spirit could grow in man. No wonder that understanding of the mystery of the Lord's Supper was also completely lost, because something had to be done by man if a transformation from matter into something completely different was to take place.

And so we see how, especially in the controversy over the Lord's Supper, something very strange arises. In the early days of Christianity, the transformation of the bread and wine was accepted as something possible, as something real, by virtue of certain ideas that were there. These ideas were no longer there. Therefore, people began to ask: What could this be? And from then on it was to be carried out purely externally. The external now became the essential, which was already expressed by the fact that the reformers even quarreled among themselves about the form in which the Lord's Supper should be taken. The spirit was driven out of the ceremonies.

That was the first phase of materialism at all. What first came to light in materialistic terms in modern civilization was sacramentalism. That was where materialism actually first arose. And during this age, in which Bruno, Böhme and Bacon lived, was only to lay the foundation for a new spirituality, as an age that tends to show man spiritless matter in the laws of nature, so that man has to seek the spirit out of his own power, the first phase of this was that in all areas of life, one first extinguished the spirit, as it were, extinguished it above all in worship. And then this extinguishing continued into the profane areas of life.

But Goethe was still sensitive to all this, and in his “Faust” he created an echo of what was felt, in energetic terms, especially in this age, in the transition from the 16th to the 17th century. What did Goethe want to present in his “Faust”? The form is poetic, but what he wanted is more generally human than merely poetic. And it is not difficult for an unbiased mind to say what Goethe wanted in his “Faust”: he wanted to present the whole, the full human being to humanity itself. And so he summoned up this figure from the 16th century, the Faust figure, whom he actually only knew poorly from insufficient records when the impulse arose in him to write a “Faust”. He took this Faust figure from the 16th century because, emotionally, he was able to relate to the tremendous struggle that took place in the 16th century to somehow recover something that had been lost: namely, the human being.

And that was what each of these three was actually seeking. The Dominican friar, who had outgrown scholasticism, in which concepts had flourished to the point of the utmost abstraction, sought—by poeticizing them, elevating them to art, permeating them with feeling, but also with profound insight—to make these concepts come alive by actually wrestling with them: What is the world in man? What is man in the world? – That was the way it was with Giordano Bruno.

And that was basically the way it was with the shoemaker Jakob Böhme. He, too, sought the human being, but in the way he grew up, in those simple circumstances, which had much more of the human element than the circumstances of the “upper ten thousand”. He did not find it, this human being. And he immersed himself in popular wisdom, and what he was looking for was basically nothing more than the world in man, man in the world.

Only Bacon was not actually aware of this search for the human being, but he also sought him in a certain way. He even sought him in the way in which he is still sought by the leading natural philosophers of today. Bacon sought man by wanting to construct him as a kind of mechanism. Condillac, de Lamettrie, the natural philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, they build man atomistically out of individual natural processes, like a mechanism. According to the belief of these natural philosophers, something comes into being that, to the discerning mind, is nothing more than a kind of spectre in the evil sense, something that cannot live, that is actually a bag of concepts stuffed with abstractions.

Really, when you hear Bacon talk about man, it is as if he were just a bag of concepts stuffed with abstractions. But that is something, after all. It is also a search for the human being, even if it is a completely unconscious search. Even with Bacon, we find that he has relegated everything with which one used to try to understand the human being to the idols, that he is also searching for the human being. He does not know it clearly, but basically he is also searching for the world in the human being, for the human being in the world.

And what is it actually like, that each person searches in their own way for the human being in the world, for the world in the human being? — If we try to gain insight from Jakob Böhme, this search for the human being appears to us in the following way. We see how Jakob Böhme comes upon a person who is actually nowhere to be found. Through his stammering concepts, we come upon an image of a person who is nowhere to be found. And yet, this non-existent, seemingly non-existent person has an inner power of existence, a real inner power of existence. We believe in the man Jakob Böhme, even though we say to ourselves: the way Jakob Böhme speaks, for my sake, of the three elements of life, of salt, sulfur and mercury in man, is not the way a person in modern times is. But there is a being that Jakob Böhme fleshed out – one cannot say that he compiled it, but rather that he fleshed it out. And precisely in spiritual science one comes to ask: What is the reason for this being, of which Jakob Böhme speaks in a stammering manner? And then one comes to this: This is the human being of the pre-earthly existence. If one goes back to the spiritual science of the nature of man in the pre-earthly existence, then strange similarities emerge with what Jakob Böhme describes as the human being stammering. This human being, whom Jakob Böhme describes, cannot walk around on earth. But in the pre-earthly existence, he actually has a possible existence. It is just that, so to speak, in Jakob Böhme's description, not everything that makes up this pre-earthly human being is really there.

And so one would like to say: If one really gets into Jakob Böhme's description of man, how this human being appears in the pre-earthly existence, then one has the impression, especially with correct spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical knowledge: Jakob Böhme describes the pre-earthly human being. It is correct, but he describes him in such a way that he remains a theory, not an extensive theory, but an internal theory. It is the pre-earthly human being who cannot become an earthly human being, who actually dies spiritually before he can be born on earth. He cannot cross over to earth.

So one could also say: What Jakob Böhme describes of the pre-earthly human being is like wanting to have a memory of something one has experienced, and one cannot get to the bottom of it, no matter how hard one tries to bring up the memory again. So for Jakob Böhme the power was lost to conjure up the pre-earthly human being again. In earlier ages one could do it. Jakob Böhme had absorbed the folk tradition of such wisdom. But he could not achieve anything other than a pre-earthly human being who was stillborn in soul. The human ability to describe this human being as truly alive in his pre-earthly existence was no longer sufficient.

And Giordano Bruno, well, Giordano Bruno is actually not only a child of his time, but a human being in whom everything is completely present. One has the feeling with Giordano Bruno that everything in him is present, magnificent presence, present that encompasses the universe in space – but nothing past, nothing future. He experiences the world entirely in the present. He presents the universe as a present reality and would actually now also like to describe the man of the present from his stammering, poetizing words of knowledge. He is just as little able to do this as Jakob Böhme is able to describe the pre-earthly human being. But the seeds are there in Giordano Bruno to place the human being of the present, namely the earthly human being between birth and death, in the universe in such a way that he can be understood.

But here again we see the inability of human powers to grasp the whole man whose knowledge is the goal of their striving. But this man had to be grasped, for out of the comprehension of the terrestrial man must again spring the pre-existent man and the post-existent man. Of the post-existent man they had very little. This part was left closed to Bacon, to Baco of Verulam.

Just as the sleeping human being, when he is outside of the physical and etheric body in his ego and in his astral body, lives in the same world that we perceive with our eyes, with our entire sensory apparatus, how this sleeping human being, that is, his spiritual-soul, absorbs sleeping germs into himself for the life that he will unfold when he has passed through the portal of death, but as what is actually taken in from the immediate present for the future is closed to man for ordinary consciousness, so for the first approach of modern science, as it appears in Baco von Verulam, all that is closed is what is future, but what nevertheless lives unconsciously, even if denied, in sensory knowledge. And from sense knowledge must be drawn the knowledge of post-existence, of existence after death. Bacon is not yet able to do this, he has no spiritual power at all. Therefore, as I said, his man becomes a bag of concepts, stuffed with abstractions. It is the most imperfect of what must one day be achieved at the end of this age — which must strive towards spirituality, but now out of knowledge of nature: this, what emerges in Baco von Verulam.

Thus we see how, in the case of Jakob Böhme, the pre-earthly man is approached in an imperfect way, and in the case of Giordano Bruno, the present-day earth man, the man between birth and death, is approached in a grandiose but equally imperfect way, and how, in the case of Bacon, there is still unconsciousness of what is to come to life one day, but which still appears to him as a completely dead product. For you see, what Bacon describes as man, that does not live on earth, that is a ghost on earth. But when it will be described in its perfection, then it will be the human being in the after-earth existence.

If we take these three spirits, who truly represent a wonderful triumvirate at the turn of the 16th to the 17th century, especially if we take their origin — the man of the people Jakob Böhme, the Dominican Giordano Bruno, who emerged from the spiritual training of the time , and Baco of Verulam, who stood on the heights of outward social life but had lost the ground under his feet. If we also understand from these social conditions how they were able to arrive at their views in different ways, then we find a remarkable destiny fulfilled in them.

We see the man of the people, Jakob Böhme, fighting throughout his life for that which still lives in the people, but lives in a stammering way and is treated with hostility. Yet the struggle continues latently: fundamentally, Jakob Böhme does not step out of the circles of folklore.

Baco von Verulam, an intellectually magnificent man, the representative of the modern world view, loses himself morally, goes astray morally, and is an honest representation of man in so far as this kind of scientific approach was bound to go astray morally. Only the others are not as honest as he is in the demon; for I do not want to claim that he was honest.

And in between, Giordano Bruno, who pointed not to the past nor to the future, but to the present, where he sought to grasp the germ from which the future view of the world must develop. With him it appears still in its embryonic state. But the forces clinging to the old were to crush this germ in its birth. And so we see how the burning Giordano Bruno is a historic monument of magnificent kind, as the burning Giordano Bruno indicates: something must come of it. And that which was to come, which impelled him to utter these words: You may kill me, but my ideas will not be killed in centuries to come — that must also live on. And in this way, external symptoms, which appear to be only externalities in historical development, are nevertheless deeply rooted in the development of humanity. It is expressed in these Giordano Bruno flames how a new impulse must be received by the old, if one really understands the whole configuration of the old.

I wanted to describe to you what actually happened inwardly, what people actually wanted to burn. Well, our time has indeed erected an external Giordano Bruno monument on the site of the former Giordano Bruno flames. But the point is that we should now really understand what was killed back then, but should and must live - live, however, in further development, not in the same form in which it existed back then.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 15, Number 3, Autumn 1970.

In the lectures given here just before the burning of the Goetheanum I spoke to you of man’s connection with the course of the year and of other related subjects.¹ As a continuation of those lectures I want to take your minds back again today to an epoch of history which we have often studied and which must be thoroughly understood if genuine insight into the present phase of the evolution of humanity is to be acquired.

We have heard that certain processes taking place in the human being can be recognised in the ever-repeated happenings of the course of the year. I also said that it was the aim of earlier Mystery-science, Initiation-science, to spread such knowledge among persons able to accept it. By spreading this knowledge the aim was to strengthen man’s thinking, feeling and willing, to strengthen his foothold and position in the world.

We may ask: Why was it that in earlier times human beings were able by their very nature to understand the relation of man the microcosm, to the great world, the macrocosm, as this relation is expressed in the seasonal course of the year? For there was indeed such understanding. This was because in those ancient times man’s inner life, his life of soul, was more closely linked with the etheric or formative forces body than is the case today.

You will remember from the outline which I was able to give in the lectures of the so-called French Course,² that when man has passed through the supersensible life between death and a new birth, when he has sent down to Earth the spirit-seed of his physical body, while he himself, as a being of soul-and-spirit before conception, has not yet descended, he gathers together from the Cosmos the forces of the cosmic ether and with them builds his etheric body which he thus possesses before he unites with his physical body. Thus as man descends from the supersensible worlds as a being of soul-and-spirit, he first envelops himself with an etheric body. Then he unites the physical body given him through the physical stream of inheritance by the father and mother.

In earlier ages of evolution the union into which man could enter with the etheric body before his actual earthly life was far more intimate than it was in later times and is today. And it was because of this more intimate union with the etheric body that it was possible for an earlier humanity to understand what was meant when from the Mysteries it was proclaimed: the physical Sun seen by the bodily eyes is the physical expression of a spiritual reality. Men understood what was meant by the ‘Sun Spirit’. They understood it because when that intimate union between the human soul-and-spirit and the etheric body was still present it would have seemed absurd to expect man to believe that somewhere up in universal space there hovered that physical globe of gas of which modern astrophysics speaks today. To those human beings of an earlier epoch it would have seemed a matter of course that to this physical phenomenon there belongs a spiritual reality and it was this spiritual reality which in all the ancient Mysteries was recognised and revered as the Sun Spirit.

We can point to the fourth century after Christ as the epoch when human beings descending from the supersensible world were no longer united in this intimate way with the etheric body. (These details are only approximately accurate, although in essentials they are correct). There was now a looser union and for this reason the time drew nearer and nearer when in their earthly life too men could use only the physical body when gazing at the Heavens. In earlier times when they looked up to the Heavens they too beheld the Sun but an impulse arose from within them not to see this Sun as a merely physical phenomenon but to recognise soul-and-spirit in the Sun. After the fourth century A.D., however, men could use only the physical body, the physical eyes, when they gazed at the Sun, for their sight was no longer borne and sustained by the power of the etheric body. Hence as time went on they saw merely the physical Sun and to teach of a Sun Spirit was possible only because this had been known by men in earlier epochs and the tradition still survived.

Julian the Apostate was one who learnt from his teachers of the Sun Spirit. But we know that in the Mystery of Golgotha this Sun Spirit came down to the Earth. He transferred the course of His heavenly life to the Earth, changed it into a course of earthly life. For since the Mystery of Golgotha His activity has been concerned with guiding the evolution of mankind in the sphere of the Earth.

You will notice that the two points of time do not coincide. The Mystery of Golgotha tells us, when we look back at it today, that it was then that Christ, the sublime Sun Being, united Himself with Earth-existence. Popularly expressed: since that point of time, Christ has been on the Earth.

Vision of the Sun Spirit was possible to men until the fourth century A.D., because up to then they were still intimately united with the etheric body, as I have already said. And although Christ Himself was already on the Earth, until well into the fourth century the etheric body still enabled men to behold His after-image in the Sun. Just as in the physical world when we gaze at some object and then shut our eyes, the eyes retain an after-image, so in personalities in whom this faculty had remained, the etheric body retained an after-image of the great Sun Spirit when such men looked up into the Heavens. Hence those human beings who were still closely united with their etheric body – and there were many, especially in the regions of Southern Europe, Northern Africa and Asia Minor – realised from actual experience: The Sun Spirit is to be seen when our eyes gaze into the heavenly expanse. And they could not understand what it meant when the teachers and leaders of those other Mysteries of which I spoke during the French Course declared that Christ was on the Earth.

You must remember that nearly four centuries had elapsed since the Mystery of Golgotha, during which time, for the reason I have just given, a large number of sound human beings were unable to make anything of the declaration that Christ had appeared on Earth. What had taken place in Palestine was for them an insignificant event, just as insignificant as it was for the Roman writers who merely mentioned it as an aside. The death of an individual of no importance had taken place under unusual circumstances. The men of whom

I am speaking simply did not understand the depths of the Mystery. It can be said that these men did not need the Christ on Earth for in the old sense He was still there for them in the Heavens. For them He was still the Cosmic Spirit, the Spirit working in the light. For them He was the all-embracing illuminator of mankind. There was still no need for them to look into the human being and seek Him in the ego.

A man who could not grasp why Christ should be sought in a human being on the Earth since He was obviously to be sought in the Heavens, living in the light which from sunrise shines daily upon the Earth and ceases to shine at sunset – such a man was Julian the Apostate. For him, and others of his kind, what had taken place in Palestine was an event on a par with any other historical event, but altogether insignificant. For such men it was an ordinary, actually unimportant event, for the need for Christ was not yet alive in them.

When was it that the need for Christ began to live in men? This is what we shall be thinking about today. When could the need for Christ arise in mankind at all?

Let us now think of the successive epochs of earthly evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe. The catastrophe took place in the eighth/ninth millennium before Christ and after it we come to the first post-Atlantean civilisation-epoch which in the book Occult Science I called the ancient Indian epoch. In that ancient time man lived paramountly in his etheric body. His union with the etheric body was so close that we can say quite simply: man lived in the etheric body. His life was such that the physical body was really more like a garment for him, something quite external. He looked out into the world far more with his etheric eyes than with his physical eyes.

The second period was the ancient Persian epoch. Man now looked into his environment mainly through the sentient body. In the third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, he looked into the world with the help of the Sentient Soul, and at length, in the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, he looked into the world with the powers of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

In our own fifth civilisation-epoch since the fifteenth century, which we may call the historic present, man looks into the world with the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. This brings about the results I have described in their historic sequence in the Natural Science Course.³

But we must now be clear about what this really signifies. The soul makes itself felt to begin with in the etheric body. In the first epoch man is still living altogether in the etheric body. Then he lives in the sentient body. But this, in reality, is still immersed in the etheric body. Only in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch does he begin to live in the soul itself, but even now the soul is still living in the etheric body. In this epoch, when man experiences himself inwardly as a being of soul, he still feels half immersed in the etheric body.

It is in the Graeco-Latin epoch that in his life of soul man grows out of and beyond the etheric body. The etheric body is still within him, of course, until about the year A.D. 333. Then he begins to grow beyond the etheric body in such a way and to such an extent that his soul is only loosely united with it; there is no longer a strong, inner union. In the outer world the soul feels deserted, being obliged to go out into the world without the support of the etheric body. And it is now that the need for Christ arises. Man’s soul is no longer united with the etheric body so he no longer sees the great Sun Spirit, does not even see His afterimage when he looks out into the Heavens.

But world-evolution is a very gradual process, lasting for long, long periods of time. From the fourth century onwards the soul was as it were inwardly emancipated from the etheric body but not yet strengthened in itself; it was still inwardly weak. And if we survey the centuries, the fifth, sixth and seventh, right on into the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even on into our own time (but we will consider primarily the period until the fifteenth century) we find the human soul inwardly emancipated, it is true, but weak and ineffectual. It feels the need for something but is not strong enough yet to meet this need from its own inner forces, not strong enough yet to seek the Christ, not, as formerly, in the Sun, but now in the Mystery of Golgotha; to seek Him, not in cosmic space but in the course of Time. The soul of man had to grow inwardly strong enough to develop forces within itself. Through all the centuries until the fifteenth, man was not strong enough to develop inner forces whereby he could have acquired understanding of the world through his own soul. Hence he was content to gather knowledge from the writings left by the ancients, from surviving traditions.

This is something we must bear in mind. The soul of man had to grow strong. In the fifteenth century it had reached the point of being able to experience as its own what it was no longer able to experience through the etheric body or through the etheric body out of the physical body, namely, the mathematical domain which it could now experience as abstraction. With this experience mankind has not yet achieved a great deal. But as you will be aware, it is now a totally different kind of experience. It is the impulse, out of the innermost soul itself, to arrive at something which mankind had not been able to reach in ancient times by using the etheric body with which the soul had been so intimately united.

Men had to grow inwardly strong enough to reach the Christ, whereas in earlier times the etheric body had enabled them to behold Him s He appeared in the Sun. We may therefore say that up to the fourth century A.D. it was precisely the most highly cultured men who were unable to make anything of the tidings about the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is interesting to be able to say that neither the Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christ nor the Emperor Julian’s rejection of Him was based on any firm ground. The historian Zozimus even goes so far as to declare that Constantine himself went over to Christianity because he had committed so many crimes against his family that the priests of the old religion refused to pardon him. He therefore broke away from the old Paganism and its priests, the Christian priests having promised him that they would be able to forgive his iniquities. This was hardly a very valid foundation for the adoption of Christianity. Indeed one can truly say that it was by no means out of a deep or intense need for Christ that Constantine turned his allegiance to Him.

In Julian’s case it only required initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries – an initiation which by that time was a very external matter – to fill him with enthusiasm for the Sun Spirit in the form in which that Spirit had been known. In his case too, therefore, the foundation of it was not really profound, although Julian did indeed acquire remarkable insight through his initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis. But in regard to the Christ question, neither the pros nor the cons were at that time really powerful or profound, for men simply did not know the meaning of the statement that Christ must now be sought for in history, in the body of a man.

And again, from the fourth century onwards, when their souls were inwardly emancipated but not strong enough as yet, men could find no other way to the Christ or indeed to any explanation of the world – for this had to be entirely recast – than through historical tradition, written and oral tradition, largely oral tradition, since few were cognisant of the written traditions and interpreted them to others by word of mouth.

This state of things remained for many centuries, indeed so far as perceptive understanding of Christ is concerned it remains so to this day. But it is of great significance that the soul had become free. Although in history it is true that every change has its preliminaries and its after-effects, nevertheless the year A.D. 333 can be cited as the point of time when the emancipation of the soul became a reality in the more advanced men. But the soul was still too lacking in strength to acquire any inner knowledge by its own efforts. In those times, when a man pondered earnestly and deeply about the surviving traditions and teachings, he could say: ‘Quite a short time ago there were people who still beheld divine-spiritual reality in the Sun. But I see nothing. Those to whom this divine-spiritual reality was revealed drew from it a wealth of other knowledge – mathematical knowledge, for example. My soul does indeed feel itself independent but it cannot yet muster its own forces to acquire such knowledge.’

In the fifteenth/sixteenth century the important symptom was that people began at least to for-mulate mathematical-mechanistic knowledge by using the forces of the soul itself. And Copernicus was the first to apply to the structure of the Heavens what he experienced through an emancipated soul. All earlier cosmologies had been evolved by souls not yet emancipated from the etheric body, who were still using the faculties of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and who were thus able to apply the powers of the etheric body to look out into the Universe. The Intellectual or Mind-Soul was still active until well into the fifteenth century, but men could make use only of the physical body, the physical eyes, when they gazed upwards to the Heavens. These are the reasons why through all the centuries to this very day, knowledge of Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha could be transmitted only by scripture or oral tradition.

And now – what have we gained as yet through the soul which has become gradually stronger since the fourth/fifth century? External mechanistic knowledge, physical knowledge, of which I spoke in the Course on Natural Science. But now the time has come when the soul must become even stronger; for whereas in earlier days, when gazing up into the Heavens with the help of the etheric body the soul beheld in the physical Sun the Spirit Sun, so now, gazing inwardly into the ego it must feel, behind the ego, the Christ. By physical eyes the physical Sun is seen and by the eyes belonging to the etheric body, the Sun Spirit, the Christ, is seen.

When man looks into himself today he finds the ego. He is aware of the ego, has a feeling of the ego, but it is very shadowy. This feeling of the ego was an experience which first arose in the emancipated soul. Formerly man had looked out into the world; now he must look into his own inner being. Gazing out into the world brought him into touch with the Sun and with the Christ, the Sun Spirit; gazing inward has brought him, so far, into touch only with the ego. He must now reach the stage of finding behind the ego the reality of being which in ancient times the Sun revealed to him. The Christ he once experienced in the light from sunrise to sunset, the illuminator of his life, he must now feel radiating as a light from within himself, from his own ego. In Christ he must find the strong support of his ego.

And so we may say: Formerly man gazed outwards to the Sun and found the Christ-filled light. Now he feels his way into his own being and must learn to recognise and experience the Christ-filled ego. True, we are at the very beginning of this development and we must remember what Anthroposophy tells mankind, namely that the centuries since the fourth century A.D. have been an intermediate period. In the previous centuries men were able to look out into the Heavens and find the Christ as the Sun Spirit in outer space. Now that these intermediate centuries are past a new humanity must arise. Men must find the way into their own inmost being and along this path find the inner Sun, the Christ; for He now appears when the ego is experienced as in former ages He was revealed in the Sun. He who was once the Sun Spirit is now the pillar and support of the ego.

With the fourth century, in that humanity which was gradually evolving out of the Graeco-Latin races, there began the need for Christ which at first could find satisfaction only through written or oral tradition. But today, especially for the more advanced members of humanity, this written and oral tradition has lost its power of conviction. Today, therefore, men must learn to find the Christ inwardly, even as a humanity of olden times found Him outwardly through the Sun and its light. It is important to understand the intermediate centuries during which the soul of man was independent but in a certain sense empty of content. When the soul looked out into the Universe while endowed with the power of the etheric body, it could not possibly perceive in the phenomena of the Heavens that mechanistic-mathematical system which subse-quently became the Copernican system. Everything was perceived in far closer union with the human being. And the result was not some arbitrary cosmic system abstracted entirely from the human being, but the system which then, already decadent, became known as the Ptolemaic.

But when the soul began no longer to be rooted in the cosmic ether with its own etheric body, a new mental attitude in man was gradually being prepared. And this mentality subsequently pro-duced a science of the stars in which it was a matter of indifference whether man is related or is not related to the Heavens. The one and only tribute paid by this transformed mentality to ancient times was that men placed the starting-point of the new system in the Sun. Through Copernicus, the Sun was made the centre of the Universe – not of the spiritual but of the physical Universe. This indicates the existence of a dim feeling that once upon a time the Sun, with the Christ, was felt to be the centre of the Universe. We must not, as has gradually become the custom nowadays, study the external aspect of history only; we must also pay attention to the development of inner feelings, inner perceptiveness, in human beings.

If we really understand how to read Copernicus, in whom this element of feeling was obviously present, we realise that he did not merely calculate. He was aware of an urge to restore to the Sun something of the old glory. This inner impulse led him to the discovery of three laws, the third of which actually makes everything that is said in the first and second, questionable and uncertain. For Copernicus had formulated a third law, which subsequent astronomy, reducing everything to a mechanistic system, simply omitted. This was a law according to which the movement of the Earth around the Sun was by no means described in such absolute terms as it is today. For today, as I have often said, the whole matter is regarded as a simple fact of observation, as if one were to place a gigantic chair far out in cosmic space, view the Sun from there with the Earth circling around it. But the chair would have to be far out in cosmic space and sitting on it the pedant, observing the system from outside. This could not, of course, be regarded as a result of observation at all. Copernicus himself, if I may put it so, had a conscience in these matters not quite as stubborn or hardened as those who later on mechanised the whole structure of the Universe. Moreover he cited phenomena which indicate that this movement of the Earth around the Sun is not, after all, absolute and unconditional. But as I said, this third law was simply ignored and suppressed by later science. The scientists confined themselves to the first two laws – the rotation of the Earth on its own axis and around the Sun – thus obtaining a very simple system which in this form was gradually introduced into the schools. Needless to say, there is no question here of raising opposition to the Copernician system. Its advent was a necessity in the course of evolution. But today the time has come when we must speak of these matters as I tried to do in the Course of lectures on Natural Science and Astronomy, given in Stuttgart.⁴ I showed that we must think about these things quite differently from what is possible in the field of materialistic science today.

In Copernicus himself, in the whole conception of his system, there is still an element of feeling. After all, he did not wish to apply a purely mathematical system of co-ordinates to our solar system with the Sun at the centre. He wanted to give back to the Sun what had been taken away from it because men were no longer able to behold the Christ in the Sun.

Such things as these should show you how necessary it is to observe not only the external facts and the change in men’s thinking in the course of history, but also the change in their feelings. This was especially striking when the mechanistic principle came decisively to the fore. In Copernicus, and notably in Kepler, these elements of feeling are still perceptible and in Newton very emphatically so. A few days ago in the lectures on science I explained how Newton subsequently became rather ill at ease with his mathematical natural philosophy. To begin with he had conceived of space as being permeated with purely mathematical-mechanistic forces, but later on, after reading through what he had written he became uneasy about such an abstract conception, and he thereupon declared that what he had thus posited as abstract space with the three abstract dimensions, was in reality the Sensorium Dei – the Sensorium of God. Newton had grown a little older. These ultra-mathematical ideas pricked his conscience and he now declared space to be the most important realm in the brain of God: the Sensorium.

It was not until later that men of knowledge were judged entirely as thinkers, the element of feeling being ignored altogether. But this ought not to have happened in the case of Newton, above all not in that of Leibnitz and the natural scientists of that time. And anyone who reads a life of Galileo will find on every page how human nature in its fullness was at all times active. Man as a thinking apparatus, feeding himself as such with the results of experiment and observation as any steam-engine is fed with coal, man as a thinking apparatus does not appear on the scene until a later time, and only then becomes the authoritative leader in science which is said to be free of a priori premises. And it is indeed free of a priori premises of true knowledge.

The soul is no longer the empty soul which it became in the fourth century of the Christian era. It is no longer empty for it has filled itself with a multitude of mathematical-mechanistic ideas. But to all this, something must be added: the inner light must be found within the ego, which in order to avoid speaking merely in a figurative or symbolic sense, we should call the Being who is the pillar and support of the soul.

And here we come to something that became more and more apparent in the course of the cen-turies and is strong today but is cast by men who have dulled their senses to sleep into the sub-conscious foundations of their souls. It is: the need for Christ. Only a spiritual knowledge, a knowledge of the spiritual Universe, can satisfy this need for Christ. A characteristic of our own age, the twentieth century, is the need for Christ and with it the inner effort of the soul to muster the power to find the Christ in the ego, or behind the ego, even as in past times He was found in the Sun.

The relation of men to the Sun Spirit in the Graeco-Latin epoch was in the state of evening twilight. For it was in the ancient Indian epoch that men beheld the Sun Spirit with full clarity of vision. We ourselves are living in an age when we should be aware of a dawn – the dawn of the true knowledge of Christ won by man’s own forces. The ancient knowledge of the Sun Spirit which Julian the Apostate still wished to galvanise into new life, can no longer afford any satisfaction to mankind. Even the endeavours of Julian were in vain because of the march of evolution. But the epoch of the first four centuries of our era, when men did not know what to make of Christ and the following epoch when they already felt the need for Him but could satisfy this need only through written or oral tradition – these epochs must be followed by the new age in which there is understanding for words in the Gospel such as these: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.’

An age must come which understands what Christ meant when He said: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of earthly time.’ For verily Christ is not dead; He is alive and He speaks not through the Gospels only. He speaks for the eye of Spirit, when the eye of Spirit opens again to the mysteries of man’s existence. Then He is present at all times, speaks and reveals Himself. Truly it is a feeble humanity that will not strive for the time when men can be told what they could not be told two thousand years ago because they were not then able to bear it. As souls they were still in a condition which made it impossible for them to understand what Christ was offering to humanity. Certainly, those immediately around Him could understand something of it. But the Gospel was given for all beings and the saying just quoted resounds through the whole world.

We must strive to promote a humanity which puts the living Christ in the place of mere tradition. But even without discrediting tradition, nothing could be more unchristian than repeatedly to declare that only what has actually been written down has validity, thus ignoring the revelation of Christ that comes from the spiritual world today, speaking to our thinking as it strives for illumination, to our feeling heart, and to the fullness of manhood in our will.

• 1. English translation published by Anthroposophic Press, Inc. New York, with the title: Man and the World of Stars. The spiritual Communion of Mankind.
• 2. Ten lectures given from 6 to 15 September 1922. A précis of the contents written by Dr. Steiner himself is translated into English and published with the title: Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy.
• 3. A Course of nine lectures given in Dornach during December 1922 and January 1923, entitled: Natural Science in the History of the World. Its moment of origin and subsequent development. A translation by George Adams is contained in Anthroposophical Movement, vols. VI (1929) and VII (1930).
• 4. Eighteen lectures, January 1921, entitled: The Relation of the different Sciences to Astronomy. When the German text is published by the Nachlassverwaltung, the bibliographical number will be 323. A provisional translation is available in typescript only.