The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have sought out of the esoteric aspect of the Easter thought to speak to you about how, when the course of Nature is permeated by spirit, it must come about that an autumn festival is added to the festivals of the year. This should be a kind of Michael festival, placed in relation to the fall equinox approximately in the same way as Christmas is to the winter solstice, Easter to the spring equinox, and St. John's to the summer solstice.

I should like to try to bring closer to you the Easter thought appropriate to the present age, particularly in its feeling content, so that tomorrow I can lay before you the whole significance of such a contemplation.

When we celebrate the Easter festival today, if we look about us into the consciousness of contemporary humanity and are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that the Easter thought is actually very little true for the greater part of humanity! On what does the truth of the Easter thought depend? The truth depends on a man's being able to link with this thought a mental image showing the Christ Being as having gone through death, having conquered Death, and then when He had undergone death and the succeeding Resurrection, having thereafter so united Himself with mankind that He could still give revelations to those who had formerly been His disciples, to the Apostles. But the Resurrection thought has more and more faded away, whereas when Christianity was in its inception it had been so living that Paul's words could sound across the ages from this epoch: “And if the Christ be not risen, then is... your faith vain!”

Paul has here linked Christianity directly with the Easter thought, that is with the thought of the Resurrection. People who have received the education of the present day call the Resurrection a miracle, and as miracle it is excluded from the realm of what is or can be reality. So that for all those who can no longer penetrate to the Resurrection thought, the Easter festival merely reflects an ancient custom, as do the rest of the Christian festivals. In the course of the years we have mentioned this from the most varied points of view.

It will first be necessary for mankind to reacquire a knowledge of the spiritual world as such in order to understand events which do not belong to the realm of sense reality; and what is connected with the Resurrection thought must be regarded as such an event. Then it will be possible for the Easter thought to become truly living again, which it cannot be for a humanity that relegates the Resurrection to the realm of unreal miracles.

The Easter thought arose in those epochs of mankind in which there were still remnants of the ancient primitive human knowledge of the spiritual world. We know that at the beginning of human earth-evolution, man had a certain instinctive clairvoyance by means of which he could gain glimpses of the spiritual world which led him to view this world as of equal validity with the physical sense world. This original instinctive clairvoyance is lost for earthly humanity. But in the first three centuries of the Christian era, the last remnants of it at least still existed. Hence in these centuries a certain understanding of the Easter thought based upon ancient human insight could still take root.

Such an understanding became blunted in the fourth century, when preparation began for what has come to full expression since the first third of the fifteenth century; namely, man's life in abstract, dead thoughts, which we have often mentioned. In these abstract, dead thoughts, in which natural science attains greatness, the Easter thought soon died. Today the time has come when it must again awaken as a living thought. But in order to awaken, it must pass over out of the state of death into a state of livingness.

That which is living is characterized by the fact that it puts forth something other than itself out of itself. In the early Christian centuries, when the Easter thought was spreading throughout Christendom, the “Gemuets”¹ of men were still sensitive enough to experience inwardly something very powerful when they pictured the grave of Christ and, rising out of the grave, that Being Who was now united with mankind. The Gemuets could experience with great inner force what appeared before their souls in this powerful image. And this inner experience was a reality in the human soul life.

Only that is a reality in the human soul life which this soul really lays hold of, just as the senses ordinarily lay hold of the outer sense world. The people of the early centuries felt that they were changed by beholding the event of the Death and the Resurrection of Christ. They felt that by this sight their souls were transformed, just as a man feels that he is changed by physical events in the course of his life on earth.

The human being is transformed at about the seventh year by the change of teeth, and again at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year by the onset of puberty. These are bodily transformations. In the contemplation of the Easter thought the early Christians felt themselves transformed in their inner soul life. They felt themselves thereby lifted out of one stage of human existence and transported into another.

In the course of time the Easter thought has lost this force, this power, and it can regain it only when the Resurrection, which cannot be understood according to natural laws, regains reality through spiritual science, a science which comprehends the spiritual. But what is spiritually conceived attains reality, not when this spiritual is conceived merely in abstract thoughts but only when it is also grasped in lively connection with the world appearing before the senses.

Anyone who wants to cling to the spiritual only in its abstraction, who says, for example, that we should not pull down the spiritual into the physical sense world, should at the same time maintain that the Divine Being is degraded when He is represented as having created the world. The Divine is comprehended in its greatness and power, not when we place it outside and beyond the sensible, but when we ascribe to it the power to work in this sensible world, to permeate this sensible world creatively. It is a debasing of the Divine to want to set it up yonder in abstract heights, in a “cloud-cuckoo-land.” And we will never live in spiritual realities if we conceive the spiritual only in its abstractness, if we cannot bring it into connection with the whole course of the world as this comes to meet us.

And this cosmic course, as far as our earthly life is concerned, meets us first of all in the fact that this earthly life comprises a certain number of years, and that these years present the return of certain events in a regular rhythm, as I indicated yesterday. After a year we return to approximately the same conditions of weather, of sun-position, and so forth. The course of the year thus enters into our earthly life in a rhythmical way.

We saw yesterday that this course of the year represents an in-and-out-breathing by the Earth itself of soul-spiritual elements. If we picture to ourselves once more the four high points of this Earth breathing-process, as we allowed them to come before our souls, we must say to ourselves: The time of the Christmas festival represents the time when the Earth holds its breath within it. The soul-spiritual part of the Earth is completely absorbed. Deep in the bosom of the Earth there rests all that the Earth unfolded during summer in order to let it be stimulated by the cosmos. All that opened up to the cosmos and was yielded up to its forces during the summertime has now been completely drawn in by the Earth, to rest in her deeps at Christmas time. Man of course does not dwell in the earthly depths; physically he lives on the surface of the Earth. Soul-spiritually also, he does not dwell in the depths of the Earth, for he lives actually in the Earth's periphery; he lives in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth.

Therefore esoteric wisdom has always recognized the essential being of the Earth at the time of the winter solstice, at Christmas time, as something concealed at first, as something which cannot be penetrated by the ordinary forces of human knowledge, something which belongs in the sphere of the esoteric mysteries. And in all ancient times when something comparable to our present Christmas festival existed, it was recognized that what goes on in connection with the Earth at Christmas time could be grasped only by initiation into mystery-knowledge, by the initiation still known in Greece as the Chthonian Mysteries. By means of this initiation, man forsook in a certain way the periphery of the Earth in which he lived with his ordinary consciousness, to immerse himself in something into which he could not submerge physically. He immersed himself in the soul-spiritual element, and thus he learned to know what the Earth becomes during midwinter, when she draws her soul-spiritual element into herself.

And then a man came to know through this Mystery initiation, that at the time of the winter solstice the Earth is especially receptive to permeation by the Moon forces. This was regarded as the secret—if I may express myself in the modern sense—as the Christmas secret of the ancient mysteries: that just at Christmas time one comes to know how the Earth, by being permeated and saturated by her spirit-soul-being, becomes especially receptive in her inner being to the activity of the Moon forces.

In certain ancient times, for example, no one was entrusted with a knowledge of healing science unless he was initiated in the Winter Mysteries, and understood how the Earth, through the holding of her breath, becomes especially susceptible inwardly to the activity of the Moon forces, how at this time she permeates especially the plants with healing forces, how at this time she makes the plant world, and to a certain extent also the world of the lower animals into something entirely different.

The Christmas initiation was felt as a descent into the depths of the earthly world. But something else was connected with this Christmas initiation; namely, something that was felt in a certain sense to be a danger for the human being. A man said to himself: “When anyone really observes his consciousness in connection with what lives in the Earth as Moon forces at Christmastime, he comes into a state of consciousness in which he must be inwardly very strong, must have inwardly fortified himself, in order to withstand the attack from all sides of the Ahrimanic powers, who live in the Earth precisely because of its having taken in the Moon activity.” And only in the strength which a man had himself developed in his soul-spiritual being, in the strength to break the opposition of these forces, did he see what makes it possible to endure his earth existence over the long run.

But then some time after the celebration of these Christmas Mysteries, the teachers of the Mysteries gathered their pupils together, and as a sort of revelation, said to them the following: “Certainly, through initiation one can, in full consciousness, behold what is at work within the Earth at the time of the winter solstice. But with the oncoming of spring, when the plant world starts to grow, something rises up out of the depths of the Earth which permeates all that is growing and sprouting, permeates also man himself; namely, what the Ahrimanic powers bring about. At a time when man was still endowed with divine forces, as he was at the Earth's beginning, then through this primordial divine heritage men could still resist the attack of the Ahrimanic powers which broke over mankind in this way during the time of the winter moon. But (so the initiates told their pupils) a time will come when mankind will be rendered insensible to the spiritual through the agency of the Moon forces which the Earth takes up in the wintertime. With the growing and sprouting in the spring, a kind of intoxication with regard to the spiritual will come over mankind, depriving men of any consciousness that anything spiritual exists. Then, should mankind not find it possible to resist these intoxicating forces, the humanity of the Earth will go into decline and not be able to develop further with the Earth to future higher stages of earth evolution.”

The initiates painted in gloomy colors the age which had to break in for humanity in the fifteenth century, when mankind will excel to be sure in abstract, dead thoughts, but when man can again acquire spiritual capacities only by gaining new strength to overcome the intoxicating forces that rise out of the Earth. This he can do by developing the particular spiritual force now accessible to mankind.

When we form such visualizations, we transpose ourselves, so to speak, into the connection that exists between the course of the year in nature and what lives in the spirit. We bring together what is otherwise abstract, merely thought-out, with what is the natural sensible course as it confronts us, for example, in the seasons.

The polar opposite of this Christmas Mystery is the St. John's Mystery, at the time of the summer solstice. Then the Earth has completely exhaled. The spirit-soul element of the Earth is then utterly surrendered to the super-earthly powers, to the cosmic powers. Then the spirit-soul element of the Earth takes in all that is extraterrestrial. Just as the ancient initiates had said of the Christmas Mystery, so they said also of the St. John's Mystery (we use modern forms of expression, but there were appropriate forms in the ancient Mysteries also)—the initiates said that it was necessary to attain initiation in order to penetrate the secrets of the St. John's Mystery, that is, the secrets of the heavens. For man belongs to the periphery of the Earth; he belongs neither within the Earth, nor as earthly man does he belong to the heavens. Hence he must be initiated into the secrets of the sub-earthly in order to come to know the secrets of the super-earthly.

In a certain way, the Easter Mystery and the Michael or Autumn Mystery were seen as holding the balance between the super-earthly and the sub-earthly. And the Michael Mystery, as we have said, will first attain its proper significance in the time that is still future to our own.

The Easter Mystery in its full magnitude entered into the evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this Easter Mystery was understood, as I have already said, because remnants of the ancient clairvoyance still existed. At that time people could still raise themselves up in their Gemuets or feeling souls to the resurrected Christ. The Easter Mystery was therefore woven into that ritual which was not an initiation ritual, but a ritual for mankind in general; it was woven into the ritual of the celebration of the Mass.

But with the retreat of primitive clairvoyance, the understanding of the Easter Mystery was lost. People begin to discuss a matter only when they no longer understand it. All the discussion that began after the first Christian centuries about how the Easter thought is to be understood derive from the fact that people could no longer comprehend it in a direct elementary way.

Now we have often been able to apply to the Easter thought what anthroposophical spiritual science gives to us. What is essential here is that this anthroposophical spiritual research points again to forms of life which are not exhausted between birth and death in the sense world; that it places what can be spiritually investigated over against what can be sensibly investigated; that it makes comprehensible how the Christ could converse with His disciples, even after the physical body was turned to dust. In the light of spiritual research, the Resurrection thought becomes alive again. But this Resurrection thought will be fully understood only if it is linked to what I might call its counter-pole. What then does the Resurrection thought really portray? The Christ Being descended from spiritual heights, entered into the body of Jesus and lived on Earth in this body, thereby bringing into the earthly sphere forces in themselves super-terrestrial. And these super-earthly forces which the Christ Being brought into the earthly sphere were from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha on, united with the forces of mankind's evolution. Since then that which the men of ancient times could behold only outside in cosmic space is to be feelingly perceived within the evolution of earthly humanity. Following the Resurrection, the Christ united Himself with mankind, and since then He lives, not only in the super-earthly heights, but also within the earth-existence; He lives in evolution, in the stream of mankind's evolution.

Above all, this event must be regarded not from the earthly point of view alone, but also from the super-earthly viewpoint. We can say that we should not view the Christ only in the way He comes to Earth out of heavenly worlds and becomes man, in the way He is given to men, but we should view this Christ Event also from the standpoint that the Christ actually departs from the spiritual world when He descends to the Earth.

Human beings saw the Christ arise in their realm. The Gods saw the Christ forsake the heavenly world and plunge down among mankind. For men the Christ appeared; for certain spiritual beings He vanished. Only when He passed through the Resurrection did He appear again to certain extraterrestrial spiritual beings, now shining out to them from the Earth like a star, a star which radiates out from the Earth into the spiritual world. Spiritual beings mark the Mystery of Golgotha by saying: “A star began to shine out from the Earth into the spiritual realm.” And it was felt to be of immense importance for the spiritual world that the Christ had submerged into a human body, and had gone through death in this body. For by partaking in death in a human body He was enabled immediately after this death to undertake something which His former divine companions could by no means have accomplished.

These former divine companions confronted, as an inimical world, what even in earlier times was called “hell.” But the efficacy of these spiritual beings stopped short at the gates of hell. These spiritual beings worked upon man. The forces of man extend even into hell. This signifies nothing other than man's subconscious projection into the Ahrimanic forces in the wintertime and also into the ascent of these Ahrimanic forces in the spring. The divine spiritual beings felt this as a world opposed to them. They saw it rise up out of the Earth and felt it to be an exceedingly problematic world. But they themselves had only a roundabout connection with it through man. They could only observe it in a certain way. But because the Christ had descended to the Earth, had Himself become man, He could descend into the realm of these Ahrimanic powers and overcome them. This is expressed in the Creed as “the Descent into Hell.”

This Descent into Hell provides the opposite pole to the Resurrection. This is what Christ has done for mankind: By descending from the divine heights and taking on the form of man, He became able actually to descend into the realm to whose dangers man is exposed, into which the other Gods, who had not been exposed to human death could not descend. In His way the Christ gained the victory over death. And therewith entered, I might say, as the opposite pole of the Descent into Hell, the ascent into the spiritual world, in spite of the fact that the Christ remained on Earth. For Christ had so united Himself with mankind that he had descended to that to which mankind is exposed. During the winter and spring seasons, He could win for man that which works out of extraterrestrial regions into the Earth again from St. John's to autumn. Thus in the Easter thought we see united in a certain way the Descent into the region of Hell, and through this descent the winning of the heavenly region for the further evolution of mankind.

All this belongs to a right conception of the Easter thought. But what would this Easter thought be if it could not become living! It was possible in ancient times to connect the right feeling awareness with the thought of the winter solstice only because they had on the other hand the St. John's thought. Schematically drawn: If one had the earthly with its deeply concealed winter nature (orange), then its counterpart was what in summer lay in the super-earthly periphery (orange). Both were to be reached only through initiation, yet they were connected by what was in the atmosphere surrounding the Earth, in the Earth's periphery (green), Christmas calls for St. John's. St. John's calls for Christmas. Man would rigidify under the influence of the Ahrimanic powers if he could not be exposed to the loosening Luciferic powers, who again give wings to thought, so that it need not remain rigid but can thaw again under the influence of the light.

At first humanity in its evolution had only the one pole, the Easter pole, and this Easter pole became paralyzed. The Easter festival lost its inner vitality. It will regain its inner life only when man can think about this festival in such a way that he can say to himself: “Through what is symbolically expressed in the Descent into Hell—which in reality can be understood as the Resurrection—a counterweight was given against something which had to come; namely, the paralyzing of all spiritual vision, its dying away in the earthly life. Prophetically, Christ Jesus wanted to prepare for what had to come; namely, the circumstance that man during his life on Earth between birth and death would have to forget the super-earthly, the spiritual, that he would in a certain way die to the spiritual. Opposed to this dying away of man in earthly life stands the Easter thought of the victory of super-earthly life over the earthly.”

On the one side is this: Man descends from his pre-earthly life; but in the period that dawned in the first half of the fifteenth century, he will in his earthly life more and more forget his super-earthly origin; as to his soul-being he will die away, as it were, in the earthly life. That stands on the one side.

On the other stands this: There was a spiritual, heavenly Being, Who by His deed, working out of the heavens into the Earth, set forth the counter-image. That spiritual Being descended into a human body, and in the Resurrection has, through His own being, placed the super-earthly spiritual among the men of Earth. In remembrance of this we have the Easter festival, which puts before mankind the picture of the burial of Christ Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

He was laid in the grave and thereafter He arose—this is the Easter thought, as it stands in cosmic records... “Look upon thyself, O Man; thou descendest out of the super-earthly worlds; thou art threatened by the danger that thy soul will die away in the earthly life. Therefore the Christ appears, Who sets before thine eyes how that from which thou also didst arise, how that super-earthly spiritual conquers death. There stands before thee in mighty images such as could be placed before mankind: the entombment of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. He was laid in the grave. He rose from the grave and appeared to those who could behold Him.”

But with the paralyzed soul forces of man today, this image can no longer become living. Where could it become alive? In a traditional faith man can still look upon what the Easter festival gives him: Upon the sublime picture of the burial and the Resurrection. But out of the inner force of his soul, he can no longer, of himself, find anything to connect with this Easter thought, with the thought of the entombment and the Resurrection. It is out of spiritual knowledge that he must again unite something with it.

And this something is another thought, to which there can be no alternative. It is, however, possible for a human being to let spiritual knowledge approach him so that he may understand this “other.” Let us place this “other” before ourselves, so as to inscribe it deeply within our souls. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Now let us place before ourselves the other thought which must come over mankind: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Michaelmas thought: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave.

The first thought, the Easter thought, pertains to the Christ; the second thought pertains to the human being. It pertains to the man who directly comprehends the power of the Easter thought, comprehends how when spiritual knowledge enters into the earthly life of the present, in which his soul-spiritual is dying away, his soul can resurrect, so that he becomes living between birth and death, so that in the earthly life he becomes inwardly alive.

The human being must through spiritual knowledge comprehend this inner resurrection, this inner awakening; then will he confidently be laid in the grave. Then he may be laid in the grave, through which he otherwise would fall prey to those Ahrimanic powers who work within the earth realm at the time of the winter solstice.

And the festival which contains this thought: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave”—this festival must fall in the time when the leaves are beginning to turn yellow and fall from the trees, when the fruits have ripened, when the Sun has received that power which brings to maturity what in the spring was budding and sprouting, full of the forces of growth, but which also brings withering and the inclination to seek again the inner part of the Earth; when what is developing on the Earth begins to be a symbol of the grave.

If we place the Easter festival at the time when life begins to bud and to sprout, when the forces of growth attain their highest point, then the other festival, which contains: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave,” we must place at the time when Earth nature begins to wither, when the mood of the grave is spreading abroad in Earth nature, when the symbol of the grave can appear before the soul of man. Then the Michael thought begins to stir in man, that thought which is not, like the Easter thought in the earliest centuries of Christianity, directed toward a kind of inner perceiving (Anschauung).²

In the first centuries of Christianity, this feeling perception was directed to the Christ laid in the grave and risen. In this perception the soul was made strong, was filled with its strongest forces. In the festival-thought at the time of the fall equinox, the soul must feel its strength when appeal is made not to its perceiving, but to its will. “Take into thyself the Michael thought which confers the Ahrimanic powers, that thought which makes thee strong to gain here on Earth knowledge of the spirit, so that thou canst overcome the powers of Death.”—As the Easter thought is directed to the perception, this thought is directed to the will-powers: to take up the Michael force, which means to take the force of spiritual knowledge into the will-forces. And so the Easter thought can become living, can be brought directly to the human soul and spirit, when now the Michael thought, the thought of the Michael festival in the autumn, is felt to be the counter-pole of the Easter thought—just as the St. John's thought was perceived to be the counter-pole of the Christmas thought. As the Christmas thought by its inner livingness, has brought forth the St. John's thought after a half-year, so must the Easter thought bring forth the Michael thought. Mankind must attain an esoteric maturity, so as to think, not merely abstractly, but to be able again to think so concretely that men can again become festival-creating. Then it will be possible again to unite something spiritual with the cycle of sense phenomena.

All our thoughts are so abstract! But no matter how remarkable they are, how intelligent, if they remain abstract, life will not be able to penetrate them. When today men reflect that Easter might be set abstractly on any day, no longer according to the constellations of the stars, when today all higher knowledge is darkened, when man no longer sees any relation between insight into the soul-spiritual and the natural-physical forces, the force must once more awaken in man which will be able to unite something spiritual directly with the sense phenomena of the world.

Wherein then did the spiritual strength of man consist, making him able to create festivals in the course of the year, in accordance with the yearly phenomena? It consisted in the primal spiritual force. Today men can continue to celebrate festivals according to the ancient traditional custom, but they must gain once more the esoteric force out of themselves to “speak” something into Nature that accords with natural events. It must become possible to grasp the Michael thought as the blossom of the Easter thought. While the Easter thought stems from physical blossoming, it will become possible to place the blossom of the Easter thought—the Michael thought—into the course of the year as the outcome of physical withering.

People must learn once more to “think” the spiritual “together with” the course of nature. It is not admissible today for a person merely to indulge in esoteric speculations; it is necessary today to be able once again to do the esoteric. But people will be able to do this only when they can conceive their thoughts so concretely, so livingly that they don't withdraw from everything that is going on around them when they think, but rather that they think with the course of events: “think together with” the fading of the leaves, with the ripening of the fruits, in a Michaelic way, just as at Easter one knows how to think with the sprouting, springing, blossoming plants and flowers.

When it is understood how to think with the course of the year, then forces will intermingle with the thoughts that will let men again hold a dialogue with the divine spiritual powers revealing themselves from the stars. Men have drawn down from the stars the power to establish festivals which have an inner human validity. Festivals must be founded out of inner esoteric force. Then from the dialogue with the fading, ripening plants, with the dying Earth, by finding the right inward festival mood, men will also again be able to hold converse with the Gods and link human existence with divine existence.

• 1. The Gemüt, or feeling soul, together with the intellectual soul forms the centermost of the three soul elements in Rudolf Steiner's picture of man. This soul element was predominant in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the event of Golgotha took place.
• 2. It is assumed that Anschauung here is intended to describe the way man's Gemuet could inwardly experience the Entombment and Resurrection, as was indicated earlier. This would be perceptively, feelingly, rather than through logic.

We should not underestimate the significance it once held for mankind to focus the whole attention during the year on a festival-time. Although in our time the celebration of religious festivals is largely a matter of habit, it was not always so. There were times when people united their consciousness with the course of the year; when, let us say, at the beginning of the year, they felt themselves standing within the course of time in such a way that they said to themselves: “There is such and such a degree of cold or warmth now; there are certain relationships among the other weather conditions, certain relationships also between the growth or non-growth in plants or animals.”—People experienced along with Nature the gradual changes and metamorphoses she went through. But they shared this experience with Nature in such a way—when their consciousness was united with the natural phenomena—that they oriented this consciousness toward a specific festival. Let us say, at the beginning of the year, through the various feeling perceptions associated with the passing of winter, the consciousness was directed toward the Easter time, or in the fall, with the fading away of life, toward Christmas. Then men's souls were filled with feelings which found expression in the way they related themselves to what the festivals meant to them.

Thus people partook in the course of the year, and this participation meant for the most part permeating with spirit not only what they saw and heard around them but what they experienced with their whole human being. They experienced the course of the year as an organic life process, just as in the human being when he is a child we relate the utterances of the childish soul with the awkward movements of a child, or its imperfect way of speaking. As we connect specific soul-experiences with the change of teeth, other soul experiences with the later bodily changes, so men once saw the ruling and weaving of the spiritual in the successive changes of outer nature, in growth and decline, or in a waxing followed by a waning.

Now all this cannot help affecting the whole way man feels himself as earthly man in the universe. Thus we can say that in that period at the beginning of our reckoning of time, when the remembrance of the Event of Golgotha began to be celebrated which later became the Easter festival—in that period in which the Easter festival was livingly felt and perceived, when man still took part in the turning of the year as I have just described it—then it was in essence so, that people felt their own lives surrendered, given over to the outer spiritual-physical world. Their feeling told them that in order to make their lives complete, they had need of the vision of the Entombment and the Resurrection, of that sublime image of the Mystery of Golgotha.

But it is from filling the consciousness in such a way that inspirations arise for men. People are not always conscious of these inspirations, but it is a secret of human evolution that from these religious attitudes toward the phenomena of the world, inspirations for the whole of life proceed.

First of all, we must understand clearly that during a certain epoch, during the Middle Ages, the people who oriented the spiritual life were priests, and those priests were concerned above all with the ordering of the festivals. They set the tone for the celebration of the festivals. The priesthood was that group of men who presented the festivals before the rest of mankind, before the laity, and who gave the festivals their content. In so doing the priests themselves felt this content very deeply; and the entire soul-condition that resulted from the inspiring effect of the festivals was expressed in the rest of the soul-life.

The Middle Ages would not have produced what is called Scholasticism—the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the other Scholastics—if this philosophy, this world conception, with all its social consequences, had not been inspired by the most important thought of the Church, by the Easter thought. In the vision of the descending Christ, Who lives for a time in man on Earth and then goes through the Resurrection, that soul impulse was given which led to the particular relation between faith and science, between knowledge and revelation which was agreed upon by the Scholastics. That out of man himself, only knowledge of the sensible world can be acquired, whereas everything connected with the super-sensible world has to be gained through revelation—this was determined basically by the way the Easter thought followed upon the Christmas thought.

And if, in turn, the idea-world of natural science today is totally the product of Scholasticism, as I have often explained to you, we must then say: “Although the natural science of the present is not aware of it, its knowledge is essentially a direct imprint of the Easter thought which prevailed in the early Middle Ages and then became paralyzed in the later Middle Ages and in modern times.” Notice the way natural science applies in its ideas what is so popular today and indeed dominates our culture: it devotes its ideas entirely to dead nature; it considers itself incapable of rising above dead nature. This is a result of that inspiration which was stimulated by viewing the Laying in the Grave.

As long as people were able to add the Resurrection to the Entombment as something to which they looked up, they then added also the revelation concerning the super-sensible to mere outer sense-knowledge. But as it became more and more common to view the Resurrection as an inexplicable and therefore unjustifiable miracle, revelation—that is, the super-sensible world—came to be repudiated. The present-day natural scientific view is inspired solely by the conception of Good Friday and lacks any conception of Easter Sunday.

We need to recognize this inner connection: The inspired element is always that which is experienced within all the festival moods in relation to Nature. We must come to know the connection between this inspiring element and all that comes to expression in human life. When we once gain an insight into the intimate connection that exists between this living-oneself-into the course of the year and what men think, feel, and will, then we shall also recognize how significant it would be if we were to succeed, for example, in making the Michael festival in autumn a reality; if we were really to succeed, out of spiritual foundations, out of esoteric foundations, in making the autumn Michael festival something that would pass over into men's consciousness and again work inspiringly.

If the Easter thought were to receive its coloration through the fact that to the Easter thought “He has been laid in the grave and is arisen” the other thought is added, the human thought, “He is arisen and may be laid in the grave without perishing”—If this Michael thought could become living, what tremendous significance just such an event could have for men's whole perceiving (Empfindung), and feeling and willing—and how this could “live itself into” the whole social structure of mankind!

My dear friends, all that people are hoping for from a renewal of the social life will not come about from all the discussions and all the institutions based on what is externally sensible. It will be able to come about only when a mighty inspiration-thought goes through mankind, when an inspiration-thought takes hold of mankind through which the moral-spiritual element will once again be felt and perceived along with the natural-sensible element.

People today are like earthworms, I might say, looking for sunlight under the ground, while to find the sunlight they need to come forth above the surface of the earth. Nothing in reality will be accomplished by all of today's organizations and plans for reform; something can be achieved only by the mighty impact of a thought-impulse drawn out of the spirit. For it must be clear to us that the Easter thought itself can only attain its new “nuance” through being complemented by the Michael thought.

Let us consider this Michael thought somewhat more closely. If we look at the Easter thought, we have to consider that Easter occurs at the time of the bursting and sprouting life of spring. At this time the Earth is breathing out her soul-forces, in order that these soul-forces may be permeated again by the astral element surrounding the Earth, the extra-earthly, cosmic element. The Earth is breathing out her soul. What does this mean?

It means that certain elemental beings which are just as much in the periphery of the Earth as the air is or as the forces of growth are—that these unite their own being with the out-breathed Earth soul in those regions in which it is spring. These beings float and merge with the out-breathed Earth soul. They become dis-individualized; they lose their individuality and rise in the general earthly soul element. We see countless elemental beings in spring just around Easter time in the final stage of the individual life which was theirs during the winter. We see them merging into the general earth soul element and rising like a sort of cloud (red, yellow, with green). I might say that during the wintertime these elemental beings are within the soul element of the Earth, where they had become individualized; before this Easter time they had a certain individuality, flying and floating about as individual beings. During Easter time we see them come together in a general cloud (red), and form a common mass within the Earth soul (green). But by so doing these elemental beings lose their consciousness to a certain degree and enter into a sort of sleeping condition. Certain animals sleep in the winter; these elemental beings sleep in summer. This sleep is deepest during St. John's time, when they are completely asleep. Then they begin once more to individualize, and when the Earth breathes in again at Michaelmas, at the end of September, we can see them already as separate beings again.

Man needs these elemental beings... This is not in his consciousness, but man needs them nonetheless, in order to unite them with himself, so that he can prepare his future. And man could unite these elemental beings with himself, if at a certain festival time—it would have to be at the end of September—he could perceive with a special inner soul-filled liveliness how Nature herself changes toward the autumn; if he could perceive how the animal and plant life recedes, how certain animals begin to seek their shelters against the winter; how the plant leaves get their autumn coloring; how all Nature fades and withers.

It is true that spring is fair, and it is a fine capacity of the human soul to perceive the beauty of the spring, the growing, sprouting, burgeoning life. But to be able to perceive also when the leaves fade and take on their fall coloring, when the animals creep away—to be able to feel how in the sensible which is dying away, the gleaming, shining, soul-spiritual element arises—to be able to perceive how with the yellowing of the leaves there is a descent of the springing and sprouting life, but how the sensible becomes yellow in order that the spiritual can live in the yellowing as such—to be able to perceive how in the falling of the leaves the ascent of the spirit takes place, how the spiritual is the counter-manifestation of the fading sense-perceptible; this should as a perceptive feeling for the spirit—ensoul the human being in autumn! Then he would prepare himself in the right way precisely for Christmastide.

Man should become permeated, out of anthroposophical spiritual science, by the truth that it is precisely the spiritual life of man on Earth which depends on the declining physical life. Whenever we think, the physical matter in our nerves is destroyed; the thought struggles up out of the matter as it perishes. To feel the becoming of the thought in one's self, the gleaming up of the idea in the human soul, in the whole human organism of man to be akin to the yellowing leaves, the withering foliage, the drying and shriveling of the plant world in Nature; to feel the kinship of man's spiritual “being-ness” with Nature's spiritual “being-ness”—this can give man that impulse which strengthens his will, that impulse which points man to the permeation of his will with spirituality.

In so doing, however, in permeating his will with spirituality, the human being becomes an associate of the Michael activity on earth. And when man lives with Nature in this way as autumn approaches and brings this living-with-Nature to expression in an appropriate festival content, then he will be able truly to perceive the completing (Erganzung) of the Easter mood. But by means of this, something else will become clear to him.—You see, what man thinks, feels, and wills today is really inspired by the Easter mood, which is actually one-sided. This Easter mood is essentially a result of the sprouting, burgeoning life, which causes everything to merge as in a pantheistic unity. Man is surrendered to the unity of Nature, and to the unity of the world generally. This is also the structure of our spiritual life today. Man wants everything to revert to a unity, to a monon; he is either a devotee of universal spirit or universal nature; and he is accordingly either a spiritualistic Monist or a materialistic Monist. Everything is included in an indefinite unity. This is essentially the spring mood.

But when we look into the autumn mood, with the rising and becoming free of the spiritual, and the dropping away and withering of the sensible (red), then we have a view of the spiritual as such, and the sensible as such.

The sprouting plant in the spring has the spiritual within its sprouting and growing; the spiritual is mingled with the sensible; we have essentially a unity. The withering plant lets the leaf fall, and the spirit rises; we have the spirit, the invisible, super-sensible spirit, and the material falling out of it. I would say that it is just as if we had in a container, first, a uniform fluid in which something is dissolved, and then by some process we should cause this to separate from the fluid and fall to the bottom as sediment. We have now separated the two which were united, which had formed a unity.

The spring tends to weave everything together, to blend everything into a vague, undifferentiated unity. The view of the autumn, if we only look at it in the right way, if we contrast it in the right way with the view of the spring, calls attention to the way the spiritual works on the one side and the physical-material on the other. The Easter thought loses nothing of value if the Michaelmas thought is added to it. We have on the one side the Easter thought, where everything appears—I might say—as a pantheistic mixture, a unity. Then we have what is differentiated; but the differentiation does not occur in any irregular, chaotic fashion. We have regularity throughout.

Think of the cyclic course: joining together, intermingling, unifying; an intermediate state when the differentiating takes place; the complete differentiation; then again the merging of what was differentiated within the uniform, and so forth. There you see always besides these two conditions yet a third: you see the rhythm between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, in a certain way, between the in-breathing of what was differentiated-out and the out-breathing again, an intermediate condition. You see a rhythm: a physical-material, a spiritual, a working-in-each-other of the physical-material and the spiritual: a soul element.

But the important thing is this: not to stop with the common human fancy that everything must be led back to a unity; thereby everything, whether the unity is a spiritual or a material one, is led back to the indefiniteness of the cosmic night. In the night all cows are gray; in spiritual Monism all ideas are gray; in material Monism they are likewise gray. These are only distinctions of perceiving; they are of no concern for a higher view. What matters is this: that we as human beings can so unite ourselves with the cosmic course that we are in a position to follow the living transition from the unity into the trinity, the return from trinity into unity. When, by complementing the Easter thought with the Michael thought in this way we have become able to perceive rightly the primordial trinity in all existence, then we shall take it into our whole attitude of soul. Then we shall be in a position to understand that actually all life depends upon the activity and the interworking of primordial trinities. And when we have the Michael festival inspiring such a view in the same way that the one-sided Easter festival inspired the view now existing, then we shall have an inspiration, a Nature/Spirit impulse, to introduce threefoldness, the impulse of threefoldness into all the observing and forming of life. And it depends finally and only upon the introduction of this impulse, whether the destructive forces in human evolution can be transformed once more into ascending forces.

One might say that when we spoke of the threefold impulse it was in a certain sense a test of whether the Michael thought is already strong enough so that it can be felt how such an impulse flows directly out of the forces that shape the time. It was a test of the human soul, of whether the Michael thought is strong enough as yet in a large number of people. Well, the test yielded a negative result. The Michael thought is not strong enough in even a small number of people for it to be perceived truly in all its time-shaping power and forcefulness. And it will indeed hardly be possible, for the sake of new forces of ascent, to unite human souls with the original formative cosmic forces in the way that is necessary, unless such an inspiring force as can permeate a Michael festival—unless, that is to say, a new formative impulse—can come forth from the depths of the esoteric life.

If instead of the passive members of the Anthroposophical Society, even only a few active members could be found, then it would become possible to set up further deliberations to consider such a thought. It is essential to the Anthroposophical Society that while stimuli within the Society should of course be carried out, the members should actually attach primary value, I might say, to participating in what is coming to pass. They may perhaps focus the contemplative forces of their souls on what is taking place, but the activity of their own souls does not become united with what is passing through the time as an impulse. Hence, with the present state of the Anthroposophical Movement, there can of course be no question of considering as part of its activity anything like what has just now been spoken of as an esoteric impulse. But it must be understood how mankind's evolution really moves, that the great sustaining forces of humanity's world-evolution come not from what is propounded in superficial words, but from entirely different quarters.

This has always been known in ancient times from primeval elementary clairvoyance. In ancient times it was not the custom for the young people to learn, for example, that there are so and so many chemical elements; then another is discovered and there are then 75, then 76; another is discovered and there are 77. One cannot anticipate how many may still be discovered. Accidentally, one is added to 75, to 76, and so on. In what is adduced here as number, there is no inner reality. And so it is everywhere. Who is interested today in anything that would bring to revelation, let us say, that a systematic threefoldness or trinity prevails in plants! Order after order is discovered, species after species; and they are counted just as though one were counting a chance pile of sticks or stones. But the working of number in the world rests on a real quality of being, and this quality must be fathomed. Only think how short a time lies behind us since knowledge of substance was led back to the trinity of the salty, the mercurial, and the phosphoric; how in this a trinity of archetypal forces was seen; how everything that appeared as individual had to be fitted into one or another of the three archetypal forces.

And it is different again when we look back into still earlier times in which it was easier for people to come to something like this because of the very situation of their culture; for the Oriental cultures lay nearer to the Torrid Zone, where such things were more readily accessible to the ancient elementary clairvoyance. Today, however, it is possible to come to these things in the Temperate Zone through free, exact clairvoyance.... Yet people want to go back to the ancient cultures! In those days people did not distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter. To distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter leads us to a mere succession because it contains the “four.” It would have been quite impossible for the ancient Indian culture, for example, to think of something like the course of the year as ruled by the four, because this contains nothing of the archetypal forms underlying all activity.

When I wrote my book, Theosophy, it was impossible simply to list in succession physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, although we can summarize it this way once the matter is before us, once it is inwardly understood. I had therefore to arrange them according to the number three: physical body, ether body, astral body, forming the first trinity. Then comes the trinity interwoven with it: sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; then the trinity interwoven with this: spirit self, life spirit, spirit man—three times three interwoven with one another in such a way as to become seven.

Only when we look at the present stage of mankind's evolution does the four appear, which is really a secondary number. If we want to see the inwardly active principle, if we want to see the formative process, we must see forming and shaping as associated with threefoldness, with trinity.

Hence, the ancient Indian view was of a year divided into a hot season, which would approximate our months of April, May, June, July; a wet season, comprising approximately our months, August, September, October, November; and a cold season, which would include our months, December, January, February, March. The boundaries do not need to be rigidly fixed according to the months but are only approximate; they can be thought of as shifting. But the course of the year was thought of according to the principle of the “three.”

And thus man's whole state of soul would be imbued with the predisposition to observe this primal trinity in all weaving and working, and hence to interweave it also into all human creating and shaping. We can even say that it is only possible to have true ideas of the free spiritual life, the life of rights, the social-economic life, when we perceive in the depths this triple pulse of cosmic activity, which must also permeate human activity.

Any reference to this sort of thing today is regarded as some sort of superstition, whereas it is considered great wisdom simply to count “one” and again “one,” “two,” “three,” and so on. But Nature does not take such a course. If we look, however, only at a realm in which everything is woven together, as is the case with Nature in springtime—which of course we must look at if we want to observe the interweaving of things—then we can never restore the pulse of three.

But when anyone follows the whole course of the year, when he sees how the “three” is organized, how the spiritual and the physical-material life are present as a duality, and the rhythmic interweaving of the two as the third, then he perceives this three-in-one, one-in-three, and learns to know how the human being can place himself in this cosmic activity: three to one, one to three.

It would become the whole disposition of the human soul to permeate the cosmos, to unite itself with cosmic worlds, if once the Michael thought could awaken as a festival thought in such a way that we were to place a Michael festival in the second half of September alongside the Easter festival; if to the thought of the resurrection of the God after death could be added the thought, produced by the Michael force, of the resurrection of man from death, so that man through the Resurrection of Christ would find the force to die in Christ. This means, taking the risen Christ into one's soul during earthly life, so as to be able to die in Him—that is, to be able to die, not at death but when one is living.

Such an inner consciousness as this would result from the inspiring element that would come from a Michael service. We can realize full well how far removed from any such idea is our materialistic time, which is also a time grown narrow-minded and pedantic. Of course, nothing can be expected of us, so long as it remains dead and abstract. But if with the same enthusiasm with which festivals were once introduced in the world when people had the force to form festivals,—if such a thing happens again, then it will work inspiringly. Indeed it will work inspiringly for our whole spiritual and our whole social life. Then that which we need will be present in life: not abstract spirit on one hand and spirit-void nature on the other, but Nature permeated with spirit, and spirit forming and shaping naturally. For these are one, and they will once again weave religion, science, and art into oneness, because they will understand how to conceive the trinity in religion, science, and art in the sense of the Michael thought, so that these three can then be united in the right way in the Easter thought, in the anthroposophical shaping and forming. This can work religiously, artistically, cognitionally, and can also differentiate religiously, cognitionally. Then the anthroposophical impulse would consist in perceiving in the Easter season the unity of science, religion, and art; and then at Michaelmas perceiving how the three—who have one mother, the Easter mother—how the three become “sisters” and stand side by side, but mutually complement one another. Then the Michael thought which should become living as a festival in the course of the year, would be able to work inspiringly on all domains of human life.

With such things as these, which belong to the truly esoteric, we should permeate ourselves, at least in our cognition, to begin with. If then the time could come when there are actively working personalities, such a thing could actually become an impulse which singly and alone would be able, in the present condition of humanity, to replace the descending forces with ascending ones.

I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before.

To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology.

Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days.

Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature.

Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness.

The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man.

The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.”

Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.

But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other.

Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream.

And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance.

Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit.

But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.

My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.

And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;

but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales.

Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.”

Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment.

But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.

The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times.

Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry.

Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego.

And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly.

You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men.

Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time.

Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning.

But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course.

Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away.

Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well.

Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness.

And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.”

You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons.

Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual.

We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form.

If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline.

Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.

Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically.

This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it.

I should like to carry to a still wider horizon the reflections I have already made here concerning the relationship between man and the cycle of Nature which was formed in ancient times under the influence of the Mysteries, and to go into what was believed in those times with regard to all that one as man received from the cosmos through this cycle of Nature. You may have gathered from yesterday's lecture as well perhaps as from the recollection of much that I could still say about such matters during the past Christmas season, in the Goetheanum which has now been taken from us—you may have gathered that the cycle of the year in its phenomena was perceived, and indeed today can still be perceived, as a result of life, as something which in its external events is just as much the expression of a living being standing behind it as the actions of the human organism are the manifestations of a being, of the human soul itself.

Let us remind ourselves how, in midsummer, the time we know as St. John's, the people became aware under this ancient Mystery-influence of a certain relationship to their ego, an ego which they did not yet consider as exclusively their own, but which they viewed as resting still in the bosom of the divine-spiritual.

These people believed that by means of the ceremonies I have described, they approached their “I” at midsummer, although throughout the rest of the year it was hidden from them. Of course they thought of themselves as dwelling in their beings altogether in the bosom of the divine-spiritual; but they thought that during the other three-quarters of the year nothing was revealed to them of what belonged to them as their ego. Only in this one quarter, which reached its high point at St. John's, did the essential being of their own ego manifest itself to them as through a window opening out of the divine spiritual world.

Now this essence of the individual ego within the divine spiritual world in which it revealed itself was by no means regarded in such a neutral, indifferent—one may even say phlegmatic—way as is the case today. When the “I” is spoken of today, a person is hardly likely to think of it as having any special connection either with this world or any other. Rather, he thinks of his “I” as a kind of point; what he does rays out from it and what he perceives rays in. But the feeling a person has today in regard to his “I” is of an altogether phlegmatic nature. We cannot really say that modern man even feels the “egoity” of his “I”—in spite of the fact that it is his ego; for anyone who wants to be honest cannot really claim that he is fond of his “I.” He is fond of his body; he is fond of his instincts; he may be fond of this or that experience. But the “I” is just a tiny word which is felt as a point in which all that has been indicated is more or less condensed. But in that period in which, after long preparations had been made, the approach to this “I” was undertaken ceremonially, each man was enabled in a certain sense to meet his “I” in the universe. Following this meeting, then, the “I” was perceived to be once more gradually withdrawing and leaving the human being alone with his bodily and soul nature, or as we would say today, with his physical-etheric-astral being. In that period man felt the “I” perceptively as having a real connection with the entire cosmos, with the whole world.

But what was felt above all else with regard to the relationship of this “I” to the world was not something “naturalistic,” to use the modern term; it was not something received as an external phenomenon. Rather, it was something which was deemed to be the very center of the most ancient moral conception of the world. Men did not expect great secrets of Nature to be revealed to them at this season. To be sure, such Nature secrets were spoken of, but man did not direct his attention primarily to them. Rather, he perceived through his feeling that above all he was to absorb into himself as moral impulse what is revealed at this time of midsummer when light and warmth reach their highest point.

This was the season man perceived as the time of divine-moral enlightenment. And what he wanted above all to obtain from the heavens as “answer” to the performances of music, poetry and dancing that were carried on at this season, what he waited for was that there should be revealed out of the heavens in all seriousness what they required of him morally.

And when all the ceremonies had been carried out that I described yesterday as belonging to the celebration of these festivals during the time of the sun's sultry heat—if it sometimes happened that a powerful storm broke forth with thunder and lightning, then just in this outbreak of thunder and lightning men felt the moral admonition of the heavens to earthly humanity.

There are vestiges from this ancient time in conceptions such as that of Zeus as the god of thunder, armed with a thunderbolt. Something similar is linked with the German god, Donar. This we have on one side. On the other side, man perceptively felt Nature, I might say, as warm, luminous, satisfied in itself. And he felt that this warming, luminous Nature as it was during the daytime remained also into the night time. Only he made a distinction, saying to himself: “During the day the air is filled with the warmth-element, with the light-element. In these elements of warmth and light there weave and live spiritual messengers through whom the higher divine beings want to make themselves known to men, want to endow them with moral impulses. But at night, when the higher spiritual beings withdraw, the messengers remain behind and reveal themselves in their own way.”

And thus it was that especially at midsummer people perceived the ruling and weaving of Nature in the summer nights, in the summer evenings. And what they felt then seemed to them to be a kind of summer dream which they experienced in reality; a summer dream through which they came especially near to the divine-spiritual; a summer dream by which they were convinced that every phenomenon of Nature was at the same time the moral utterance of the gods, but that all kinds of elemental beings were also active there who revealed themselves to men in their own way.

All the fanciful embellishment of the midsummer night's dream, of the St. John's night dream, is what remained later of the wondrous forms conjured by human imagination that wove through this midsummer time on the soul-spiritual level. This then, in all particulars, was taken to be a divine-spiritual moral revelation of the cosmos to man.

And so we may say that the conception underlying this was: at midsummer the divine-spiritual world revealed itself through moral impulses which were implanted in man as Enlightenment (see diagram). And what was felt in a quite special way at that time, what then worked upon man, was felt to be something super-human which played into the human order of things.

From his inner participation in the festivities celebrated in that time, man knew that he was lifted up above himself as he then was into the super-human, and that the Deity grasped the hand that man as it were reached toward him at this season. Everything that man believed to be divine-spiritual within him he ascribed to the revelations of this season of St. John's.

When the summer came to an end and autumn approached, when the leaves were withered and the seeds had ripened, when, that is, the full luxurious life of summer had faded and the trees become bare, then, because the insights of the Mysteries had flowed into all these perceptions, man felt: “The divine-spiritual world is withdrawing again from man.” He notices how he is directed back to himself; he is in a certain sense growing out of the spiritual into Nature.

Thus man felt this “living-into” the autumn as a “living-out-from” the spiritual, as a living into Nature. The tree leaves became mineralized; the seeds dried up and mineralized. Everything inclined in a certain way towards the death of Nature's year.

In being thus interwoven with what was becoming mineral on the Earth and around the Earth, man felt that he himself was becoming woven together with Nature. For in that period man still stood closer in his inner experience to what was going on outside. And he also thought, he pondered in his mind about how he experienced his being woven-together with Nature. His whole thinking took on this character. If we want to express in our language today what man felt when autumn came, we should have to say the following—I beg you, however, to realize that I am using present-day words, and that in those days man would not have been able to speak thus, for then everything rested on perceptive feeling and was not characterized through thinking—but if we want to speak in modern terms we shall have to say: With his particular trend of thinking, with his feeling way of perceiving, the human being experienced the transition from summer to autumn in such a way that he found in it a passing from spirit-knowledge to Nature-knowledge (see diagram). Toward autumn man felt that he was no longer in a time of spirit-knowledge but that autumn required of him that he should learn to know Nature. Thus at the autumn equinox we have, instead of moral impulse, knowledge of Nature, coming to know Nature.

The human being began to reflect about Nature. At this time also he began to take into account the fact that he was a creature, a being within the cosmos. In that time it would have been considered folly to present Nature-knowledge in its existing form to man during the summer. The purpose of summer is to bring man into relation with the spiritual in the world. With the arrival of what we today call the Michaelmas season, people said to themselves: “By everything that man perceives about him in the woods, in the trees, in the plants, he is stimulated to pursue nature-knowledge.” It was the season in which men were to occupy themselves above all with acquiring knowledge, with reflection. And indeed it was also the time when outer circumstances of life made this possible. Human life thus proceeded from Enlightenment to Knowledge. It was the right season for knowledge, for ever-increasing cognition.

When the pupils of the Mysteries received their instruction from the teachers, they were given certain mottoes of which we find adaptations in the maxims of the Greek sages. The “seven maxims” of the Seven Wise Men of Greece are, however, not actually those which originated in the primeval Mysteries.

In the very earliest Mysteries there was a saying associated with midsummer: “Receive the Light” (see diagram). By “Light,” spiritual wisdom was meant. It designated that within which the human being's own “I” shone.

For autumn (see diagram), the motto imprinted in the Mysteries as an admonition pointing to what should be carried on by the souls was: “Look around thee.”

Now there approached the next development of the year, and with it, what man felt within himself to be connected of itself with this year. The season of winter approached. We come to midwinter (see diagram), which includes our Christmas time. Just as the human being in midsummer felt himself lifted out above himself to the divine-spiritual existence of the cosmos, so he felt himself in midwinter to be unfolding downward below himself. He felt as if the forces of the Earth were washing around him and carrying him along. He felt as though his will nature, his instincts and impulses were infiltrated and permeated by gravity, by the force of destruction and other forces that are in the Earth. In these ancient times people did not feel winter as we feel it, that it merely gets cold and we have to put on warm boots, for example, in order not to get chilled. Rather, a man of that ancient time felt what was coming up out of the Earth as something that united itself with his own being. In contrast to the sultry, light-filled element, he felt what came up then in winter as a frosty element. We feel the chilliness today, too, because it is connected with the corporeality; but ancient man felt within his soul as a phenomenon accompanying the cold: darkness and gloom. He felt somewhat as if all around him, wherever he went, darkness rose up out of the Earth and enveloped him in a kind of cloud—only up to the middle of his body, to be sure, but this is the way he felt.

And he said to himself—again I have to describe it in more modern words—man said to himself: “During the height of summer I stand face to face with Enlightenment; then the heavenly, the super-terrestrial streams down into the earthly world. But now the earthly is streaming upward.”—Man already perceived and experienced something of the earthly during the autumnal equinox. But what he perceived and felt then of earthly nature was in conformity in a certain sense with his own nature; it was still connected with him. We might say: “At the time of the autumn equinox man felt in his Gemuet, in his realm of feeling, all that had to do with Nature. But now, in winter, he felt as though the Earth were laying claim to him, as if he were ensnared in his will nature by the forces of the Earth. He felt this to be the denial of the moral world order. He felt that together with the blackness that enveloped him like a cloud, forces opposed to the moral world order were ensnaring him. He felt the darkness rise up out of the Earth like a serpent and wind him about. But at the same time he was also aware of something quite different.”

Already during autumn he had felt something stirring within him that we today call intellect. Whereas in summer the intellect evaporates and there enters from outside a wisdom-filled moral element, during autumn the intellect is consolidated. The human being approaches evil but his intellect consolidates. Man felt an actual serpent-like manifestation in midwinter, but at the same time the solidification, the strengthening of shrewdness, of the reflective element, of all that made him sly and cunning and incited him to follow the principle of utility in life. All this he was aware of in this way. And just as in autumn the knowledge of nature gradually emerged, so in midwinter the Temptation of Hell approached the human being, the Temptation on the part of Evil. Thus he was aware of this. So when we write here: “Moral impulse, Knowledge of Nature” (see diagram), here (at midwinter) we must write “Temptation through Evil.”

This was just the time in which man had to develop what in any case was within him by way of Nature: everything associated with the intellect, slyness, cunning, all that was directed toward the utilitarian. This, man was to overcome through Temperance (Besonnenheit).¹ This was the season then in which man had to develop—not an open sense for wisdom, which in accordance with the ancient Mystery wisdom had been required of him during the time of Enlightenment, but something else. Just in that season in which evil revealed itself as we have indicated, man could experience in a fitting way resistance to evil: he was to become self-controlled (besonnen—see preceding footnote). Above all else at the season of change which he passed through in moving on from Enlightenment to Cognition, from Knowledge of Spirit to Knowledge of Nature, he was to progress from Nature knowledge to the contemplation of Evil (see diagram, arrow on left). This is the way it was understood.

And in giving instructions to the pupils of the Mysteries which could become mottoes, the teachers said to them—just as at midsummer they had said: “Receive the Light,” and in autumn “Look around you”—now in midwinter it was said: “Beware of Evil.” And it was expected that through “Temperance,” through this guarding of oneself against evil, men would come to a kind of self-knowledge which would lead them to realize how they had deviated from the moral impulses in the course of the year.

Deviation from the moral impulses through the contemplation of evil, its overcoming through moderation—this was to come to man's consciousness just in the time following midwinter. Hence in this ancient wisdom all sorts of things were undertaken that induced men to atone for what they recognized as deviations from the moral impulses they had received through Enlightenment. With this, we approach spring, the spring equinox (see diagram).

And just as here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, midwinter) we have Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, so for the spring equinox we have what was perceived as the activity of repentance. And in place of Cognition, and correspondingly, Temptation through Evil, there now entered something which we could call the Return—the reversion—to man's higher nature through Repentance. Where we have written here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, winter): Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, here we must write: Return to Human Nature.

If you look back once more to what was in the depths of winter the Temptation by Evil, you will have to say: At that time man felt as though he were lowered into the abysmal deeps of the Earth; he felt himself entrapped by Earth's darkness. Just as during the height of summer man was in a sense torn out of himself, his soul-nature being then lifted up above him, so now, in order not to be ensnared by Evil during the winter, his soul-being made itself inwardly free.

Through this there existed during the depths of winter, I might say a counter-image to what was present during the height of summer. At midsummer the phenomena of Nature spoke in a spiritual way. People sought especially in the thunder and the lightning for what the heavens had to say. They looked at the phenomena of Nature, but what they sought in these phenomena was a spiritual language. Even in small things, they sought at St. John's-tide the spiritual message of the elemental beings, but they looked for it outside themselves. They dreamed in a certain sense outside the human being. During the depths of winter, however, people sank into themselves and dreamed within their own being. To the extent that they tore themselves loose from the entanglement of the Earth, that is, whenever they could free their soul-element, they dreamed within their own being. Of this there has remained what is connected with the visions, with the inner beholding, of the Thirteen Nights following the winter solstice. Everywhere recollections have remained of these ancient times. You can look on the Norwegian Song of Olaf [&Åsteson]² as a later development of what existed quite extensively in ancient times.

Then the springtime drew near. In our time the situation has shifted somewhat; in those days spring was closer to winter, and the whole year was viewed as being divided into three periods. Things were compressed. Nevertheless what I am sharing with you here was taught in its turn. Thus, just as at midsummer they said: “Receive the light;” and in autumn, at Michaelmas: “Look around you;” just as at midwinter, at the time that we celebrate Christmas, they said: “Beware of the Evil,” so for the time of return they had a saying which was then thought to have effect only at this time: “Know thyself”—placing it in exact polarity to the Knowledge of Nature.

“Beware of the Evil” could also be expressed: “Beware, draw back from Earth's darkness.” But this they did not say. Whereas during midsummer men accepted the external natural phenomenon of light as Wisdom, that is, at midsummer they spoke in a certain way in accordance with Nature, they would never have put the motto for winter into the sentence: “Beware of the darkness”—for they expressed rather the moral interpretation: “Beware of Evil.”

Echoes of these festivals have persisted everywhere, so far as they have been understood. Naturally everything was changed when the great Event of Golgotha entered in.

It was in the season of the deepest human temptation, in winter, that the birth of Jesus occurred. The birth of Jesus took place in the very time when man was in the grip of the Earth powers, when he had plunged down, as it were, into the abysses of the Earth. Among the legends associated with the birth of Jesus, you will even find one which says that Jesus came into the world in a cave, thus hinting at something that was perceived as wisdom in the most ancient Mysteries, namely, that there the human being can find what he has to seek in spite of being held fast by the dark element of the Earth, which at the same time holds the reason for his falling prey to Evil.

It is in accord with all of this, too, that the time of Repentance is ascribed to the season when spring is approaching.

The understanding for the midsummer festival has quite naturally disappeared to a still greater extent than that for the other side of the year's course. For the more materialism overtook mankind, the less people felt themselves drawn to anything such as Enlightenment.

And what is of quite special importance to present-day humanity is precisely that time which leads on from Enlightenment, of which man still remains unconscious, toward the season of autumn. Here lies the point where man, who indeed has to enter into knowledge of nature, should grasp in the nature-knowledge a picture, a reflection, of a knowledge of divine spirits. For this there is no better festival of remembrance than Michaelmas.

If this is celebrated in the right way, it must follow that mankind everywhere will take hold of the question: How is spirit knowledge to be found in the glorified nature-knowledge of the present? How can man transform nature-knowledge so that out of what the human being possesses as the fruits of this nature-knowledge, spirit knowledge will arise? In other words, how is that to be overcome which, if it were to run its course on its own, would entrap man in the subhuman?

A turnaround must take place. The Michael festival must take on a particular meaning. This meaning emerges when one can perceive the following: Natural science has led man to recognize one side of world evolution, for example, that out of lower animal organisms higher more perfect ones have evolved in the course of time, right up to man; or, to take another example, that during the development of the embryo in the mother's body the human being passes through the animal forms one after the other. That, however, is only one side. The other side is what comes before our souls when we say to ourselves: “Man had to evolve out of his original divine-human beginning.” If this (see drawing) indicates the original human condition (lighter shading), then man had to evolve out of it to his present state of unfoldment. First, he had gradually to push out of himself the lower animals, then, stage by stage what exists as higher animal forms. He overcame all this, separated it out, thrust it aside (darker shading). In this way he has come to what was originally predestined for him.

It is the same in his embryonic development. The human being rejects, each in its turn, everything that he is not to be. We do not, however, derive the real import of present-day nature-knowledge from this fact. What then is the import of modern nature-knowledge. It lies in the sentence: You behold in what nature-knowledge shows you that which you need to exclude from knowledge of man.

What does this imply? It implies that man must study natural science. Why?—When he looks into a microscope he knows what is not spirit. When he looks through a telescope into the far spaces of the universe, there is revealed to him what spirit is not. When he makes some sort of experiment in the physics or chemistry laboratory, what is not spirit is revealed to him. Everything that is not spirit is manifest to him in its pure form.

In ancient times when men beheld what is today nature, they still saw the spirit shining through it. Today we have to study nature in order to be able to say: “All that is not spirit.” It is all winter wisdom. What pertains to summer wisdom must take a different form. In order that man may be spurred toward the spirit, may get an impulse toward the spirit, he must learn to know the unspiritual, the anti-spiritual. And man must be sensible of things that no one as yet admits today. For example, everyone says today: “If I have some sort of tiny living creature too small to be seen with the naked eye and I put it under a microscope, it will be enlarged for me so that I can see it.”—Then, however, one must conceive: “This size is illusory. I have increased the size of the creature, and I no longer have it. I have a phantom. What I am seeing is not a reality. I have put a lie in place of the truth!”—This is of course madness from the present-day point of view, but it is precisely the truth.

If we will only realize that natural science is needed in order from this counter-image of the truth to receive the impulse toward the truth, then the force will be developed which can be symbolically indicated in the overcoming of the Dragon by Michael.

But something else is connected with this which already stands in the annals in what I might call a spiritual way. It stands there in such a form, however, that when man no longer had any true feeling for what lives in the year's changing seasons, he related the whole thing instead to the human being. What leads to “Enlightenment” was replaced by the concept of “Wisdom” [called “Prudence” in English practice]; then what leads to “Knowledge” was replaced by the concept of “Courage” [“Fortitude”]; “Temperance” stayed the same (see diagram 1); and what corresponded to “Repentance” was replaced by the concept “Justice.”

Here you have the four Platonic concepts of virtue: Wisdom [Prudence], Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. What man had formerly received from the life of the year in its course was now taken into man himself. It will come into consideration just in connection with the Michaelmas festival, however, that there will have to be a festival in honor of human courage, of the human manifestation of the courage of Michael. For what is it that holds man back today from spirit-knowledge?—Lack of soul courage, not to say soul cowardice. Man wants to receive everything passively, wants to set himself down in front of the world as if it were a movie, and wants to let the microscope and the telescope tell him everything. He does not want to temper the instrument of his own spirit, of his own soul, by activity. He does not care to be a follower of Michael. This requires inner courage. This inner courage must have its festival in Michaelmas. Then from the Festival of Courage, from the festival of the inwardly courageous human soul, there will ray out what will give the other festivals of the year also the right content.

We must in fact continue the path further; we must take into human nature what was formerly outside. Man is no longer in such a position that he could develop the knowledge of Nature only in autumn. It is already so that in man today things lie one within the other, for only in this way can he unfold his freedom. Yet it nevertheless holds true that the celebrating of festivals, I might say in a transformed sense, is again becoming necessary.

If the festivals were formerly festivals of giving by the divine to the earthly, if man at the festivals formerly received the gifts of the heavenly powers directly, so today, when man has his capacities within himself, the metamorphosis of the festival-thought consists in the festivals now being festivals of remembrance or admonition.*³ In them man inscribes into his soul what he is to consummate within himself.

And thus again it will be best to have as the most strongly working festival of admonition and remembrance this festival with which autumn begins, the Michaelmas festival, for at the same time all Nature is speaking in meaningful cosmic language. The trees are becoming bare; the leaves are withering. The creatures, which all summer long have fluttered through the air, as butterflies, or have filled the air with their hum, as beetles, begin to withdraw; many animals fall into their winter sleep. Everything becomes paralyzed. Nature, which through her own activity has helped man during spring and summer—Nature, which has worked in man during spring and summer, herself withdraws. Man is referred back to himself. What must now awaken when Nature forsakes him is courage of soul. Once more we are shown how what we can conceive as a Michael festival must be a festival of soul-courage, of soul-strength, of soul-activity.

This is what will gradually give to the festival thought the character of remembrance or admonition, qualities already suggested in a monumental saying by which it was indicated that for all future time what previously had been festivals of gifts will become, or should become, festivals of remembrance. These monumental words, which must be the basis of all festival thoughts, also for those which will arise again,—this monumental saying is: “This do in remembrance of Me.” That is the festival thought which is turned toward the memory-aspect.

Just as the other thought that lies in the Christ-Impulse must work on livingly, must reform itself and not be allowed simply to remain as a dead product toward which we look back, so must this thought also work on further, kindling perceptive feeling and thought, and we must understand that the festivals must continue in spite of the fact that man is changing, but that because of this the festivals also must go through metamorphoses.

• 1. The third of the cardinal or “Platonic” virtues, called in Greek Sophrosyne, in English, Temperance or moderation, in German is Besonnenheit. According to Steiner, Besonnenheit is “enfilling one's impulses with the degree of consciousness possible.” “A man who rules his impulses through reflective thinking, feeling and perceiving is a man who is ‘besonnen.’” (From Das Raetsel des Menschen, 6th August, 1916). See also Spiritual Foundation of Morality by Steiner.
• 2. Because of Rudolf Steiner's lectures referring to “The Dream Song of Olaf &Åsteson” (December 26, 1911 and January 7, 1913), this unique poem of initiation experience has been translated into English.
• 3. Feste der Erinnerungen (a plural form). Erinnerung has two shades of meaning. One is “recollection” or “remembrance”; the other “admonition” or “reminder.” Both elements seem to apply in this passage.

Man was born out of the Light into darkness, and the longing lies in him like a seed to seek the Light again. This ideal has shone before mankind, now brightly, now dimly, through all the ages of human culture on Earth. We glimpse it in the most direct form in the apparent preoccupation of earlier cultures with the Sun, whether this was seen as a divinity or observed in its outer reflection in the Earth's seasonal relationships to it.

On the one hand we have the Zarathustrians' Ahura-Mazdao and the Egyptians' Ra, on the other hand, holy places such as the laboriously constructed Stonehenge or the Mayan monument at Chichen Itza, both of which were apparently used in seasonal ceremonies reminding the people through the wonder of the solstice or the equinox of humanity's age-old connection with the creating God or gods, who fashioned both Earth and man and established the rhythms of Sun, Moon and stars on which all life depends.

Modern times find us in this respect in a darkened period. Walls of dogma enclose us, as the dogmas of science are added to the dogmas of religion. Many people, for example, embrace either evolutionism on the one hand or creationism on the other, on blind faith, without knowing very much about either. Yet dissatisfaction, a never fully suppressed longing really to know, stirs many others.

Readers who pick up yet another book by Rudolf Steiner are likely to do so because they have come to feel that here was a man who really knew, through a remarkable development of powers of cognition (which he claimed are accessible to everyone), the answers to many of the riddles that perplex every thinking person. Those who are familiar with Steiner's view of the world, of man and his evolution, through previous study of his teachings, known as Anthroposophy, should have little trouble with this volume.

But anyone who picks up The Cycle of the Year lacking prior acquaintance with Steiner may feel as if he had been dropped into a foreign country without map or dictionary. For this book is one of the many volumes which are not self-explaining written works, but rather a series of lectures given to a particular audience, in this case members of the Anthroposophical Society, who had been following and even diligently studying Steiner's unique work, many of them for as much as a decade or two.

Such a new reader needs to be told first of all that there are books both by Steiner himself and by other authors whose aim is to serve as an introduction to Anthroposophy. An Occult Science by Steiner is one such book. In Occult Science Steiner pictured in a great tableau the interweaving evolution of man and cosmos, from the first condition of spiritual primal warmth to “the turning point of time” when the Christ/Logos accomplished the Resurrection and laid into the Earth the seed for future human redemption. This mighty tableau of occult history had never been set forth in this way until Steiner described it here. The Philosophy of Freedom is an introductory work of a different character. In it, even more than in his other books, it was not Rudolf Steiner's primary intention to provide the reader with a fresh store of information. Rather, the intention was to set forth a systematic path by which the reader can develop and activate forces of thinking which he can begin to use livingly, creatively, imaginatively, warmly, freely, rather than in the passive, stereotyped, dry manner which present-day education so generally fosters.

From these few words the reader will already expect to find that Anthroposophy is connected with Christianity. It is not in itself a religion, much less a sect, but may be described, rather, as a Western Christian esoteric path. The Christianity Steiner set forth will be seen to be universal, rather than exclusive. We might picture it as a great life-giving river into which have flowed in their time the contributions of all the earlier great religions. These include not only the familiar ones, such as Buddhism and Judaism, but religions minimally known to history, such as that of the Druids, the Mithra cult and so on. Steiner, who could reconstruct also these through his clairvoyant vision, often referred to them together as “the ancient Mysteries.” He speaks of them here, especially in the final two lectures of this volume.

This latter aspect of the book might seem to be of merely academic interest unless we know of Rudolf Steiner's elaboration of the concept of reincarnation, with which those who heard the lectures were of course familiar. These listeners would have seen Steiner's revelations, for instance of the experiences of the festivals of the seasons as conducted by representatives of the Mysteries, as revelations of their own roots, as events in which they themselves might very well have participated in earlier incarnations. For in Steiner's view, we all take part in turn in each succeeding stage of human history.

In ancient times among those cultures that carried the torch of civilization, as described by Steiner, spiritual authority rested in the Mysteries. The science, the art, and the religion of those cultures were wholly consonant with one another and flowed as a unity out of each individual Mystery. There was no split between evolutionists creationists! It is known that Egyptian pharaohs, for example, were at the same time priests and initiates in the Mystery temple. Certain men—and until later only men—were chosen as candidates and were then trained to become initiates. The spiritual world was opened to them and they became witnesses of this world. They then passed on appropriate parts of the wisdom teaching to the rest of the populace in the form of myths, as well as giving guidance for the affairs of outer life, while keeping the deeper secrets strictly for themselves. Plato and Pythagoras among the ancient Greeks had knowledge of these Mysteries. The later Christian Mysteries, including those of the Holy Grail, cherished remnants of the ancient wisdom, but the great Spirit of the Sun, who had been variously known as Vishva, Karman, Ahura-Mazdao, Osiris and so on was now recognized to be none other than the Christ/Logos Who had come to Earth.

These aspects of history Steiner was able to set forth out of his own spiritual research. (This in no way implies that he stood alone in having knowledge of these things). But what did he say of our own times?

Now that mankind has come of age and man is able to think for himself, Rudolf Steiner asserted that the divine powers have turned over the responsibility for Earth's further evolution to man himself, as was always their intention. The “gods” have set “man” free—and woman now stand beside man and are of course included in the general term “man.” To go into the future, we who are “man” need to reconcile once more science, art, and religion, which are now pulling in conflicting directions. To make this possible, Mystery wisdom will have to be brought into the open, made accessible to all men, no longer reserved for the privileged few. Mozart had a sense for this. In his opera “The Magic Flute,” he revealed, although still in allegorical form, some aspects of the temple Mysteries, notably the trials undergone by a candidate for initiation. Indeed Mozart is said to have seriously offended thereby those who still zealously guarded the Mysteries in his day.

The same was of course said of Steiner in his time. In Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) we see a fully modern Western initiate. First having become educated as a natural scientist, he took upon himself the dual task of revealing as much of the Mystery wisdom as he could find individuals capable of receiving, and also of pointing to a modern path of spiritual development which can further open up the sources of wisdom. One of his written books in particular addresses itself to this task, setting forth a path of self-development which can lead to initiation, a path which anyone by his own free choice may follow. This is Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.

It was Rudolf Steiner's destiny to become active as initiate and teacher just at the time when a new page was being turned in spiritual history in the relation of man to those heavenly beings whose impulses come to light in the progression of time. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the archangel Michael became the ruling Time Spirit, just before the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga as it was known to the ancients, was to come to an end, in 1899. From the beginning it had been Michael's task to hold in check the Powers of Darkness, whose leader Steiner designates as Ahriman (Persian: Angri-Manyu). We often see Michael depicted in medieval art as the courageous slayer of the Dragon. It was Steiner's teaching that now that mankind is of age and free, man must overthrow the “Dragon” himself, first of all by recognizing him where he works, but that Michael will lend man power. Working out of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner served as a human representative of Michael, who is mentioned without introduction already in the first lecture in this volume.

Sixty years after Steiner's passing, Anthroposophy is increasingly showing how this modern Mystery impulse can fructify not only the inner but also the outer life, just as did the Mysteries of old. Most readers will have heard of the worldwide Waldorf School movement which arises out of Anthroposophy. Many will have heard of the organic but functional style of architecture Steiner inaugurated with his Goetheanum buildings in Dornach, Switzerland or of the eurythmy or drama performances which take place there; of Bio-Dynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, or another of the many offspring of this science of the spirit. All this is of course only a beginning. The threefold social order, for example, referred to in the volume in hand, has yet to be implemented, with all that it promises for the welfare of mankind. But a beginning has been made which finds the sciences, the arts, and religion starting to flow once more from a single source.

That a spiritual science must develop out of today's natural science, and that the threefold nature of man as a being of spirit, soul, and body must be grasped as a starting point, these are overall concerns of this volume, as of many others of Steiner's works. Its specific approach, however, is unique to this work. Only here, in this cycle of lectures, do we find so fully revealed the deeper relationships of man to the Earth's seasons, to the time of the solstices and the equinoxes, to the festivals of the seasons, and through them to the Christ Being and His right-hand spirit, Michael.

Here we can begin to sense again, surely with awe, the oneness of man with the universe that stirred the hearts of the ancients, our ancestors, of our earlier selves if you will. Here we find a foundation laid for celebrating the Christian festivals, especially Easter and Michaelmas, in a newly conscious way in which through man's emerging capacities, the lost communion with the divine world of man's origin can be re-established in ways suitable to the new Age of light. We are indeed reminded of Mozart's hope-filled declaration at the end of his opera: “The Powers of Darkness give way to the Light.”

Barbara Betteridge
Santa Paula, 1984

When, out of that existence which is called the pre-earthly, the human being first grows through the germinal state into the physical-earthly life, we then see how in his physical existence the spiritual nature, which is at first hidden, begins to assert itself Out of the physical body; how the child sleeps, as it were, into the physical-earthly world. We see that the life of the child in its relation with the surrounding world is still a kind of dreaming; that it only gradually awakes. Threefold, however, do we find is that which the child manifests at especially conspicuous points in the stages of this awaking. Indeed, something of this threefoldness is observed with that intimate joy, that devoted love, with which one who is in the full sense a human being always observes a child. But the full significance of this threefoldness really becomes clear to one only when it is possible through spiritual science to observe the spiritual life in the physical-corporeal existence. This threefoldness is the learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to think. You know that the human being passes through this threefoldness in an age like the springtime of life. Such is this meaningful order of occurrence. We shall soon see why it must be this meaningful succession. It can, as a matter of fact, be different, but the succession according to nature is just this.

Learning to walk is something which, in an utterly one-sided manner, points to a series of things that the child achieves at the same time. The child enters into the world in such a way that it is in a state of equilibrium utterly unlike that in which it later moves about in the world. There is associated with this at the same time the right use of the arms and the right placing of the human organism in a posture suitable for man in his relation with the world, in the capacity for movement in relation with the world suitable for the human being, in the capacity for movement suited to the human being in the earthly existence. This is what the child must first learn. Out of what the human being acquires in the mobility of his organism there proceeds what adapts him to the equilibrium of the solid, the fluid, the gaseous. In all of this lies the basis for something else. While the human being is undertaking all this activity—learning to walk, learning balance, learning to use the arms and hands and fingers—these movements, which take place in his entire system, are working upward into the system which is the basis for human speech. This tenses the muscles, causes the blood to flow, exercises an influence upon the etheric body, works over into those physical, etheric, astral organs of breathing, proceeds further exerting a certain plastic activity in the brain. One might say that it passes beyond into those organs which, out of the inner human being, bring about speaking through imitation of the surroundings. Language is the transposition of movement and transposition of balance. One who can bring reality into cognition through beholding the actuality of the soul-spiritual sees how dexterity—not the achieved, but the striving that the child must exercise in order to gain the dexterity practiced by the hand in grasping—works onward into the melodious element of language. What is rhythm in language comes to expression in the manner in which the feet are set down in the movement of walking. It is of much significance to observe whether the child, in learning to walk, steps on the heel, the ball of the foot, or the toes. Out of speech there grows what darts forth out of the human being as childish thinking. Walking, speaking, thinking,—all of this evolves out of that dim, dreamy state of consciousness. When the human being is born, and is not yet able to do these things, the force is none the less within the child in the last after-effects of its presence in the pre-earthly existence. Spiritual science can show us how this exists in the pre-earthly life. The earliest sounds of language are not such as manifest thinking, but proceed out of bodily comfort or discomfort.

How did walking, speaking, thinking appear in the pre-earthly life? Thinking, as it flows out of the child,—one who observes the manifestation of this thinking, as he traces it backward, finds that it disappears in an indefinite darkness. It emerges again in the very last period before the earthly birth. There one sees the human spirit-soul being in spiritual intercourse with that host of Beings described in my Occult Science as Angels. This is an intercourse which may be described by saying that thoughts are not being conceived and expressed abstractly, but that a living stream of thought is flowing here and there from one Being to another: there is living intercourse with the Angels. Out of what has flowed into the human soul in the form of a force, there develops something which is slept through, as it were, during the germinal life but later becomes manifest as the force of thinking, conceiving. This we possess in order to enter rightly into intercourse with human beings. Just think what we should be if we were not thinking beings, what we should be as human beings together! All that we are as human beings together results from the fact that we are thinking beings. Here on this earth we mutually understand one another in the relation of man to man by means of the thinking which we express in speech. This manner in which we understand one another here by means of thinking,—this we have acquired out of the pre-earthly intercourse with the Angels. This intercourse which we there practice with the Angels can be practiced also with other human beings who are there in the pre-earthly existence. This takes the form of direct speaking in thoughts. Loftier, however, is the intercourse with the hierarchy of the Angels, since this affords not only satisfaction for the soul but a force which reappears in the thinking that the child acquires in the third stage of his earthly life.

Let us consider now the second stage, that of language. This is not so completely bound up with the sense-nerve system as is thinking. Speaking is bound up with the breast system, man's rhythmic system, with that which comes to expression in breathing, in blood circulation. When that which there struggles out of the child, imitating in language the outer world, is traced back to the pre-earthly life, we find that these forces are acquired out of intercourse he is permitted to experience during the pre-earthly existence with the second hierarchy, that of the Archangels, those Beings who rule over peoples, Beings with this responsibility for the very reason that they have the relation with human beings which we have just described. These forces acquired by the human being in relation with the Archangels sink down into night and come again to manifestation in the forces of the earthly life of speech, by means of which we have mutual understanding with other human beings. Without language, what should we be as human beings in mutual association if we could not pour forth in the coarser vibration of the air, which manifest speech, the ether vibrations of thought? That our rhythmic system becomes the bearer of a denser manifestation,—this force we receive from the Hierarchy of the Archangels. And thus can we follow this process as we go back to the pre-earthly existence; we can say not only in abstract ways that man lives there among spiritual Beings, but can declare in an entirely specific manner what this or that class of Beings has bestowed upon us for the life on earth. We thank these spiritual Beings—that is, we place ourselves in a right relation with these Beings—when we say: For my thinking, I thank the Angels; for language, I thank the Archangels.

Let us go back now to the first thing that the child learns: to walk, learning a balanced posture. There is more connected with this than is usually thought. Connected with it is the bringing about by the ego of a specific physical process which changes man from a creeping to a walking being. It is the ego that erects the human being; the astral body that is at work within the feeling for speech in the erect being; the etheric body that permeates all of this with the force of thinking. But all of these work into the physical body. When we consider the animal, which has its back parallel with the surface of the earth, its action, its walking, its behavior—everything that proceeds out of the astral—is utterly unlike these things in man, who is a being with volition acting out of his upright, vertical nature. What comes about in man, taking place in the ego, astral body, etheric body,—all of this is in the physical body a sort of combustion process. Here is a point where our physical science, if it was desirous of fulfilling itself, would be able to discover its union with Anthroposophy. It must be said that the combustion processes in man are altogether different from those in the animal. When the flame of the organic being works horizontally, it destroys what comes out of conscience; there cannot work into this what is derived from the moral out of conscience. The fact that, in the case of the human being, these processes are streamed through by the conscience is due to the fact that the flame of volition in man is perpendicular to the earth. Within this striking in of the moral, of the nature of conscience, the child places himself just as into the external posture of balance. Together with the learning to walk, there darts into man the moral human nature—indeed, the religious permeation of the nature of man. These are truly lofty forces which are there at work when the child passes over from the creeping to the walking movement. These forces, if we follow them back through the darkness of the child's consciousness, lead us to a still loftier association of man with the Beings whom we call the Primal Forces, the Archai. Everything through which the human being has passed in the pre-earthly life is here reactivated. If to the prayer-like formula, for my thinking I thank the Angels, for language I thank the Archangels, we wish to attach a third unit, we must say: For my being placed within the earthly existence according to physical and moral forces, I thank the Archai—who have been endowed with this power by still loftier Beings.

And now we can answer the question for ourselves: How is it that the human being, who possessed a brilliant consciousness before birth, brings with him here a dull consciousness? Indeed, into this consciousness there dips down what we can combine under the concepts of walking capacity, speaking capacity, thinking capacity, which we have received into ourselves from the higher Hierarchies to be transformed by us. We see thus that what makes us human beings, that through which we are human beings among human beings, manifests our connection with the loftier divine-spiritual worlds. Into these divine-spiritual worlds we enter again and again in a certain way during our earthly existence. The truth is that we must say to ourselves: For the real nature of man, the state of sleep, out of which dreams come into play, is at least just as significant as the waking state. When man passes over from the waking state to the state of sleep, these three capacities that have been acquired in the manner described begin to grow silent: conceiving, speaking, action all grow silent. But we see then that, as thinking grows silent when we fall asleep, the human being, in the same degree in which thought disappears from his consciousness, comes near to the Angels, and, as his speaking capacity comes to an end, he approaches the Archangelic Beings. In the degree to which the human being has entered into complete stillness, he passes through the quieting of his activity into proximity with the Primal Beings, the Archai.

What is important, however, is that we should enter during the sleeping state in a worthy manner into proximity with these three hierarchies: that we come close to the Angels, Archangels, Archai in a worthy way during the state of sleep. Here is the point at which one would have to speak in a special manner to the human beings of the present time; for the manner in which we enter into proximity with the Angels depends very much upon the manner of one's thinking during the waking state. The manner in which man uses worthily his speaking forces determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archangels; the way in which man uses rightly his capacity for movement and his moral sense determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archai.

We are living in a time when the human being is no longer willing to have in his thinking anything extending beyond the physical world, when he desires to be stimulated by the external world. A pure, self-sustained thinking, such as I recommended more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom as the foundation for moral intuition,—such thinking, unfortunately, is sought but little at present and but little cultivated in children. But through such thinking, which Goethe and Schiller would still have called idealistic thinking,—through such thinking one breaks free from the mere waking world in earthly existence and retains something for the sleeping state. So much power do we possess for approaching the Angels during sleep as there is idealism in our thinking. And just as helpless are we for the steps we must take toward the Angels as materialism is at work in our thinking. In the same sense it is to be observed that those persons fall victims to Ahrimanic elemental spirits—to which then their thinking is forced to turn—who do not, through idealism developed during the waking state, find the forces for drawing near to the Angelic Beings. It is so very beautiful when the child has learned to think so directly, in a manner of which human beings no longer form any conception! The thinking of the child just after it has learned to think is filled with spirituality. It is wonderful to see how—up to the time when they have been nibbled at by materialism—children upon sleeping move immediately as if on wings toward their Angelic Being, how united they become during sleep with the Angelic Beings. Thus we may say that we seek during sleep—but only through idealism, through spiritualizing the realm of thoughts—those worlds out of which we have evolved in order to learn to think here as human beings together with human beings.

And when we consider language, idealism in one's disposition has the same significance for intercourse during sleep with the Archangels as idealism in thinking has for association with the Angels. The person who is able, when addressing his words to another person, to stream good will into these words, a good mood that passes over into the soul of the other person, which does not pass by the other person but penetrates into him with the interest that one may have for a human being,—that mood which may be called an idealistic mood of good will, it is this that, when astral body and ego have passed over into sleep, gives to language the melodious sound. This gives to astral body and ego, which also share in language, the capacity to come near to the Archangelic Beings, whereas it is the unsocial, egotistic attitude of mind which scatters these forces in the realm of the Ahrimanic elemental beings. Thus the human being, when he falls asleep, and has not used language in the right, idealistic manner, really dehumanizes himself.

Such is the situation likewise when our actions, our conduct is such as to be humanly friendly, but is also fully aware that the human being is not only that entity living in flesh, but in his inner nature is a spiritual being, for out of this awareness arises respect for the other person likewise as a spiritual being. It is out of action based upon this attitude that we gain for the sleeping state the power that brings us in the right manner close to the Archai, whereas, if we are not in a condition to perform humanly kind actions, if we are aware of our own nature only as bodily, the corresponding forces are then scattered in the realm of Ahrimanic elemental Beings: we alienate ourselves from the very nature of man.

Thus the human being brings three kinds of gifts out of the pre-earthly existence, but it is in this way that he connects these again in a threefold manner with his primordial form between sleeping and waking, while he remains unconscious, but returns again and again into proximity with these Beings. This, then, is just as we here on earth have to form our association with other human beings out of three sources: the source of thought, of speech, of action. Thus are we during sleep in a threefold relation with the spiritual world: with the Angels, with the Archangels, with the Primal Forces.

The nature of our link in association with these Beings is of determinative significance when we pass through the portal of death. For it is possible to know through spiritual vision that one is able to draw ever nearer to the Angels, the Archangels, the Beings of the Archai. But it is something which may become extremely bad for future human beings if they surrender themselves wholly to the Ahrimanic elemental Beings, if materialistic thinking, speaking, action become ever more habitual. Thanks to the spiritual world, however, human souls of the present time—at least as to most persons—have such an inheritance of a good mood in thinking, speaking and action that the materialism of the present time cannot degrade everything. Very materialistic persons do not possess out of the contemporary life on earth much that can render possible approach to the hierarchies, yet out of the life of the past there flows forth what brings them there. Yet humanity may very easily meet with a different reward if a spiritual conception of life is not acquired. The idealizing of thinking, speaking and action provides man with the possibility of creating in a certain way new connections with the three classes of divine-spiritual Beings—the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai—and this man needs for the time between death and a new birth. Otherwise, in a far future time, if he has not had a connection in the present time with the Angels, he must be born as a being crippled in thinking; if he has not entered into a union with the Archangels, as a man without language; if he has not had a connection with the Archai, as a being crippled in limbs and in moral impulses. It is within the power of mankind on earth, through materialism in civilization and culture, to drag the whole of earthly humanity down to ruin, or through spiritualizing to lift humanity to a loftier height, such as I described in my Occult Science as the Jupiter existence of the earthly beings.

It is simply true that Anthroposophy is not a theory: every word, every thought passes over into our whole spiritual human nature. We cannot do otherwise than to possess the thought: you are truly a crippled person if you do not possess the right relation with the Higher Beings. This gives us the right sense of responsibility in a moral relation with the spiritual world, and it is out of this that there comes about in man a right sense of responsibility in relation also with the physical world. Only thus does it arise. When you consider what thus occurs to the human being, how through idealism in his thinking he enters into proximity with the Angels, how through his words, through the idealistic attitude expressed in his speaking, he enters into proximity with the Archangels, how through the idealism embodied in his actions he draws near to the Archai—how during sleep he struggles upward to the three Hierarchies—you will then find intelligible what anthroposophical research discloses to us: that the constitution of human destiny is woven in this way. All of this we carry through the portal of death, and it later becomes conscious. After death we must form our thoughts in association with the Angels; it is through the disposition of mind we possess that we must acquire our concepts after death. The manner in which we take our place through language in the midst of mankind gives us the capacity, the power, to enter into association with the Archangels. Through the manner in which we use our limbs must we gain the possibility of possessing self-consciousness after death through association with the Archai. Thus do we enter livingly within and thus is that woven which develops into a clearer power of consciousness between death and a new birth.

If we now observe the child during the earliest years of life, we behold the preceding earthly existence in its after effects. We see not only into the preceding pre-earthly life, but also the preceding life on earth, and thus only does one gain a view for the entire life on earth. One observes the child, how it learns to walk, to use its arms; one observes whether it steps on the ball of the foot or on the heel. Not only does one notice how it directs its physical look, but how still earlier actions are carried out with delicacy, with tenderness, with a pitying heart, how this gives to the child in this life a firm tread, how an insecure, wavering step is the outcome of brutish, pitiless action in the previous life. Every step taken by the child, the striving for this or that forming of the tread, reveals to us how this forming is the outcome of the previous life on earth. We learn to recognize the physical as the image of what is living in the child as a moral impulse out of the previous life on earth. The most impressive thing that can be observed is the learning to walk. Human freedom comes about through the fact that man is born with his destiny as little interfered with as whether he has light or dark hair.

The primary measure of destiny is expressed in the learning to walk. In learning to speak, something else is really indicated. This also is in relation with the pre-earthly existence, but it is difficult to describe. Since it is difficult to characterize, I shall express this in popular language. When the human being passes through the portal of death, he has in a certain way formed his nature morally. Always during the sleeping state he has been weaving his own being, and what he has then woven he himself begins to see. What a person is, comes to manifestation in his learning to walk. When he has passed through the portal of death, he enters in the right manner into association with the Angels, Archangels, Archai, but something further is added to this which the person receives from the second group of the hierarchies. These stream into this person, as an additional, more impersonal karma, that which places him in his next life within a specific language, integrates him within a certain body of people. Individual destiny is connected with what the person is in relation with the Archai. Capacity for speaking we receive from the Archangels. But what language we learn,—this is received from far loftier Beings: the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes.

When we consider thinking, conceiving, this is in relation, as I have shown, with the Angels; these Beings can bestow upon man the gift of thinking. This capacity, however, man achieved first in the earth period of evolution; he did not possess it during the Moon period. In this way there comes about a development for the Angels themselves; they enter thus into relation with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. They have gained in this way the capacity for a direct association with the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, and these do not bestow a capacity which is to be shared only within a single human group, but one to be shared by the whole of humanity. Thinking is really something belonging in common to the whole of humanity. For this reason is logic identical over the whole earth. Walking, in which personal destiny is expressed, we receive from the Archai, out of their own forces. The capacity for speaking is received by the human being from the Archangels, but these are directed in this by the second group of the hierarchies. It is from the Angels that the human being receives the gift of thinking, but these bestow this upon man under the influence of the highest hierarchies.

Thus are things woven in the cosmic order, and man is understood only when he is clearly seen in this relation of being interwoven with the cosmic order. In this way one understands, not only the single person, but also the nature of a living or dying branch of language, a deficient or a perfect capacity for thinking. Man exists on earth in a certain dualistic relation. He sees entities and sees them in a certain dependency under natural laws. In relation with these, man comes to a consciousness of his own relation with the Godhead. Here on this earth there is no relation between the physical and the moral cosmic order. But, when we look back into the life before birth and that after death, we then enter into a world where these two realms are merged into one. Moreover, a human being cannot determine rightly what he himself is unless he is in a position to see truly into himself as a spiritual being. Man does not acquire a unitary world view unless he can see beyond birth and death, if he does not look into the higher worlds. In order to understand his entire, total being, man needs a consciousness permeated by knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

In the short lecture I gave this afternoon before the eurythmy performance, I pointed out how we can see from the relationship that modern humanity has to the festivals of the year how we are entering into materialism. However, one must then grasp the concept of materialism much more deeply than is usually the case. The most dangerous characteristic of the present time is not that people are infected with materialism, but the much more dangerous characteristic is the superficiality of our age.

This superficiality is not only present in relation to spiritual worldviews, but it is also present in relation to materialism itself. It is taken for granted in superficial appearances. This afternoon, for example, I pointed out how, in different times of the year, something like the moods to which people in older times still yielded also came to expression in the festive events of those older times. Various moods were incorporated into the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John's festival, the Michaelmas festival, those very specific, cult-like or at least cult-like events, which must overcome people when they consciously experience the course of the year.

In this way, the human soul received nourishment, whereas today we only nourish the body. We still take part in the course of the day. When the sun sends forth its morning gold in its own revelation as dawn, we eat our breakfast. When the sun is at its zenith, when it pours its warmth and light particularly lovingly over the human race on earth, we devote ourselves to our midday meal, and so on through five o'clock tea and supper. In these festive events of the day, we join in the course of the day with the sun, by inwardly experiencing this fiery ride of the sun around the world. We experience what the sun performs in its fiery ride around the world by completing hunger and satiation. And so the mood for the human physical organism is there in a very distinct way at certain times of the day. We could call breakfast, lunch, tea and supper the festivals of the day. The human physical organism participates in what takes place in the relationship between the earth and the cosmos.

In a similar way, in older times, when the soul life was felt more intensely from the old instinctive states of clairvoyance, the course of the year was experienced. Certain things even played into the other from one sphere. You only need to remember what remains of these things: Easter eggs, St. Martin's geese and so on. In this way the lower, bodily region plays into the soul region, which must also experience the course of the year in a soul-like way. Now, a materialistic age would still be most likely, I do not want to say for Easter eggs, but for St. Martin's geese and the like, one would also be in favor of the course of the year.

But in olden times these things were not meant with reference to the actual festive mood, but they were attuned to the hunger and satiation of the soul. The human soul needed something different at Christmas time, something different at Easter time, at Midsummer time and at Michaelmas time. And one can really compare what was in the events of the festivities with a kind of consideration for the hunger of the soul precisely in the seasons that occur and with a satiation of the soul in these seasons.

Now we can say: If we look at the course of the sun during the day, we can apply to it that which is good for our body. If we look at the course of the sun during the year, we can apply to it that which is good for our soul.

If festivals are to be revived, then this must naturally happen out of a much more conscious state: out of such an awakening of the soul as is striven for through the anthroposophical world view. We cannot merely restore the old festival seasons historically; we must find them again out of our own soul nature through the newer insights and views of the world. But we distinguish not only between body and soul in man, but also between spirit.

Now it is already difficult for modern man to surrender to certain ideas when speaking of soul. The story becomes blurred and indefinite. Not only that one has experienced how in the 19th century people began to speak of a psychology, a doctrine of the soul without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great critic of language, even said: Soul is something so indeterminate that we do not really know any soul, we only know certain thoughts, sensations, feelings that are experienced in us, but we do not know a unified soul in it. We should therefore no longer use the word “soul” at all in the future. We should speak of this indeterminate inner wiggling and no longer say soul, but “soul”. Thus Fritz Mauthner advises that a future Klopstock who writes a “Messiade” should no longer say: “Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, but rather: “Sing, unsterbliches Geseel, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, if that still makes sense at all within this Geseellehre! So in the future we would not have a psychology, but a soul science.

Now we can really say: the modern man no longer knows anything about the connection between his soul and the course of the sun throughout the year. He has become a materialist in this respect too. He adheres to the feasts of the body, which follow the course of the sun throughout the day. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional custom, but they are not felt to be alive. And we have, in addition to having a body and a soul - or, in the sense of Fritz Mauthner, a Geseel - we also have spirit.

Now, in the course of the world, there are also historical epochs. The human spirit also lives through these historical epochs, which extend beyond the course of a year and span centuries, if it feels them with feeling. In the old days, people experienced them very well. Anyone who is able to enter in the right way, borne by the spirit, in the way that people in older times thought their way into the course of time, knows, as has been said everywhere: At this or that turning point in time, some personality appeared who in turn revealed something spiritual from the heights of the world. And then this spiritual essence has become established, just as sunlight becomes established in the physical world. When such an epoch then entered its twilight, something new emerged.

These historical epochs are related to the development of the spirit of humanity just as the course of the year is related to the development of the soul. Of course, precisely when the development of the spirit must be grasped in a living way, it must be done by learning to understand how changes and metamorphoses occur in the development of humanity through conscious spiritual knowledge. Today, people would rather overlook these metamorphoses altogether. They are somehow outwardly affected by the effects, but inwardly they do not want to deal with the changes that come from the spirit and express themselves in external world events.

One should only look at how a certain way of thinking, feeling and feeling arises in our time among children and young people, which was still foreign to the earlier generation; how great changes occur, which, if one looks at the right elements, are entirely comparable to the development of the year in the development of humanity. Therefore, we should listen to what each age proclaims as its needs, and pay attention when a new age is dawning and demanding something different from people than previous ages have demanded. But for that, people today have only a limited organ.

The great interconnections of life can come to us when we approach the festive mood in the right way from our present consciousness, when, for example, we really let something like the St. John's mood into our soul, and if we try to gain from the St. John's mood that which will help our soul to develop, that which supports our engagement by the cosmos coming to our aid.

Certainly, modern humanity has become more or less indifferent to the things that are connected with the greatness of world development. Today, people no longer have a heart for the insights of the great world connections. The spirit of pettiness has made its way in, I would say the spirit of microscopy and atomization in phenomena that, when you talk about them today as I have to do here, naturally give the impression of the paradoxical.

I would like to point out a particular phenomenon in connection with the St. John's mood. The connection will be somewhat remote, but I would like to point it out. Even if one does not have a very developed sense of the course of the year, what is more natural than to have the impression from the growth of plants, from the growth of trees, that When spring comes, the green sprouts and shoots, and more and more growth, sprouting and blossoming occurs. The whole process of active growth, which gives the impression that the cosmos, with the effects of the sun, is calling upon the earth to open up to the universe, all of this then enters into the time around St. John's Day.

Then the sprouting and budding begins to recede again. We are approaching the time when the earth draws its forces of growth back into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How natural it is that from the impression one receives from the course of the year, one forms the idea that the snow cover belongs to winter, that it belongs to winter that the plants, so to speak, creep into the soil of the earth with their being, that it belongs to summer that the plants come out, grow towards the cosmos. What could be more natural than to develop the idea – even if in a deeper sense it is actually correct to have the opposite idea – that the plants are dormant in winter and awake in summer?

I do not want to speak now about this sleeping and waking in terms of right and wrong ideas. I just want to speak about the impressions that one gets, so that people have the idea that summer belongs to the development of vegetation, winter to the withdrawal and creeping away of vegetation. After all, a kind of world feeling develops for the human being. One gets into the feeling of a connection with the warming and illuminating power of the sun when one sees this warming and illuminating power of the sun again in the green and flowering plant cover of the earth, and you get into a feeling as if you were an earth hermit in winter, when the plant cover is not there and the snow coat closes the earth from the cosmos, calling for inner activity. In short, by feeling and sensing in this way, you tear yourself away from your earthly existence with your earthly consciousness, so to speak. You place yourself in the greater context of the universe.

But now comes modern research, which I am not criticizing here – what I am going to say now is not meant as a scolding, but as a praise, even in relation to research itself – now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders when it comes to the great cosmic connections. Why should one feel uplifted by the divinely illuminating, warming power of the sun when the trees bud, turn green, and the earth is covered with a blanket of plants? Why should one feel a connection with the universe through these plants growing out of the earth? It disturbs one. Cosmic feelings disturb one. It is no longer possible to reconcile having such feelings with one's materialistic consciousness. The plant is a plant, after all. It is as if the plant has a mind of its own when it blossoms only in spring and agrees to bear fruit in summer. How does that happen? You are dealing not only with a plant, but with the whole world! If you are supposed to feel, sense or recognize these things, you are dealing with the whole world, not just with the plant! It's not appropriate! You are already trying not to deal with the substances that are available in powder or crystal form, but with the atomic structures, with the atomic nucleus, with the electromagnetic atmosphere and so on! So you are trying to deal with something that is complete, not with something that points to many things. You should now admit to the plant that you need a sensation that reaches out into the cosmos! It is a terrible thing not to be able to narrow one's field of vision to the mere individual object! We are so accustomed to it: when we look through the microscope, everything around is closed off, there is only the small field of vision; everything happens in such a small, closed way. One must also be able to look at the plant by itself, not in connection with the cosmos!

And lo and behold, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, researchers achieved something extraordinary in precisely this area. It was certainly already known from individual plants in relation to hot houses, 'green houses and so on, that one can overcome the summer and winter, but on the whole, at this turn of the 19th to the 20th century, not enough had been achieved to overcome the fact that plants do need a certain winter rest. Discussions were held during this time about the situation of tropical plants. Those researchers who no longer wanted to know anything about the connection with the cosmos claimed that tropical plants grow all year round. The others, who still held on to the old conservative view, said: Yes, when you come to the lush green world of the tropics, you only think that because the plants go dormant at different times, some only for up to eight days. So you don't see it when a particular species is dormant. There were extensive discussions about the behavior of tropical plants. In short, there was a sense of tremendous unease about this connection between the plant world and the cosmos.

Now, just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the most interesting and ingenious attempts have been made in this direction, and a whole range of plants, not just annuals but also trees, which are much stronger, have actually been successfully weaned from their stubbornness, their cosmic stubbornness. We have succeeded in overcoming the dependency on cosmic conditions by creating certain conditions that make plants that were thought to be annuals become perennial. In the case of the majority of our forest trees growing in temperate climates, we have actually succeeded in creating conditions that cause trees that were thought to have to have this winter time, to lose their leaves in winter and stand there withered, to become evergreen. For that was the premise of certain materialistic explanations. In this respect, an extraordinarily ingenious achievement has been made.

It was discovered that the cosmic can be driven out of the trees if the trees are brought into closed rooms and the soil is properly nourished with nutrient salts, so that the plants, which would otherwise find nothing in the wintertime when the soil is so low in nutrient salts, now also find their nutrient salts there. If you provide sufficient moisture, enough warmth and enough light, the trees will grow.

Only one tree in Central Europe resisted this research drive at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the beech, the copper beech. It was hounded from all sides, and now it was said to be willing to be locked up in closed rooms! It was provided with the necessary nutrients, with the necessary moisture and warmth – but it remained stubborn and continued to demand its winter rest. But she was all alone.

And now, in this 20th century, in 1914, we have to note - I do not want to talk about the outcome of the world war, but about another great historical event - the great, powerful event that Klebs, a researcher who was extraordinarily favored by research in this field, succeeded in exorcising the beech's cosmic stubbornness. He simply succeeded in growing beech trees in closed rooms, providing them with the necessary conditions in closed rooms: the appropriate sunlight, which could be measured. And lo and behold, the beech did not resist; it also yielded to what the researchers wanted.

I am not referring to a phenomenon that I have reason to criticize, because who could not admire such tremendous research effort. Besides, it would of course be madness to want to refute the facts. They are there, they are like that, they are absolutely like that. So it is not a matter of agreement or refutation, but something else.

Why should it not be possible to create hair growth outside of humans and animals if the necessary conditions for hair growth could be found somewhere on neutral ground? Why not? The appropriate conditions just need to be somehow produced. I know that there are some people in our time who would prefer their hair to grow on their heads rather than be produced externally by some kind of cultivation! But we could imagine that this would also succeed. Then we would seemingly no longer need to somehow connect what happens on earth with the cosmos.

Of course, one can have all due respect for research, but one must nevertheless see deeper into these things. Apart from what I developed here some time ago about the nature of the elements, I would like to say the following today. It must be clear that, for example, the following is the case. We know that once upon a time the Earth and the Sun were one body. That was a long, long time ago, in the Saturn era, the Sun era. Then there was a brief repetition of this state during the Earth era. But something remained behind in the earth that belongs there. Today we are bringing it out again. And we are not only bringing it out of the repetition that occurred during our time on earth by heating our rooms with coal, but we are bringing it out by using electricity. For from those times when, according to the old Saturn time, in the solar time, the sun and the earth were one, the foundation was laid for us to have electricity on earth. With electricity, we have a force that has been connected to the earth since ancient times, which is solar power, solar power hidden in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn beech tree, if only we tackle it hard enough, make use of the solar energy flowing in from the cosmos, instead of using the solar luminosity obtained from the earth in the form of electricity!

But it is precisely when we consider these things that we realize how much we need a deepening of our whole knowledge. As long as people could believe that solar energy came only from the cosmos, they came from the immediate present observation of each year to an awareness of their cosmic connection in plant growth. In the present age, when materialistic considerations would sever that part of the Cosmos which can be so easily seen as a cosmic effect, we must, when we look at the apparent autonomy of the plant, have a science that remembers that the cosmic connection between earth and sun existed in older times, but in a different form. We need, precisely, on the one hand, to be restricted as if under a microscope, but on the other hand, we need an all the more intensive breadth of vision, and it is precisely in the details that it becomes clear how we need this breadth of vision.

It is not at all a matter of us on anthroposophical ground revolting in an amateurish way against the progress of research. But since the progress of research, by its very nature, must increasingly lead us to that earthworm nature of which I have often spoken here, so that we have no free view into the distance, we must gain the broader view, the great cosmic We need the counter-pole everywhere. Not antagonism towards research, but we need the spiritual, the spiritual counter-pole. That is the right point of view for us to take. And I would like to say that it is also a St. John's mood when we inscribe this in our minds, when we realize how we must now live in a world-historical St. John's mood, how we must turn our gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos. We need this. We need this especially in our spiritual knowledge. Today, mere talk of the spiritual is not enough; what is needed is a real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What is brought out of the cosmic development of the Earth, by drawing attention to the development of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, has enormous implications in terms of knowledge, including knowledge of history.

When, on the one hand, materialistic science, in such brilliant research results as those of Klebs, draws our attention to the fact that even the stubborn beech tree can be made to do without sunlight and light, as it otherwise only does under the influence of sunlight, then this leads us, if we have no spiritual knowledge, to crumbling everything in the world and narrow our field of vision. There is the beech tree in front of us, the electric light promotes its growth, but we know nothing but this, which arises in the narrowest field.

If we are endowed with spiritual insight, we say something different. Then we say to ourselves: If the beech's Klebs withdraws the present sunlight, then it must give it to it in the form of electricity, the ancient sunlight. Then our vision will not be narrowed, but on the contrary, our vision will be expanded into the vastness. Oh well, say the people who do not want to know anything more about the spiritual course of the year, one day is like the other: breakfast, lunch, tea time, supper time; it's good if there is something better at Christmas, but basically it goes on like this day after day throughout the year. We only look at the day, that is, at the outward material of the human being: Oh well, cosmic connections! Let us emancipate ourselves from such a world view! Let us realize that even the wayward beech no longer needs the cosmos. If we lock it in a closed prison, we only need to provide it with electric light of sufficient strength, and it will grow without the sun! — No, it just does not grow without the sun. We just have to know how to seek out the sun in the right way when we do something like that. But then we must also be clear about the fact that it is something different, a different relationship. When we look with a broad view, it turns out that it is something different whether we let the beech thrive in the cosmic sunlight, or whether we give it the light that has become Ahrimanic, originating from ancient times. And we recall what we have often said about the normal developmental process and the Luciferic on the one hand, and the Ahrimanic on the other.

If we have a sufficient insight into this, then we will not lick our fingers out of sheer cleverness that we have now overcome the cosmic obstinacy of the beech, but we will go much further. We will now proceed to the juices of the beech and examine the effect on the human organism, we will examine the effect on the human organism of the beech that we have left to its own devices and of the beech that we have removed its stubbornness with the electric light, and we will perhaps learn something very special about the healing properties of one beech and the other. Then we have to go into the spiritual!

But how do you deal with these things today? You have an admirable interest in research. You sit in a classroom, you are an experimental psychologist, you write down all sorts of words that have to be memorized, you test memory, you experiment on children, and you discover something tremendously interesting. Once you have awakened an interest in something, then of course all things in the world are interesting; it depends only on the subjective point of view. Why should one not be able to make it so that a stamp collection is much more interesting than a botanical collection? Since that can be the case, why should it not be possible for something like that to happen in another area? Why should one not be able to gain some interest from the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented on? But everywhere one wonders whether there are not higher obligations, whether it is at all advisable to experiment with children in this way at a certain age. The question arises as to what one is corrupting there. And the even stronger question arises as to what is spoiled in the teachers when, instead of demanding a lively, warm relationship from them, an experimental interest is demanded from the results of experimental psychology. So it really depends on whether, when one puts oneself in the right relationship to the sensory world with such research, one also puts oneself in the right relationship to the supersensible world.

Now, of course, it will be able to roar with joy to certain people who speak of the necessary objectivity of research: So he wants to claim that there are some spirits who find it immoral when the beechwood glue takes its stubbornness in this way! — That doesn't occur to me at all. It doesn't occur to me in my dreams. Everything that is done should be done, but you have to have the counterweight to it. And in an age in which we have emancipated ourselves from cosmic perception regarding the growth of beech trees, there must also be a perception on the other hand, in a civilization that absorbs such things, of how spiritual progress occurs in the evolution of humanity. In an age such as our own, a sense of the times is essential. I do not wish to restrict research, but it must be felt that something else must be set against it. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times, these and those things from the spiritual world always reveal themselves. If, on the one hand, materialism becomes overgrown and leads to strong and great results, then those who have an interest in such results should also have an interest in the research results about the spiritual world.

But this lies at the very heart of Christianity. A correct view of Christianity, after the Mystery of Golgotha and in the continuing effect of Christ's earthly existence, sees in the nature of Christ the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse. And that means that when the autumn mood sets in, when everything becomes arid and barren, when the sprouting and budding in the nature of the senses ceases, then one perceives precisely the sprouting and budding of the spirit, when one can feel the glistening and glowing of the spirits in the tree as it sheds its leaves, and these spirits now accompany man through the winter.

But in the same way, we must learn to feel how, in an age that, from a certain point of view, rightly sets about understanding the details, narrowing our view of the details, our view must also fall on the big, the comprehensive. That is the St. John's mood in relation to Christianity. We must understand intuitively that the St. John's mood is the starting point for the event that lies in the words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That means that the impression on man of all that is conquered by sense research must decrease. And precisely by penetrating more and more into the individual senses, the impression of the spiritual must become ever stronger and stronger. The sun of the spirit must shine ever more brightly into the human heart, the more the sun that works in the sense world diminishes.

We must feel the St. John's mood as the entrance into spiritual impulses and as the exit from sensual impulses. We must learn to feel the St. John's mood as something in which it weaves and blows, spiritually and demonically blows from the sensual into the spiritual, from the spiritual into the sensual. And we must learn to shape our spirit lightly through the St. John's mood, so that it does not just stick like pitch to the fixed contours of ideas, but that it finds its way into weaving, blowing, living ideas. We must be able to notice the glowing of the sensual, the dying away of the sensual, the glowing of the spiritual in the dying away of the sensual. We must feel the symbol of the illumination of the St. John's night moth as something that also has its meaning in the dimming of the lighting.

The St. John's night moth glows, the St. John's night moth dims again. But by glowing, it leaves alive in us the life and weaving of the spiritual in the twilight of the senses. And when we see the little spiritual ripples everywhere in nature, just as we see symbolically in the sensual the glowing and damping of the Johanniswürmchen, then we will, when we can do this with full, bright, clear consciousness, find the right Johannis mood for our age. And we need this right Midsummer mood, for we must go through our time in such a way that the spirit learns to become fervently alive, and that we learn to follow meaningfully the fervently alive spiritual.

St. John's mood - towards the future of humanity and the earth! No longer the old mood, which only understands the sprouting and sprouting of the external, which is glad when it can also imprison this sprouting and sprouting, can put under electric light that which otherwise thrived happily in sunlight. We must learn to recognize the flashing and blossoming of the spirit, so that electric light becomes less important to us than it is in the present; but that we may thereby sharpen our view, the Johannic view, for that ancient sunlight that appears to us when we open up the great spiritual horizon, not only the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light that appears to us on this great horizon to have the right effect on us, then all the trivialities of our age will be able to appear to us in this light, and we will move forward and upward. Otherwise, if we do not make up our minds to do so, we will move backward and downward.

Today, it is all about human freedom, about human will. Today, it is all about the independent human decision between forward or backward, between upward or downward.

In our time, outside the circles of the anthroposophical movement, there is little understanding of how to arrive at a true view of the soul. I am saying something that may sound incomprehensible to some people, because it is often assumed that one knows what soul is, what one is dealing with when one speaks of the soul, and so on. And on the other hand, such a statement can in many cases be taken for granted in the sense that centuries- and even millennia-old views of the human soul have finally run their course and that a view of the human soul must wait until scientific research is so advanced that it is able to provide information about the soul.

Now, however, I would like to counter these two objections today with nothing more than the assertion of the recently deceased linguist Fritz Mauthner, whom I have mentioned several times: that people in the present day often believe that they have an insight into this or that, whereas in fact they only have words. And it is for this reason that Mauthner wrote a “critique of language”. He wanted to show that today's civilized humanity in particular has an inherited language. We have expressions for all sorts of things. But if you look more closely at what is behind the words, there is actually nothing there. We have the word, we think we are designating something with the word, but in reality we are not designating anything.

Now, of course, it is nonsense to apply this criticism of language to scientific knowledge. For no one will be of the opinion that, whether one knows much or little, let us say, about a horse, one could be misled about the thing horse by the expression “horse” in some language. Everyone knows perfectly well that you cannot ride on the word horse, but you can ride on the real horse. And that makes it clear from the outset that, with regard to things that exist in nature, a critique of language is rather inconsequential, because one will always know the difference between the word and the thing with regard to external observation. I do not believe that someone who wants to ride out will sit on the word 'white horse' instead of the real white horse.

But it is really different with everything in our present civilization that, on the one hand, refers to the soul, to the life of the soul, to the facts of the life of the soul, and, on the other hand, refers to the ethical, to the moral demands of humanity. Here one must indeed say: there is actually only a belief that realities lie behind the words. Therefore, one can also understand that Mauthner thought deeply: Should one even still use the word “soul”? There is nothing real behind it, as when a person speaks of a horse with the word horse. People no longer have any insights into the life of the soul. Therefore, one should not only omit the soul from the science of the soul, as a 19th-century psychology of the soul did, one should completely eradicate the word soul, and speak of “spiritual phenomena” in such a way as to refer to something indeterminate. If one wants to say that there are three entities, Karl, Fritz, Hans, who are sons of the same father and the same mother, and wants to refer to them superficially and sweepingly, then one says: siblings. Why should one, Mauthner asks, say soul when one only knows so little about mental phenomena? The word soul designates nothing; one should say “Geseel”. If this view were really to gain currency, the delusion would be done away with that in speaking of the soul one had something more or other behind it. For in the future one would no longer say that man has an immortal soul. During his life on earth man has a soul within him, I am touched in my deepest soul, and so on.

Things are indeed extremely serious for those people who are seriously seeking a view of the spirit, much more serious than one usually thinks. In any case, they prove how much people should listen up in the present when it is asserted somewhere that the right means should be sought again to reach the reality of the soul.

Today we say that the soul abilities are mainly thinking, feeling and willing. But people should just honestly realize what they mean by these terms thinking, feeling and willing. It would soon dispel their belief that they are looking at something real. Today I would just like to speak about how anthroposophy can clarify that with ordinary consciousness one is not at all able to look at something fully real in this respect. And what I would like to hint at today in this regard, I will then explain in more detail in the next lecture, because today it is still my duty to point out another aspect.

If a person looks honestly into themselves today, they must admit that what they carry within them in terms of thoughts is mostly taken from the outside world. These thoughts are more or less only mirror images of what makes an impression on the human senses in the external physical-sensual reality. Just try to do the self-observation experiment clearly and ask yourself: How many thoughts are there in this human consciousness that point to something other than the words we have: thinking, feeling, willing, God, immortality and so on, that point to something in the spiritual life of ordinary civilization that is not mirrored from the outside world? People only strive to understand everything in terms of how it can be mirrored by the external world. And if you want to explain the spiritual to many people today, they actually demand visual aids for the spiritual as well, perhaps a film or something similar, because they say: if it is not illustrated to us, if we are not presented with sensory images, then we do not understand anything about the spiritual!

In such moments, when people demand that the spiritual be clothed in sensual images, they are more honest than when they speak as experts on the soul. If we take together much of what I have often discussed here in this house, then we will be able to realize that when we look back on our thinking, we have only one side of this thinking. In this sense one can even speak of a reality — but one can speak of a reality in this way, as when one gets to know a person only from behind. Imagine the grotesque thing: you only know a person from the back! Then you know him, but you do not know his nature. At most, you can sometimes grasp something of his nature. But then cases like that of the student who once came to Heidelberg as a young badger, registered with the famous Professor Kuno Fischer, and now, in his great joy, before going to the lecture hall, rushed to the barber's, had himself dressed up, and because he is so full of the fact that he is going to hear the famous man, also talks to the barber about it. The barber says, “Yes, today Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard!” The student asks him, “How do you know that Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard today?” Yes, when he writes something on the blackboard, he has his hair parted at the back before the lecture; that's when he turns around!

Well, when there are such clear signs that the character is expressed in the parting of the occiput, then one can indeed learn something about the inner personality, even if one only gets to know it from behind. But firstly, it is perhaps not particularly significant, and secondly, it is the case with most people that one does not learn very much.

With regard to our thinking, the most important part of our soul for life on earth, we only perceive, if I may put it this way, the back side. The front side escapes ordinary observation. For when one approaches the observation of human beings with anthroposophy and asks oneself: Is it all about thinking, that one forms abstract ideas about the external things grasped by the senses? — then one comes to the conclusion that this is not all about thinking, but thinking, apart from representing this sum of abstract thoughts, is also still another sum of forces. Thoughts cannot actually do anything, and one actually thinks best when one does nothing, when one sits quietly, when one cultivates calm. Thoughts are powerless, like mirror images are powerless. But if you now follow the human being, from infancy until he has grown taller, and if you later follow the growth processes that are still present in the human being - even if the human being is no longer growing taller, growth processes are still there - if you look at what the forces of growth are in the human being, then these are the same forces, now seen from the other side, that show themselves backwards in abstract thought. Man sends abstract thoughts outwards; inwards they are the forces that shape his brain. In the early childhood years, the brain is formed plastically. The forces that otherwise work as growth forces are the forces of thinking. And just as you have to imagine the front side if you see a person from behind – if you are allowed to imagine that they are a complete person – you have to imagine the concrete, real power of thought that goes into the human being and works on the human being in addition to abstract thinking.

That is the essence of a pedagogy based on healthy anthroposophy: the teacher knows that it is not enough for the child to receive this or that abstract idea from this or that person. There is a big difference between whether the child receives a living, pictorial, active idea or a dead idea. The dead idea has a retarding effect on the growth processes, the living idea has a promoting effect on the growth processes. And so we come to the fact that thinking shows one side, which, powerless, only reflects the outer world, and, when we look inward, we see a living side that permeates the whole organism of the human being and that is only the other side of his growth, the spiritual counter-image of his growth. And if one continues to research, one finds that what is represented by the other side - in relation to the human being it is the rear side, but in relation to thinking it is the front side - is not brought down by dead thinking, which only appears to us from the front, but by living thinking from its pre-earthly existence.

In fact, the transition from the pre-earthly existence to the earthly existence is such that, in the pre-earthly existence, the human being freely develops a system of forces that works in all directions in the spiritual world. Then he descends into the earthly existence. There this thinking, which is active and ruling in the spiritual world, transforms itself into the inner organizing forces of the body, and outwardly it sends, as it were, the reflecting surface onto which the earth projects its images. That is the fact. But now it is indeed the case that after a person has completed the time between death and a new birth in a satisfactory manner, he then has no task for this living thinking in the spiritual world. This living thinking has its great task in the time between death and a new birth. When this task is completed, the phenomenon occurs over there, which I have often described to you: the soul turns to earth life. But then this thinking has a new task: the task of forming the human body. And that is the significance of man's earthly thinking, of man's thinking that comes from the spiritual, that it is directed towards the human body in a formative way. Thus, in our true, in our real thinking, we have an heirloom from the spiritual world, but one that is only something on earth, because in the spiritual world it has lost its purpose. We have to thank this for the fact that our thinking can become so clear on earth. If this thinking still had a task as it had in the spiritual world, it could not become so clear on earth.

But let us turn to the other faculty of the human soul, to feeling. You will all notice - quite apart from what I myself have said about it here in this room: feeling is not as clear as thinking. Feeling is something that occurs in a different form, but in the same way as dreaming. The state of mind during feeling is basically the same as during dreaming, except that feeling occurs in a completely different form. Why is that so? Well, in feeling, just as in thinking, we only have the back side for this earthly life. But the front side is not only directed towards the human body, but, as man descends to earth from the pre-earthly existence, from the existence between death and a new birth, he also retains what lies behind feeling as an heirloom. But that still remains turned towards the spiritual, it does not just have an earthly task. Therefore, every night when a person falls asleep, he does not take his thinking with him into sleep, but he does take his feeling with him. And if you look at dreams in the right way, they are images because logical thoughts do not live on; but feelings live on. With every sleep, a person delves into the whole spiritual world. Man does not take his thoughts with him, but he does take his feelings, and even more so his volitions.

Understandably, during the day there is nothing to be done with the will. I have often said that a person can make a plan, he has a thought. But how the thought slides down into the body, how the will to move the hand continues to work, remains as dark as the state remains dark in sleep. But for that, a person retains the most from the eternal for his will. And again, one can see from the activity of the human being, for if the human being does not move, there is not a will present, but only a desire. Seen from the other side, the will represents something completely eternal. Thinking also represents something eternal, but it has been transformed into an earthly activity. The will, however, remains in the Eternal and is active in man's destiny through repeated earthly lives, in Karma.

I just wanted to give you an introduction to how one penetrates to a real teaching of the soul, so that behind the words thinking, feeling and willing there are realities, so that one points to reality. Just as the word horse refers to the outer physical horse, so when one penetrates anthroposophically into the life of the soul in this way, one can come to reality, to realities. That is the way, and on this way will come at the same time what I emphasized at the end of the last lecture here: that Anthroposophy will never will be understood when it is theory, but only when, in acquiring the anthroposophical, the human being becomes a different being, the human being is truly transformed; when he becomes a different being altogether in ethical and human relationships.

What is being striven for in this way is now confronted with something else. And now I come to what I am obliged to tell you, because Anthroposophy is already in the world and one must be alert to what is happening. We must not always have closed windows, but must also look out, and so it is a spiritual and intellectual duty to speak about these things. For everywhere today, where people believe that they have obtained clear concepts only from science, anthroposophy is dismissed with the assertion: that is fantasy, speculation, that is fantasy. And those people say that they alone have clear thinking. Apart from the fact that when one approaches anthroposophy, one naturally gains inner certainty from the truth by pursuing the anthroposophical, one must sometimes also look at how clear today's thinking actually is! I would like to discuss this with you first of all using an example, for the reason that the anthroposophist should be aware of what is today's culture or civilization. I will take an example that says something. If, let us say, one examines the logic of a person who writes in the newspapers, not much is said by that. But I take a prominent naturalist of the present day and say explicitly that I do not want to say anything malicious or disparaging, because I fully recognize that we are dealing with an important naturalist and with a serious matter that he discusses. And in this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the clarity that prevails in this regard.

In October 1910, the well-known naturalist Max Rubner gave the rector's speech at the University of Berlin, entitled: “Our Goals for the Future”. He talks about the spiritual goals of the future, and it is not just anyone who speaks, but someone who is immersed in research and who must be seen as a serious and diligent researcher from the point of view of today's civilization. At the end of his speech, he also addresses the students and tries – well, in a way that is beautiful in his own way – to make it clear that they should study. But he does this with the “clear” concepts — I mean “clear” in quotation marks — that are possible for such a researcher today, based on today's thinking. I would like to draw attention to a few points. First of all, he says, addressing the students: “We all have to learn; we come into the world with nothing but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world...”

So, an often-encountered view today, which says: Look, if you want to talk about the soul life, look at your brain, which is a blank slate that has to get everything from the impressions of the outside world. So when we are born, we have our brain as a blank slate, we have to expose ourselves to the impressions of the world, then they go into us, then the slate is written on. So, he says to his students, just expose yourselves to the impressions of the world with freshness, courage and vigor, and then the page you brought with you will be written on.

In the next sentence, he tells them how to do it. He says: “No brain wants to grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned, what billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...”

So the students should only pay attention to what the spiritual heroes have created. But now the spiritual heroes are suddenly creating, so now the unwritten brains have to oppose the written brains of the spiritual heroes! You see, as soon as you put two sentences together, one on page 23 and the other on page 24, they are no longer correct! For if the heroes of the mind were also blank brains, it would not be possible to speak of their impressions on the blank brains in such a way as to suggest that these brains have created anything, for that is precisely what is being denied: everything must be received from the outside world. But now the outside world is also considered to include what human brains create. One must indeed go into such things.

But then it goes on to say: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” Now, put the two sentences together: “We receive everything from the outside world,” and the second: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” This is not the speech of an ordinary newspaper writer, this is the speech of a truly meritorious researcher of the modern age. You see, it is basically irrelevant if you now want to point out the way in which such a personality characterizes how the brain works. “[...] there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” That is why he tells his students to sometimes look around for other subjects that they have not yet looked at: “[...] some areas of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but ultimately bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

Well, after all, the soil that is plowed does not produce the plow. If you want to dwell on these thoughts, you can no longer grasp any thought at all. But now Rubner finds that this thinking is quite natural.

In order to show you the significance of what he is saying, I would like to say something in advance. When someone does sports, we see him in various movements. If you are particularly interested, you can even take a snapshot of these movements. But if we take an unbiased view of things, we have to admit that if we follow the internal organic processes that take place while someone is doing sports, what happens inside between nerve and muscle as a kind of process of destruction and restoration is, firstly, much more important for what it means to be human, but also infinitely more interesting than what can be captured in a snapshot. I am not saying anything against sport as an external physical exercise. But what the athlete is inwardly is truly much more interesting than what he is outwardly. It is only in what he achieves within the organism that it begins to become interesting.

Now it so happens that the opposite is the case with the movement of the human limbs as it is with thinking. In thinking, what is done, what happens, what the fact is, is the essential, and what lies in the organization is the unessential. In sports, what takes place externally in the facts is the less interesting part; what the organism does internally is the more interesting part. In thinking, what is interesting is what thinking presents itself as, what thinking really is; what the organism does in the process is something more or less simple. Therefore, when you understand things, you can no longer speak of thinking in the same way as of muscle movement.

But if all this becomes superficial, external, what do you say? Then you explain things like this: “Thinking strengthens the brain, and the latter (the brain) increases in performance through exercise, just like another organ, like our muscle strength, through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

You see, our civilization is caught out in its most important element, in thinking about things, if you grasp it in such a place. You don't wake up to what is actually happening in the present through something else.

Now I would like to introduce you to a personality who, through her way of thinking, which can truly be called ingenious within certain limits, has some excellent negative thoughts about our present civilization, and who understands how to characterize it well: how it is ultimately an impossible formation and shaping of thought that has brought our civilization to decay and ruin. And I must say: the man who wrote the book about the “decay and reconstruction of culture”, Albert Schweitzer, is in a position to judge such things. Anyone who is familiar with Albert Schweitzer's book “The History of the Life-Jesu Research,” published in 1906, for example, and the way in which Schweitzer knows how to address even the most apocalyptic of subjects, so that he is already well ahead of the other theologians, must admit that Schweitzer can have a sound judgment of what contemporary intellectual life is actually worth. Now he has written this book, the first part of which has just been published. The first chapter is entitled: “The Fault of Philosophy in the Decline of Culture.” And truly razor-sharp are the sentences that are intended to characterize our present intellectual life, our life of civilization. The very first sentence is: “We are living in the era of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It itself is only one manifestation of it. What was spiritual has been translated into facts, which in turn react on the spiritual in every respect in a deteriorating way.” A person who has insights into the worthlessness of present-day culture! And further: ”We lost our way in culture because there was no reflection on culture among us... So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” And now he asks himself: Why is this symptom of the decline of culture there? Why are we living in a cultural decline? And he says to himself: If we look back just a short time, to the time when intellectualism was in its first stage of flowering, people still had a “total worldview.” They still spoke of ethical and moral goals in such a way that they lay in the same sources as the laws of nature. They contemplated the laws of nature and then ascended to the sources of morality with the same views, thus having a “total worldview” that encompassed both the moral and the natural.

You will remember how often I have pointed out that the decline of our culture has been caused by the fact that we have a one-sided view of nature, which posits the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar at the beginning of our existence on earth, where everything has formed out of a primeval nebula. Man also formed out of this primeval nebula, then what is called moral ideals arose - illusions - and when the heat death occurs one day, which must occur according to purely physical laws, there will be a large field of corpses, but what emerged as cultural ideals or moral ideals will be buried with them. Thus, our morality is no longer part of the world view. It is no longer part of it; it has become something that can only be captured in abstract thoughts. Schweitzer also knows that basically this has become the case around the middle of the 19th century. He is quite clear about it: “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway... The Age of Enlightenment” - by this he means the period when intellectualism first flourished - ”and rationalism had established ethical and rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks, about the behavior of nations towards each other and their absorption into a humanity united by the highest spiritual goals... But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this engagement of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it."

And now Albert Schweitzer wants to make it clear that if people no longer have effective thoughts, culture must perish. Since effective thoughts seem to be contained in philosophy, he attributes the reason for the decline of culture to philosophy. He knows, and expresses it in this book, that although Flege and Kant are read by only a few, their ideas dominate the ideas of thousands, because they pass unnoticed through all possible into the broadest masses of humanity, and one does not exaggerate when one says today: If only the most popular books have begun to be read by the simplest mountain farmers, then Kant is already in them. One only believes that philosophy works on those who read the philosophers. That is just outer Maja.

That is why Schweitzer says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” But now he treats this philosophy with some compassion and says to himself: Philosophy should have thought, but since thinking had gone astray, since thinking had been forgotten, one need not be surprised that philosophy could no longer think either. So he treats philosophy a little more mildly. “It did not become clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the nineteenth century - the same one that I once discussed here - “this is defined as the process in which ‘step by step, with ever clearer and more certain awareness, reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universal validity of which is the subject of philosophy itself’. In doing so, the author forgot the essential: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to be transmitted as active ideas in public opinion, while from the second half of the nineteenth century they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.

But now he becomes mild. After all, what can the philosopher do if he no longer thinks because everyone else does not think: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit this fact to itself and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture."

Schweitzer no longer blames the philosophers for no longer being able to think, since it has become a general habit of people not to think anymore. But he does blame the philosophers for not having noticed this at all. They should have noticed it at least.

"According to its ultimate purpose, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total worldview, as they used to, but were for the time being left to their own devices and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone... Philosophy philosophized so little about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.

Well, I think I have already told you many things about this sleeping from a variety of points of view.

In the next chapter, Schweitzer discusses the elements in us that inhibit culture. He comes to some very interesting conclusions. He finds, for example, that man has become unfree as a result of what he has absorbed as culture in recent times. Well, one can sympathize with him on that point, because people have gradually come to really only follow certain bellwethers, to swear by the authority of science, and so on. But now Schweitzer claims that the human being is not collected in his thinking. I don't think we need discuss this much either; Schweitzer is probably right that the power to collect has really declined a lot in our civilization. But then he calls the human being incomplete. Now, people will say, if he already finds us unfree and so unsettled; that we are not even supposed to be whole people, we cannot concede that to him! But he means it this way: What a person learns today, that is a specialty, be he a scholar or be he somehow a different person, so that only certain sides of his abilities are developed, not the total human being. Therefore, we go around as incomplete, not at all as complete people. And then he finds, as a fourth, that humanity has decreased to the highest degree. He cites beautiful examples. But he is generally of the opinion that unfree, uncollected and incomplete people do not develop humanity in their ethical lives either. He also finds a culture-inhibiting element in over-organization, in the eradication of human individuality. How much does the individual still depend on today? It depends only on what is prescribed by any organization. Schweitzer rightly accuses our time of over-organization as a particular tendency.

But now he also wants to move on to answering the question of how to achieve culture again. What must be done to achieve culture again? He then asks: What must the culture we achieve be like? — And he says: It must be ethical and optimistic. Now, imagine you want to build a house for yourself. You go to a builder who says: You have to describe to me what the house should be like so that I can make the plans for you. — So you tell him: The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and so that you can live comfortably in it. — Well, you can't make plans with that, but you think you have said something when you say: The house must be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that you can live comfortably in it. But you can't do anything with these statements. Nor can you do anything with the statement: A worldview must be ethical and optimistic. It's the same, exactly the same.

Once, when I was a little boy, there was a court case in a village where I lived. Some chickens had been stolen from a prominent member of the community. The judge wanted to know what the sentence should be and needed a description of the chickens. So he asked the man concerned what the chickens were like. “Well, they were beautiful chickens.” Yes, that's not enough. You have to tell us something so that we can get an idea of what the chickens might have been worth. Well, they were really quite beautiful chickens. Yes, but, you have to know whether the chickens were skinny or fat... – Well, they really were quite beautiful chickens. – And so it went on, nothing at all could be elicited from the man except that they were quite beautiful chickens. |

Now here we have a quite outstanding spirit who trenchantly characterizes the decline of culture in an extraordinarily fine and apt way, who even knows a great deal that people today do not even want to admit to themselves. For example, he knows the following – it is good that it is also said by someone other than just the anthroposophist: 'The summary of knowledge and the assertion of its consequences for the world view is not his concern. In the past every scientist was also a thinker who had a certain significance in the general spiritual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. Therefore we still have freedom of science, but hardly any thinking science at all.” It is indeed good to hear it from someone else for a change. But you see, despite all this insight, he does not get any further than the beautiful chickens. Extremely characteristic! Something that reappears as a truly fruitful worldview must be ethical, optimistic, firm, weatherproof, beautiful, and such that one can comfortably live in it!

Yes, he gets very far in this negative characterization. He notices that there are people who have already felt that this thinking, this brain sport, does not lead to the sources of existence. Therefore they said: Well, let us give up all this thinking and arrive at the truth by way of feeling or belief, by a mystical path. He sees that, and being a keen thinker himself, to a certain extent, he asks a remarkable question. The question is: “Philosophical, historical and scientific questions, which he was not able to answer, overwhelmed his earlier rationalism like an avalanche and buried him on the way. The new thinking world view must work its way out of this chaos. Let everything that actually is take effect on itself, passing through all kinds of reflection and recognition” - yes, if only he went through a little recognition and reflection now: the house should be beautiful and weatherproof - ”it strives towards the ultimate meaning of being and life, whether some of it can be unraveled,

The final knowledge, in which man comprehends his own existence in universal existence, is said to be mystical in nature. By this is meant that it no longer comes about through ordinary reflection, but is somehow experienced.

But why assume, he says, that the path of thinking ends at mysticism? Reasoning, as practiced up to now, has always stopped when it came close to mysticism...

Now one asks oneself: What does Anthroposophy want? To start from clear, mathematically clear thinking, not to stop at mysticism, but to penetrate, thinking, into the regions that are to be opened up for the eternal. Even then people still say that the house should be solid, weatherproof and comfortable to live in – when it is already standing in front of their noses, but they cannot find their way into it. This can be said without any modesty, but these are not the worst, these are the best, these are the sharp thinkers! We must not close our eyes to such things. We must not keep beating about the bush, saying that we must make this or that person understand what anthroposophy is, when people talk like this.

But further: “Thought carried to its conclusion thus leads somewhere and somehow to a living mysticism that is necessary for all human beings to think...” Right building leads to the good house, the way I want it! Now, he finds that people are unfocused, and so he wants to make it clear what people should do to get beyond this terrible state that culture has fallen into: “In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a meaning. If such reflection arises again among us, the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...' It does not say in the footnote: 'The details can be found in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, oh no, but it says that somehow we have to get to the point that there are people who take three minutes to collect their thoughts - “..look up thoughtfully to the infinite worlds of the starry sky and, when attending a funeral, would devote themselves to the mystery of death and life instead of walking behind the coffin in thoughtless conversation...”

It then concludes with the following, after first drawing attention to the fact: But something, which is now a world view, should not actually be said to people; we do need such a world view - I just want to know what we need it for if we are not supposed to say it to people! “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in which and for which we live cannot take place by talking into the people of our time different, better thoughts than those they have..."

It is not right that one should speak better thoughts into the minds of people than they have, but rather one must leave them to themselves! Reflect, think of other things when you walk behind a coffin, reflect! - Yes, then people will just continue to do what they have been doing so far: they will not know what to reflect on in the three minutes and so on.

"Previous thinking sought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us... “It may be! - “Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we must go is clear. Together we have to think about the meaning of life, to struggle to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening, and then becomes capable of setting up and realizing definitive cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity. — They'll be beautiful chickens!

No one will be able to say that I want to practice caustic, deliberately negative criticism. I chose the first example of Professor Rubner because I wanted to choose a personality whose scientific achievements would be recognized. I chose the second example so that I could say that I regard the person who wrote this book as one of the sharpest thinkers, as a personality who is most justified in speaking in this way. I do not want to criticize adversely, that is far from me. One must endeavor to point out characteristically what is. But when Albert Schweitzer says: Philosophy should have been on guard, but it was asleep, then we can't help but say: He continues to sleep.

Let's wait and see what the second part is like, but the first part promises that the second part will not be much different. He continues to sleep, only dreaming out of his sleep. They are desires, they are not realities. Our striving must be to go beyond mere illusions, beyond phrases, to arrive at realities. You see how the words of our language have been squeezed dry. So we have to proceed as we started this evening, by talking about the soul, then we will put content back into the words. Otherwise, as Schweitzer says: philosophy is not to blame for the decline of culture, but it is to blame for not having noticed it. Well, of course Albert Schweitzer is not to blame either for the fact that our words have been so squeezed out that they no longer contain any concepts or realities. But he is to blame for not noticing this at all. He does not notice that he is talking in completely squeezed-out words.

I felt obliged to draw attention to the cultural decline in such a cutting way in response to Albert Schweitzer's recently published cultural act – I don't mean this maliciously, I mean it quite seriously. I was obliged to point out what the situation must actually be like in order to gain a real judgment of what is not happening on the one hand and should be happening on the other. After we have gone through this episode, we want to continue talking about specific topics of anthroposophy.

Let us start from the fact that the human being is a many-part, a multi-part being, that is, from a fact that is quite familiar to us. We want to assume that within the anthroposophical movement there is always an effort to understand how the human being is composed of members, each of which requires a certain understanding, so that the understanding of the whole human being is only possible if one is able to unite the understanding that one has brought to the individual members into a whole. If we disregard everything else for the moment, we know that this human being is divided into the physical body, the etheric body or formative forces, the astral body and that which we call the I. Now this is not — or at least should not be — a mere classification of the human being and his essence, but what is listed as the four members of the human being actually comes from very different worlds and can only be understood from the inner conditions of these worlds. And only when one has understood how the physical body, the etheric body, the body of formative forces, the astral body and the I are formed out of their corresponding worlds, then one is able to gain an understanding of the entire human being from the resonance of the understanding of these individual human limbs. The human being's physical body must be understood from the standpoint of the physical world, but the etheric body or formative forces must be understood from the standpoint of the etheric world, and so on. If we are not extremely precise in this area, if we do not accept that things are exactly as I have just indicated, then we cannot come to an understanding of the human being as a whole.

Let us turn our attention away from the physical body of the human being. We can do this because all of today's education and science is based on understanding the physical body of the human being. But today there is no similar endeavor to understand the etheric body or the body of formative forces. At most, it is imagined that this etheric body or body of formative forces perhaps consists of a finer substance than the dense physical body and that this finer etheric substance is mixed with the physical body. But things are not like that; the situation is essentially different. Someone who has grasped everything that can be grasped from the standpoint of physical science in order to form an idea about the workings of the physical body could completely ignorant about the etheric or formative forces, because when we look at the human being, it is impossible to find the laws of the etheric or formative forces near the earth. We cannot look for the laws of the etheric or formative body in the vicinity of the earth itself. Just as we say, when a stone falls in a vertical direction: gravity is at work, the stone moves in the direction of the center of the earth - just as we look for the causes of the stone's fall in the vicinity of the earth or in the earth look for the causes of the stone's fall, we proceed correctly when we remain close to the earth, we proceed wrongly when we ask about the causes of the event in the etheric or formative forces. Rather, we must look for that which is at work in our etheric or formative body not on earth at all, but in the vastness of the universe, in a sphere that is, an indeterminate distance away from us. There the forces are at work from all sides. Just as physical forces work out from the center of the earth, so the forces from all sides work in and condition our etheric body.

Recall what I told you about the transition of a person from his pre-earthly existence to his earthly existence. He comes down and has already sent the laws for his physical body to earth. Then, I said, he collects his etheric body from the vastness of the cosmic ether. So there he is, before he moves into what he has sent ahead: his physical body, I, astral body and etheric body. But the ether body is not formed by the earth in terms of its laws, but, as we say, representatively: from the four quarters of the world; but this only means that it is drawn together from all sides. So the laws are effective from all sides of the world periphery, the surrounding area, when the human ether body is formed.

What we are now going to discuss may come as something of a shock to the modern reader, and will be extremely surprising. You will agree with me when I say that if we light a flame, however strong, the intensity of the light will mean less and less to us the further we move away from the source of the light. Eventually, at a certain distance, where this light source is hardly taken into account, where it has become so weak that we can no longer read; where, if there is a light somewhere in the distance, we can say for all practical purposes that there is no light. Everyone will admit that. Likewise, today's science admits that the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker the further you get into the surrounding area. But what people today do not consider at all is the following. We on earth express in our words the laws that apply on earth. The law that we express as earthlings also decreases, becomes weaker and weaker and is finally practically no longer there for a certain distance. No matter how cleverly you formulate natural laws for earthly conditions, no matter how cleverly you formulate historical sentences for what happens on earth, these laws, the laws of nature and historical laws, are no longer valid in a certain radius, just as the strength of gravity or the intensity of light has no further significance. Therefore, it is naive if someone were to claim that the same natural laws apply to a star that is so many light-years away as they do to us. For the validity of our natural laws exists only for earthly conditions and ceases when we venture out into space. But the laws of the ether come from the vastness of space. If we expect the same laws from them as the natural laws of the earth are, then we will never understand the etheric existence. Even as we speak of the etheric body of man, we must speak of something that follows quite different laws from the natural laws of the earth.

There lies that which is astonishing and shocking for today's humanity, but which must be gradually grasped. Otherwise, today's humanity will simply spin itself into earthly conditions and not get beyond these earthly conditions with its soul condition. I will now tell you this in a form in which one can say it – or at least should be able to say it – after having discussed anthroposophical truths within a circle for some time. For if one were to say what is about to be said today in front of an otherwise different circle, people would think one was not quite of sound mind. But that is not a criticism at all. Because as long as one is of sound mind, one retains the spiritual science. So basically, because the genius of language works quite correctly, one must be able to take it seriously with such things. At most, one should reproach someone who presents spiritual science for not being of sound mind. That is not a reproach at all! He is not of sound mind. One must only be with spirit with full consciousness, that is what matters. But if one says that one only has a justified consciousness when one is of sound mind, then one must renounce spiritual science.

People everywhere are declaiming: There are certain tremendously simple laws that one comes upon last. — People call them axioms or something, it does not depend on the names. I will call such axioms. The first axiom is: The whole is always greater than one of its parts. That is a matter of course, people say, and whoever sins against such axioms is not quite of sound mind, because the whole is greater than one of its parts. Or: The straight line is the shortest path between two points. For earthly conditions and for the world of the senses, this applies to the fullest extent. If we go to the most extreme abstractions, we come to such sentences: the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and: the straight line is the shortest way between two points.

But if you sail into the ether, then you really have to break through from the sensory world into another world, where precisely the most trivial laws of the sensory world no longer apply. As soon as you enter the etheric world, the law no longer applies that the whole is greater than one of its parts. Because in the etheric world, for example, it is like this for a human being: If you look at what is etherically behind the part of the whole human being, you look at the liver, lungs and search for their etheric correlates, then each individual part of the human being is considerably greater than the whole human being on earth. And if you ever believed that a person is greater than his liver, you would never be able to penetrate into the spiritual. For in the spiritual, a whole is created by the larger parts working together to form a smaller one, by the whole being created precisely through the interaction of the larger parts.

This may become even clearer to you for the other example, that a straight line is the shortest way between two points. Yes, that applies in the physical world. If you have one point here and a second point there, the straight line is the shortest. But if you enter the ether world, then every path that is taken is easy, every crooked one, every winding one, and if you want to take the straight path, it will get in the way. It forks at every point, it is just the longest way to get from one point to another. Therefore, in relation to the ether world, such a sentence: the straight line is the shortest way between two points - a sentence that spins you into the physical, that makes you not get out of the crust in which you are locked at all. As long as one does not take seriously the fact that even in the world of ether everything is different and even opposite to that in the physical world, one does not come to an understanding of the spiritual world.

People would like to know the members of the human nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. But now they would like to have it so that they apply the same kind of thinking to the etheric body that they have applied to the physical body. But that is precisely what cannot be done, because to the same extent that one moves away from the physical world - but this is identical with the earthly world - the validity of natural laws diminishes, and quite different laws take their place. I am merely pointing out to you all how, when one comes to this second link in human nature, the necessity arises to engage in a completely different way of thinking.

But as soon as you enter this other thinking, you have to take this other thinking very seriously. You can go around in the physical world as much as you like and find all kinds of things, not atoms, but you can find cells and the like. But it would never occur to anyone to think that they would find thoughts under a microscope or in a telescope. They must be found in some other way. You can examine the brain under the microscope until the end of time, but you will not find thoughts in it, they do not go into the microscope. But that is precisely the proof that you only find the physical world in the microscope and in general in the whole view, because the ether world consists of nothing but thoughts. The etheric world is the activity of thoughts as forces. And as soon as one penetrates from the physical body to the etheric body in the case of man, this etheric body consists of thoughts throughout, but thoughts work as forces. We are completely permeated by thoughts, interwoven with thoughts everywhere, but thoughts work as forces.

This now has a very important consequence for the view of the human being. Because now imagine you are going to sleep. There in bed lies the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body is full of thoughts. It is a kind of excerpt, a kind of extract from the ether of the world, and the ether of the world is an active world of thought. And therefore it is true that the etheric body of a person is something extraordinarily clever, if I may express it that way, full of thoughts full of light and without contradictions. And when a person leaves his physical body and etheric body with his I and his astral body, he actually leaves a very clever entity. The only thing that is fatal is that when a person sleeps, he is not aware of how clever he is, while he remains in bed. The fact that we are not so clever during the day is because during the day we and our astral body submerge into the very clever etheric body and constantly dull it. The fact that we are imperfect as human beings stems from our ego and our astral body. Our astral body and our ego are incapable of rising to the inner solidity, clarity and worldliness of the etheric body. If only we could make the etheric body speak and then write down in shorthand, just as faithfully or unfaithfully, what it has to say all night about the secrets of the universe, then it would be something tremendously clever, even more clever than what is written here.

So, world thoughts as forces work in this ethereal body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our ethereal body, in proportion to what we have in our astral body.

And yet, what are we as physical and etheric bodies when we remain in bed when we sleep and have withdrawn our ego and our astral body? We are then in bed a being of physical body and etheric body, and thus we carry within us only the laws of the plant kingdom. And the same thing that we can observe in ourselves, when we look back, as it were, and see the wisdom of the whole world radiating from our sleeping etheric body, in what we could observe in a backward glance in a human being, we basically have before us on a small scale everything that we also have before us when we look at the earth, in that it exists as a physical sphere, but out of itself lets the plant world sprout and has sprouted, and this plant world is ethereally stimulated on all sides by the world thoughts that are weaving in the world ether. This is the infinitely sublime image of the cosmos; of the cosmos that lies before us when we are only able to look at everything that springs from every single plant on our earth as if, I would like to say, from spiritual flames of fire, drawing lines and waves into the farthest reaches of space. So that we actually have before us the globe, the forces that bring vegetation out of the earth, sprouting from the farthest point in space and repeating this earth formation in every single sleeping human being.

When we visualize this image, we have to exclude everything that is in our ego and in our astral body, and we have to think of the image of animals with their astral body instead of the cosmic image. That which is in our astral body does not belong to that which is earthly on the one hand or etheric on the other, but rather belongs to a completely different world altogether. However, we do not seek this world in the same way that we seek the ether. If one describes it pictorially, and these things can only be described pictorially, because otherwise one comes into earthly ideas, one would have to say: How does one get an idea of the world ether? One comes to an idea of the world ether when one simply follows that which is here on earth outwards, when one swings further and further outwards - one must do this spiritually, of course. Here on earth, the effect of the ether is actually hardly noticeable, because it is weakest there. Just as the earthly effects of illumination, for example, are weakest far out in space, so the effect of the cosmic ether is weakest in the vicinity of the earth. As soon as we go out into the far reaches of the world, the actual nature of the etheric effect becomes more and more apparent. When we go out into the wide world, we begin to see how the physical of the earth is woven into the etheric according to very different laws than those found on the earth. But if one could go all the way out to the boundaries where the ether sprays in its effects from the outside, one would experience something curious. The superficial physical thinkers say: If you move out from the earth in a radial manner into the world, then you can go away into infinity. At most, those who know a little newer geometry will say: If you go out into infinity, you will come back on the other side, it will just take a little while. But that is what they think; in reality it is not so. In reality, you really do come to an end, even if the path can be called infinite by earthly standards, superficially speaking. The world has a transition from earthly lawfulness to cosmic lawfulness, which radiates in. The world is a closed whole, and if you come to the end - you only have to imagine it figuratively - then you will encounter the inside of a spherical surface everywhere. The astral then radiates inwards. The astral begins to work in from the outside by taking possession of the etheric.

But you still do not come to something that is the I. If you follow the world, you first come to nature, to physical nature, to earthly nature, from there to the etheric, and at the end of the etheric to the astral. But you do not yet enter the world to which the human ego belongs. It is initially not present at all in this area of the cosmos, which can be found even for the astral senses, but the ego still belongs to a further world, which in turn has its own laws. So when speaking of the human being, one must be clear about the fact that the different members belong to completely different worlds. We are not dealing with a mere classification, but with the presentation of the fact that the human beingness is a confluence of the beingnesses of radically different worlds. And now, at the moment when you want to think at all about the differentiation between waking and sleeping, you must also think about this differentiation of the different worlds. Because what we actually have in our I and in our astral body does not belong to the same world as the two members of human nature that lie in bed. What we left in bed, we have conveyed to the mineral and plant world for the time of sleep. What we carry with us as I and astral body, we have taken out of the plant and mineral world, we have raised it up into another world, which is not the plant and not the mineral world.

And what happens now while we sleep? While we sleep, exactly the same thing happens in what lies in bed as goes on outside in the world in the mineral and plant kingdoms, as long as the plants are not eaten by animals. For then the astral world of the animal world comes into play. But if we disregard humans and animals and consider only the earth with the plants, we have the world to which we surrender our physical and etheric bodies during sleep, and everything that happens in the mineral and plant kingdoms then also happens in our physical and etheric bodies.

Let us assume that we could not sleep. I have said before that people sometimes claim that they cannot sleep, but they do sleep, even if they interrupt their sleep and often wake up. Because the time that some people claim they have not slept is so great that they would have been dead long ago if it were true. So sleeping is necessary for the entire being of a person. But if we did not sleep – let us assume that – then we would continually work in our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body and our ego. But the physical body and etheric body cannot stand that at all. The physical body follows the laws of the earth. The astral body does not belong to the earth at all, it continually works on the physical body in opposition to the laws of the earth. The physical body would become quite unsuitable if a person could not sleep, because it is constantly being worked on by extraterrestrial laws. Just as if someone were to continually work a field of the mineral kingdom with hoes and spades and thereby pulverize it completely, so our astral body begins to work on the physical body. The physical body must again assert the earthly laws within itself so that it is strengthened in a certain way. And the etheric body is dulled by the astral body. I do not mean it is so bad, there are also clever people, one need not always reproach people for being clever; but in fact, seen cosmically, it has this effect. Then the etheric body must once again be exposed to the cosmos, so that it gets rid of this dulling influence for a while. And so the human being must become mineral and vegetable cosmos, so that that which is in him can flourish, so that a certain state is established when we wake up. I am now talking about normal life. In the case of abnormal phenomena, the human being naturally sleeps and wakes as well.

What is the condition that is brought about when we wake up? The condition that is brought about is that our soul, namely the astral body and the ego, cannot initially enter the physical body and etheric body completely. They can never enter completely. Oh, how clever we would be if we could enter our etheric body completely. But that would also exhaust us, we could not bear it. It is really true, this astral body is basically terribly selfish. The etheric body, which is actually identical in nature to the cosmos, is not selfish. It is also not envious, it has no need of it. But the astral body is subconsciously terribly envious of the etheric body, which is so wise, which contains the thoughts of the whole world in itself, - is terribly envious. And now it is already ensured that the senses remain independent, the I and the astral body remain independent during the day. Then gradually the I and the astral body are increasingly able to sink deeper into the physical body and the etheric body. But this only makes them imbued with the longing to go out again. They then want to sleep, and so the I and the astral body become tired. For the human being is only able to prove himself as an independent being because he is not absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies during waking. If the human being were absorbed by the ego and the astral body, then we would know nothing of ourselves and of the world, but we would find ourselves in the interior of our physical organism, which would go up to the skin, would follow the processes in our physical physical organism, would only know something about our inner being, and then we would still know that magnificent thoughts imbued with wisdom are sprayed into our inner being, but we would not go beyond these thoughts either. We would know nothing at all about any other human being, about animals on earth, about other beings on earth, if we were completely absorbed in our physical and etheric bodies. If we did not retain our independence, so that we did not enter completely into our physical body and etheric body, we could never establish relationships with the world, we could only know something of our physical body and our own etheric body.

People reflect on this: how is it that one says the table is outside of us? — One would not arrive at this statement: the table is outside of us — if we were to completely immerse ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies. We would never come to the realization that the table is outside of us — we would only experience what is within us, namely within the skin of our body. And there would shine in an internally closed universe, which is etheric, full of wisdom. But the idea that there is something outside of us comes from the fact that we ourselves are outside of ourselves when we are asleep. When the I is outside of the physical body, it gets used to being outside of the physical body. When the I slips back into it, it has an understanding of the outside world. We can thank the fact that we can sleep for the possibility of accepting things outside of us. We become accustomed to being outside of ourselves by placing ourselves outside of ourselves in our sleep.

Philosophers reflect on what guarantees existence; on why I say at all: something is – or: I am. If I were completely absorbed by my physical and etheric bodies, I would never come to say: I am. But by being able to make myself independent of the physical and etheric bodies between falling asleep and waking up, I get into the habit of living with the outside world as well. Just as one consciously has a memory, as I consciously remember yesterday when I saw someone today and ascribe a reality to this memory, so out of habit I ascribe an external reality to what is outside of me, because I am also sometimes outside myself when I sleep.

We must therefore think about things from completely different angles than we do today. But then we will really come to understand how much depends on the human being not being absorbed by his physical and etheric bodies. Only then can one really understand how the sense of freedom is essentially conditioned by the fact that one can also be outside one's physical and etheric body. People as naturalists, who do not reflect at all on the independence of an ego and an astral body in sleep, can never come to an understanding of freedom, because man would not be free if he were united all the time only with his physical and his ether body. How could they know about freedom if they know nothing of the times when man makes his astral body and his ego independent of his physical and ether bodies! If we could not sleep, we could not be free. Only what we bring with us from sleep into wakefulness makes us free.

Modern man has no conception at all of the world in which the I and the astral body find themselves during sleep. But if we know that everything that modern man can imagine lies in the realm of the mineral and the vegetable, then we know that modern science actually has only to decide about the sleeping person and not about the waking one; and about the sleeping person only if one has such ideas about the ether as I have mentioned today. If one knows this, then one will say to oneself: Now, however, I must also be able to arrive at ideas about the ego and the astral body. Today, as I already indicated the other day, one only has words from these things.

How can we get an idea of the ego and the astral body? Let me use a trivial example. Firstly, your thoughts can rest a little during the trivial comparison and secondly, we will understand each other better if I use this example. Imagine that some being, a human being or any other being that needs food, does not feed itself but completely refuses food. It becomes increasingly emaciated, until it is nothing but skin and bones. This is beautifully symbolized in a story: there was a farmer who had decided to wean his ox from eating. And now he had come quite a way with this weaning cure. He gave him less and less every day and was confident that he would be able to get to the point of giving him just a straw a day. He would have succeeded, but the ox died first, so he could not carry the experiment to the end. In the end, the being simply stops needing the extra nourishment.

But that is what has happened to the human soul in the course of historical development - or as we call the soul: I and the astral body. Gradually, people have lost any concepts that they can apply to the soul. Thus, the soul has become a mere word. I already told you last time: Mauthner, who wrote the “Criticism of Language,” no longer wanted to use the word soul at all. He wanted to say “Geseel” (to nourish the soul).

Now we recall times when there was still a living awareness that the concept of the soul needs nourishment if it is to be present; that for the soul one needs something to give to it, just as one needs nourishment for a living being. The concept of the soul has indeed died altogether, because in the end there was no more nourishment in the content of people's concepts. Let us look back at such times. I recall to you a saying of St. Paul's that is familiar to everyone: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” because people - and this is the basis - would have to die spiritually if the power that lies in the resurrection of Christ had not come into the world. But this power is a spiritual power that is given to the souls. And if one comes from such ideas, one will say: What then should the concept of the soul be, in order for it to become a living concept, so to speak, as food? It must be given that on earth which is not earthly, the ethical-religious content, the moral content. These are what keeps the soul alive, just as the body receives nourishment.

How far is today's humanity from saying to itself: If the soul does not receive spiritual nourishment, it dies with the body! In Paul's time, there was still a vivid idea that not receiving spiritual nourishment means death for the soul. This must come to the world again through anthroposophy. For you can believe that if someone today is looking for proof of the immortality of the soul, he is looking for it in a similar way to the way science does. It does not occur to him to say: In the course of earthly life, the soul becomes more and more similar to the physical and etheric bodies; in order for it to sustain itself, it must receive spiritual nourishment, that is, moral and religious content, then it conquers the transience of the physical and etheric bodies. That the spiritual, the moral and religious in the spiritual has something to do with the life of the soul must first be understood by mankind. Then one also comes to attach reality and reality to the moral and religious.

You can see from this what the age of intellectualism has actually done. What has the age of intellectualism done? You see, before the age of intellectualism, people still immersed themselves a little in their physical and etheric bodies. The fact that people no longer immerse themselves at all is only an achievement of the intellectual age. Since that time, they have only had reflections in their thoughts. The nature of abstract, intellectual thought is that it contains nothing in itself, because it is a reflection. People's earlier thoughts still had power. That is when people developed myth. The myth still penetrated down into reality. With abstract, intellectualistic thinking, one can think everything exactly, but it does not acquire any content; it is merely a drawing of the world, which one has with intellectualistic thinking. So it is that the intellectualistic age has brought man completely out of himself, leaving him to experience only mirror images of reality. The moral-religious world is not experienced at all if one wants to experience it intellectually, because the moral-religious things must indeed be done by man. No mirror images are experienced if they are not done, the moral-religious things. So it is a matter of the human being having to rise above the intellectualistic in order to experience the reality of the moral-religious in reality, to a real inner experience. This can only be done if one faces the will of spiritual science with full clarity.

What I have already been obliged to say elsewhere, I would also like to repeat here. In certain areas of the world, people are finally realizing that there is a difference between today and a hundred years ago. People talk about Goethe as he lived, say, in 1823, without emphasizing one thing that is only now beginning to emerge as an inkling in America, where it is even more pronounced than in Europe. Do you think that in the Weimar where Goethe walked around – or anywhere else, for that matter, where Goethe walked around – there were no telegraph wires, no telephone lines and so on? The air was not permeated by telegraph lines, by electrical lines. Now just imagine how fine the instruments are, where the effect of electricity is sent. But man has nothing but such devices before and around him. People over there in America are beginning to suspect that this has an influence on the physical human being, that he is surrounded by electrical lines and the like. Goethe walked the world without his body having induction currents in it. Today you can go far enough anywhere and the electrical lines will follow. This continuously induces currents in us. Goethe was not in such currents. All this takes away the physical body from humanity, makes the physical body so that the soul cannot enter it at all. We must be clear about this: in the time when there were no electric currents, when the air was not buzzing with electrical lines, it was easier to be human. Because there were not constantly these ahrimanic forces present, which take away one's body even when one is watching. It was also not necessary for people to exert themselves so much to come to the spirit. Because when we enter into ourselves, we actually only come to the spirit. Therefore, it is necessary today to apply much greater spiritual capacity to be human at all than it was a hundred years ago.

It does not occur to me to be reactionary and say, “So get rid of all that stuff, the modern cultural achievements!” That is not the intention. But modern man needs this direct access to the spirit, as spiritual science gives it to him, so that through this strong experience of the spirit he may indeed be the stronger in the face of those forces that are emerging with modern culture to solidify our physical body and take it away from us. Otherwise it will come to the point that people, I would say, miss the boat in the evolution of humanity.

This intellectual age has emerged for the benefit of humanity at a time when people could still immerse themselves somewhat in their physical body. If we had remained as people were in the 13th or 14th century, with the state of mind of those people, we would not be able to grasp intellectual thoughts at all. Then we would no longer have the older, but we would not even come to abstract intellectual thoughts; they would evaporate. The old would be alienated from us, we would not be able to think, and so we would go around as dreaming beings in the world, so reeling in the face of the most important world affairs. We would go around like reeling dreamers. But that is also what would happen to humanity if it does not sharpen and strengthen its inner spiritual abilities. Humanity would suffer so much from progress that it would be like hurting a person if they were to think. In the 16th century, people were still inwardly robust enough to think sharply in an intellectual way. They still took great pleasure in thinking intellectually. Today, we are already very close to people saying: Oh, thinking is so hard, film the whole story for me so that I don't have to think and can watch it in its various stages! — Strange things could come of that. I don't mean that in a humorous way. This is something, as you will see in a moment, that is very much within the realm of possibility. Just imagine if you could film the whole multiplication table, then a person could always carry a camera in front of him and, by making the calculation, the correct answer would be triggered by the specific sound, and he would have the whole story filmed in front of him. Gradually, man no longer wants to think because it starts to become unpleasant. Thinking becomes unpleasant. Man much prefers dreaming to thinking. And if those outer things, the outer cultural development, were to continue forever and a strong inner spiritual element were not to arise in the development, then it would actually be the case that all people would become reeling dreamers. This is meant very seriously; such a thing is in store for humanity. And this can only be counteracted by really getting involved in it, courageously and boldly tackling the spiritual world in the way spiritual science wants it and can do it. Today it is still quite possible for us to pull ourselves together so strongly inwardly as humanity, that we can achieve inner activity. But all those who understand this must work in earnest with all means at their disposal.

Please do not take the things I say in a negative sense negatively. I do not want to take anything away from modern culture. The more things are developed, the more I am enthusiastic about them. I do not want to abolish the telegraph or the film, that does not occur to me at all. But it is really necessary in the world to take into account that everywhere two things are juxtaposed. The world is completely dominated by externalization. The counterbalance: just as one must dry oneself after bathing, so one must delve inward in spirit, when on the other hand the culture of external observation is becoming ever greater and greater. This in particular calls upon us to become inwardly more and more active when we are outwardly absorbed in that which no longer works through us but works on us, so that we literally switch off as soul and spirit.

We can best find these thoughts, which we need, by realizing that This human being is such a complicated creature because the entities of the most diverse worlds flow together in him to form a total being. When I had written my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, a quite important contemporary philosopher sent me – I have already mentioned this – a long treatise about this “esoteric science”. And when I began to read it, I came across clever things like: Yes, that is an abstract division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on. Now that is just as clever as saying: It is abstract to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. One need not be surprised if one has to say: It is impossible to discuss with someone like that. We must always distinguish between the impossibility of discussing the subject matter with our contemporaries. Such discussions are fruitless discussions. They are, of course, also the rarer ones. The more frequent cases are where opponents come forward with personal slander and lies. In such cases, the lie must be exposed as a lie, the slander as slander, before the world. But discussions alone achieve very little. For it is precisely the nature of anthroposophy and the nature of what its opponents have to present that they somehow want to discuss: that no bridge can be built; that anthroposophy must emerge through its own efforts in all areas. We must be just as vigilant in repudiating calumny and falsehood as we must realize that Anthroposophy can only make its way in the world by working with all the intensity that its inner strength can give it. So, dealing with opponents means: be vigilant where the fight is being waged with dishonest means. On the other hand, it may certainly be necessary for reasons of expediency to point out how justified one or the other is; one can do that when one is merely dealing with a fictitious opponent. Some people have liked to copy the refutations that are in my writings and have left out only what was positive. So it is indeed the case that one can extract factual refutations from my writings oneself. It is necessary to see clearly in these matters and not to start dreaming in this area.

Please forgive me for having to end almost every reflection with such a request, even if it attempts to introduce more remote areas. The most harmful thing for the Anthroposophical Society to do is to develop too great an inclination to sleep; it must be awake. Man becomes a plant when he sleeps. But the Anthroposophical Society also takes on a plant-like existence when its actual affairs are neglected. Just as a human being cannot always be a plant, cannot sleep through his whole life, so the Anthroposophical Society cannot always be asleep. Vigilance must also be developed. And I would like to recommend this to both the Anthroposophical Society and the Free Anthroposophical Society without distinction. Otherwise it could come about that the two societies developed only alongside each other because, if they had remained together, the members of one or the other would have disturbed each other's sleep too much. But when one is independent, the others disturb one's sleep less, and one can sleep all the better.

It is therefore important that both societies come to realize that both are now awake and not happy due to their own internal forces, and that the other should no longer disturb their sleep. Of course, I do not want to be insinuating, but sometimes one has to say such things and even has to say them to the Free Anthroposophical Society. If neither is to be the pet project of the other, then both should be treated quite humanely. So I would like this to be taken into account a little. I think one or the other already knows what I actually mean. People often say they don't know what I mean, but I still believe that if you want to, you can know what I mean, and even when I call for awakening, you can know what I mean, even if it sounds unpleasant.

So, my dear friends, send your delegates to the General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach from July 20 to 22. Send them well awake. Because we need wakefulness in the future, full wakefulness in the whole Anthroposophical Society.

Lecture 1 of 11 from the volume The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

My Dear Friends,

We will consider a certain theme today which may serve as an elaboration of the public lecture given yesterday.¹ I want to speak in greater detail of how the human being is placed within the sphere of the World Order that is connected with his destiny, with what we are accustomed to call Karma. How does the shaping of destiny proceed? In order to answer this question, not theoretically, but concretely in a vital and practical manner, it is necessary to study the being of man a little more closely.

Human life is often said to be divided into two different states of consciousness: waking life and sleep. The conception of sleep in most people's minds amounts to nothing more than this, that the human being rests during sleep. The scientific view indeed assumes that the activity of consciousness ceases when a man falls asleep and begins again when he wakes; in other words, so far as the organism is concerned, sleep is nothing but repose, a state in which human activity is at rest. But sleep is by no means merely rest; we must realise that from the time of falling asleep to the moment of waking, both the astral body and the Ego are present outside the physical and etheric bodies as active realities.

At the present stage of evolution reached by man in earthly life, it is not possible for him to have direct consciousness of what the Ego and astral body are doing during sleep; none the less their activities are, to say the least, as significant as those of waking life. The reason why the Ego and astral body cannot unfold consciousness of all the complicated circumstances in which they are immersed during sleep is that, at the present stage of the Earth's evolution, Ego and astral body have no organs wherewith to become aware of the happenings in which they are involved. Nevertheless these experiences are undergone by the Ego and astral body during sleep and they work on into the life of day, into man's conscious life.

We can most easily form an accurate conception of the way in which the experiences of Ego and astral body work into the life of day, by thinking of the beginning of man's life. During the very earliest period, as a tiny child, the human being as it were sleeps his way into the earthly life. You must not think here only of the times when a child is actually and obviously asleep, but of the whole period which cannot, in later life, be remembered by ordinary consciousness. To external observation the child may give the impression of being awake during this period, but what is going on in the child's consciousness does not take a form which can be remembered in later life. When we speak of all that is experienced by the child without his having subsequent memory of it, we are referring to this period during which the human being is ‘sleeping’ his way into earthly life.

But now, what develops out of this sleeping state at the beginning of man's life on Earth? Three things must be considered if we are to understand the workings of all that the human being brings from his pre-earthly life and proceeds to weave, in the dim consciousness of sleep, into his physical existence. There are three faculties which the human being has to acquire, differently from the animals. Animals either do not have them at all, or already possess them—in greater or lesser degree of development—when they come into the world.

Of the development of these three faculties people have usually quite a one-sided and inadequate conception. Very little of the whole process receives consideration. The first faculty is learning to walk. Man enters the world, the earthly world, as a being who cannot walk, who has to acquire this faculty. The second is speaking, and the third, thinking. One faculty may take precedence in a particular child, but in general it can be said that the human being learns to walk, to speak and to think. The faculty of thinking follows that of speaking; the faculty to grasp also in thought what is expressed in words develops, gradually, out of speaking. It is some considerable time before one can truly say that a child thinks.

The ordinary conception of walking is extremely inadequate. Walking does not merely consist in the child's learning to stand upright and propel his legs, it involves acquiring equilibrium, gaining complete mastery of the balance man has in the world. This means the child can move freely in any direction without falling over. Thus he learns to place his body into the world; he learns to control his muscles and limbs in such a way that the centre of gravity in the body, whether standing or walking, lies at the correct point. Current ideas about this faculty are, as I said, totally inadequate, for in reality something else of tremendous significance comes to pass with the learning to walk, namely differentiation of the functions of legs and arms. As a rule—and where modifications occur there is a sound explanation for them—animals make uniform use of their four limbs, whereas in the human being there is differentiation. For the purposes of equilibrium and of walking, man uses his legs, whereas his arms and hands are wonderful instruments for the expression of his life of soul, vehicles of the work he is to accomplish in the world. This differentiation between feet and hands, arms and legs, is one of the features that are ignored in the usual one-sided conception of the faculty of learning to walk. The differentiation testifies, in the physical world, to the fact that the human being has to acquire certain faculties during his physical life on Earth.

The second faculty, that of speaking, is also acquired by imitation; the little child tries to imitate—just as he does with walking, standing, equilibration, differentiation between hands and feet. It can be said with truth, that speaking is not unconnected with walking,—above all, with the use of the hand in its differentiation. It is well known that speaking is connected with the specific development of an organ situated at the left side of the brain. This however only applies to people who use their right hand for the most important activities of life; in left-handed people the organ of speech lies at the right side of the brain. These facts indicate that what comes to expression in speech is connected with the search for equilibrium. Then, out of speaking, thinking develops. A person who is born dumb can only be brought to think by artificial means; in all those who are not born dumb, thinking is a faculty that develops out of speech.

Now, the characteristic development I have just described is not really to be understood until we can follow how, in later life, the human being passes over from the waking to the sleeping state. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie resting in the physical sense; the Ego and astral body have separated, in essentials, from the physical and etheric bodies. But if, with the methods of spiritual Science, we examine the astral body of man which has separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, we find that this astral body contains within it the forces that are connected with learning to speak. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the human being falling asleep and waking, during the time when, as a child, he is learning to speak; and it is also very interesting, in the case of some grown-up person who is learning to speak for the first time, to observe the intensity with which the astral body participates in the process. For when the human being is learning to speak, and even later on, too, when he is using speech in everyday life, the astral body carries with it, out of the physical and etheric bodies, the element of soul and spirit that is inherent in words and in speech.

If you can perceive how a human being speaks, how he forms his words, how he imparts to the words his own characteristic tone of voice, how he pours into words the force of his inner convictions, the experiences of his own soul—then you can also perceive how, when he falls asleep, the astral body carries this element of soul and spirit out of the physical and etheric bodies and during the period of sleep holds within itself, in the world of soul and spirit, as a kind of echoing wave, the after-workings of the psycho-spiritual qualities of speech. The forming of the words, the nuances of tone, the force of conviction which a man is able to bring into his words—all this can be perceived in the astral body during the sleeping state. There is, of course, no force of vibration such as is communicated to the physical air, and thus naturally no physical tone of voice is produced. The element of spirit and soul however, that proceeds from the human mouth on the waves of the words and is heard by the human ear, what the soul communicates in the flow of speech—all this is carried forth into the spiritual world by the astral body while the human being sleeps. It can be perceived more clearly when a child, or even a grown-up, is exerting himself to learn to speak a language. But through the whole of life, the element of spirit and soul inherent in speech during the day is taken out into the spiritual world by the astral body during the night. Thus we can say: the nuances of feeling in the spoken word—these it is above all that are carried out of the human being by the astral body during the night. This is a characteristic function of the astral body.

And now let us consider the Ego during the hours of sleep. The Ego is related, as it were, by nature to the limb-system. Just as the astral body is connected with the breast from which speech proceeds, so is the Ego involved in what the human being performs with his limbs, what he does between waking and falling asleep as he walks about or uses his arms and hands. The astral body flows into every word, carries forth the soul-quality of the word during sleep; the Ego is bound up with every movement we make as we go about the world in waking consciousness. The Ego is involved in every movement of the hands, in every act of grasping an object. Whereas, in connection with the astral body, too little attention is paid to the specific soul-element that pours into speech (speech being in itself so obviously a matter of the life of soul), when we come to the connection between the Ego and the limbs, we find an inclination to ignore altogether the working of the soul and spirit. Walking, grasping with the hands, are regarded as processes which happen entirely within a kind of physical mechanism,—for such the human organism is thought to be. But it is by no means so.

In every movement of the fingers that we make during the day, in every step we take as we go about, spirit and soul are contained, just as truly as they are contained in words. What is connected with our limbs and our movements is taken by the Ego out of our physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world when we fall asleep; and in the process inheres a psycho-spiritual element of a very special nature. At every moment during the period of sleep, the Ego is unconsciously satisfied or dissatisfied. (You will understand this better presently, when I have explained it more fully). Although the words sound trivial, the Ego is satisfied with the legs having moved towards some place or other, or with something that has been accomplished by the arms. Not only is an aftermath of leg and arm movements carried out into sleep, but satisfaction or dissatisfaction as well. Part of the experience of the Ego during the hours of sleep is as follows: You should really not have gone to such and such a place! Or: It was very good to go there! It was good, too, that some particular thing was done with the arms! Or again: Such and such an action was not good! This is an expression of the element of soul and spirit that is added by the Ego to what it bears outwards from the limbs of man into sleep.

What underlies this? In accordance with the World Order the astral body of man is destined to come into inner contact between sleeping and waking with the Beings described in the book Occult Science as belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi—the Archangels. The Archangel Beings feel an affinity with what is carried out into sleep as an echo sounding on from human speech. It is something they need, something they long to experience.

I will put it like this.—Just as human beings in their physical life on Earth have to breathe, have to be surrounded with oxygen, and consequently feel oxygen to be something beneficial, so do the Archangeloi, who are connected with the inner nature of the Earth, experience a need that the souls of men who are asleep shall bring to them the echo of what is contained in their speech.

Human speech is in this way connected, inherently and fundamentally, via the sleeping state, with the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. You will remember what I have said in earlier lecture courses, namely, that the Archangeloi are the Leaders, the Guiding Spirits, of the folk-languages. This is connected with what has now been given. The Archangeloi are the Guiding Spirits of folk-languages because they breathe in what the human being, as he sleeps, brings to them from his speech. And a certain human failing is revealed—it is one that is particularly observable in modern cultural life—when, with his speech, a man does not carry out into sleep the right quality.

There is in the culture of the present day very little of what we call idealism. Our words relate entirely to things of the outer, material world. The voicing of ideals—which presupposes belief in the spiritual, for the ideal is a spiritual thing—is becoming rarer and rarer. Since in their waking life men do not unfold inner enthusiasm for ideals, they speak, in reality, of nothing but what is actually present in the physical world. More and more do their words apply and refer only to things of the physical world.

In our days it is often so that people who claim to believe fanatically in the Spirit are the very ones who refute the Spirit. I refer to such as engage in spiritualistic experiments with the object of producing manifestations of the Spirit. This is because, fundamentally, they are only willing to believe in a Spirit which can manifest in the material world. But it is no Spirit that reveals itself in glimmering material light and other such phenomena! Spiritualism is veritably the most extreme form of materialism. It is really an attempt to deny the Spirit, inasmuch as these people will only acknowledge as Spirit that which enters into the world of matter. We are living in an age when words, as they emerge from the soul, lack the wings of idealism. But if this quality is absent, if, in other words, man is unable in waking life to speak of his ideals as well as of physical things, unable to turn to the ideal which imparts real aim to life and transcends physical existence, if in his daily speech he produces no words to express ideals, so that language itself lacks idealism, then it is exceedingly difficult, during sleep, for the connection—which is so necessary for the human being—to be made with the Archangeloi; in such circumstances no order prevails during sleep in the intercourse which should be established between the human soul and the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. Yes, it is indeed the case that every night man loses the opportunity, if I may so express it, of union with the Archangel Beings. And it is difficult for him, then, to have the inner connection with the spiritual world which enables his life between death and a new birth to be full of strong and vital experiences. The life of a man between death and a new birth is weakened when no idealism is expressed in his speech.

To understand these things constitutes an integral part of the knowledge of life. Those who realise what lack of idealism in speech signifies will ultimately develop the power to make it once again an integral quality of human speech. Even during earthly life it can be observed that a man who, during sleep, fails to draw the right power from the Archangel, does not unfold the strength he should really possess. With regard to what speech should accomplish during sleep for the human being, we can therefore say: In order that speech may produce something that is beneficial to life, we must make a real effort to develop idealism of such a kind that our words do not merely voice an understanding of everyday affairs, but are also imbued with the Spiritual, in the form of idealism.

We are confronted with something even more striking when we observe the Ego in the sleeping state. The Ego carries out into sleep satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the activities of the limbs. Just as the astral body, as a result of the after-working of speech, is carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, so is the Ego carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archai—the Powers of the Primal Beginnings—by virtue of what it takes out into the sleeping state as an echo of what has been performed by arms and legs in the daily round of life. From these Archai, the power flows to us, firstly, so to permeate the physical body that we do not only desire the Good, but are also able to exercise upon the urges and instincts of the physical body the measure of control which ensures that the physical body shall present no insuperable obstacle to the fulfilment of the duty or aim we have set ourselves in freedom of thought. In our thoughts we are free beings; but the power to use the freedom in actual life arises only when we carry out into sleep the basis for a true connection with the Archai. How can this be done? Idealism brings the astral body into right connection with the Archangeloi. And what enables the Ego to be united with the Archai? Although we ourselves, to begin with, are unconscious during sleep, the Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai is fully conscious, receives what is unconscious in us and elaborates it into a definite thought of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what we have done during the day. But what is it that enables us to be connected rightly with these Archai, in the same way as idealism in speech leads us into right connection with Archangeloi?

One quality alone brings the Ego, during sleep, into right connection with the Archai, namely true human love, universal and unselfish love for human beings, sincere interest in every fellow man with whom life brings us into contact. I do not mean sympathy or antipathy, which are merely the outcome of something we are not willing to overcome. True and genuine love for human beings during the waking state leads us, during sleep, to the bosom of the Archai. And there, while the Ego is resting in the bosom of these Beings, karma or destiny is shaped. A verdict is passed: ‘I am satisfied with what I have performed with my arms and legs.’ And out of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction is born a power that not only plays a part in the period immediately following death, but continues on to the next earthly life—the power to shape destiny aright, so that true balance and adjustment are brought about in all those things which in one earthly life we have experienced in the Ego during sleep, in communion with the Archai.

Reflection on these things will develop insight into the mysterious connection between the Ego and the karma, or destiny. Just as the astral body of a man who is an idealist can hand over his speech to the Archangeloi as an offering that then enables the Archangeloi to guide him aright between death and a new birth, so does the Ego weave and work at the texture of destiny. Karma is elaborated in conjunction with the Archai. It is moreover in the power of the Archai to bestow upon us what we need in order that we may not only live through the period between death and a new birth, but, at our next descent to the earthly world, possess already a power which in earliest childhood, enables us, each in his own way, to learn to walk, to find equilibrium, to differentiate the functions of feet and hands, arms and legs.

It is wonderful to be able to perceive how the efforts made by a child when it stops crawling and begins to walk, when it first learns to achieve equilibrium—how these efforts represent the after-effects of the way in which, during the previous earth-life, the Ego was able, because of a universal love for human beings, to make a connection, during sleep, with the Archai. This fact manifests now in the process of learning to walk and can be observed in the very details of the process.

Suppose, for instance, a little child continually stumbles and falls. This means that in a previous life feelings of strong antipathy or even hatred were harboured. No more than an approach was made to the Archai and the effect of the absence of any real connection is expressed in the constant falls during the process of learning to walk. One who develops insight into such matters and sets himself the aim, let us say, of fitting himself to be an educator in the true sense by making close and careful observations of the way in which little children learn to walk, can indeed come to realise what a great and far-reaching task lies before him in the karmic adjustment of something brought over into the present life through the fact that in the previous life there was too little human love, or perhaps enough, but of a misdirected kind.

We have here an example of how the materialistic outlook remains altogether within the realm of the physical. It describes how the human organism raises itself like a machine to the upright position, how it learns to walk, and so on: but behind every physical phenomenon is something spiritual and those who can survey the whole process learn to recognise that the previous earthly life works over into learning to walk. For learning to walk is one expression of how the human being, at the beginning of a new earthly life, learns to control his physical body. Those who understand it fully, know that there is a great deal more in the process of learning to walk than the capacity to lift the legs and raise the body upright; they know that, in truth, this phenomenon is connected also with deeply inward processes, it has to do with the whole manner in which the human being is becoming master of his glandular activity and the like. For when a child is learning to walk, and even before, it is not a matter only of walking, but of gaining—or failing to gain—control of the glandular activities, a factor in the process being whether the child's temperament is phlegmatic or choleric, or whether certain emotions in him are too intense. This, again, is connected with the relationship established with the Archai during sleep in a previous earthly life, as the outcome of universal human love, or lack of it. Materialistic thought says that the human being rests during sleep. But he is not merely resting. When the right kind of idealism is present in a man's waking life, then the astral body will be enabled, while he sleeps, to rise to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, that is to say, to be connected with the spiritual world during sleep in such a way that the period leading over from death to a new birth can be lived through in the right manner. If this period is not rightly spent, it means that weaknesses are carried over into another earthly life. How the next life is framed and built, depends upon the nature of the connection established with the Archai. Universal human love carries with it creative power. To have strength to place the body wholly in the service of the soul, to have mastery and control of the physical body—upon what does this depend? It depends upon whether the human being, in the previous life, unfolded love for his fellow men—a faculty that belongs entirely to the soul.

You will remember what I have said in previous lectures: The soul-element of one earthly incarnation manifests in the physical in the next; the spiritual of one incarnation in the soul of the next. These connections are as I have just described them.

It will not do to generalise, saying merely that destiny and karma exist. What can be said, and with truth, is that we behold how the human being works at the formation of his own karma. He weaves it during sleep; but it is during waking life that he gathers what he needs for its texture. He weaves the threads that are formed out of universal human love—or he weaves threads which perpetually tear asunder and make bad karma for the next life, threads that are woven out of feelings of hatred for our fellowmen. Love and hatred—these are creative forces in the forming and shaping of karma.

Such truths must be viewed in their true light. It is but a slip-shod and easy-going conception of karma which prompts us to say: ‘I am ill—it is my karma!’ ‘A misfortune has befallen me—it is my karma.’ To make karma responsible for everything in this fatalistic way does not, it is true, afford any real peace of mind, it is merely a convenient theoretical conception; it is, however, quite incorrect.

Imagine you are considering, not this present life, but the third subsequent life, then in that life you will be able to look back to the present one, and when you say: ‘It is my karma,’ your karma, as it will be then, is to be traced back to this present earthly life where it was actually born. In other words, karma is all the time coming into being.

It is not right to throw everything back to the past. The right attitude to karma leads us to say: An illness which befalls me now, need not necessarily be the consequence of earlier weaknesses of soul; it is possible that an illness may constitute a first beginning. Karma holds good, nevertheless. If an illness, a misfortune befalls me in this present earthly life, the compensation will quite surely come,—or again the illness, the misfortune, may itself be the compensation.

In other words: the future, too, must be reckoned with, when we are speaking about karma. The right attitude towards karma is to have an unshakable conviction of justice reigning through all the worlds, a knowledge that for everything there is compensation. But the present earthly life must not be considered as breaking the on-flowing sequence of incarnations so that we relegate everything to the past. The healthy and positive attitude to the karmic flow of life's happenings rests on the sure knowledge that there is justice. What really matters most of all is the mood of soul that is born from this understanding of karma.

The whole feeling and attitude of soul that must emerge from a true understanding of karma, is one which makes us realise when, perhaps some misfortune befalls us as consequence of an earlier weakness in the life of soul—that if this misfortune had not come about, the weakness would have persisted. Looking into the depths of our soul, we must realise: It is good and right that this misfortune has come upon me, because it has enabled a weakness to be eliminated.

A man who bewails a misfortune which is really the consequence of a preceding weakness or failing, is not adopting the standpoint of true manhood, for the inference is that it matters not to him whether he remains weak or achieves some measure of strength. That man alone faces misfortune aright who says to himself: ‘If it has occurred because of an earlier weakness, it is to be welcomed, for it will make me conscious of the weakness (which expressed itself perhaps in some definite failing); I will now eradicate the weakness, I will be strong again.’

In a case, on the other hand, where a misfortune befalls one as the first step in karma, the right attitude is to say to oneself: If we were always only to encounter what we wish for ourselves, such a life would make us out and out weaklings! One or two earthly lives might continue to be comfortable and easy through the fact that only that would befall us that we desired for ourselves—but in the third or fourth life a kind of paralysis of soul and spirit would supervene, and no effort to overcome obstacles would arise in us. For, after all, obstacles would not be there for us to overcome unless the unhoped-for, the undesired came upon us. But if the right kind of strength is developed vis-à-vis the obstacles, if enough human love is carried over into sleep, then the karma that is woven by the Ego in communion with the Archai is such that the true compensation takes place in the next earthly life.

The truths of Anthroposophy need not remain in the realm of cognition; their very nature is such that they affect a man's attitude and temper of mind and heart. A man who is not thus affected has not grasped them fully; for him indeed they remain abstract and theoretical. The effect which a true understanding of karma has upon a man is to make him more sensitive to happiness and misfortune than he would otherwise be; happiness and misfortune are experienced with great intensity; but he is also able to induce in his soul an attitude to the spiritual world which arises, not out of any belief or creed but out of a perception of what the Ego and astral body are doing while they are withdrawn from the bodily life of day. Recognition of this promotes an unshakable conviction of world-justice. Understanding of karma means that a man has a true perception of world-justice. It does not mean that he becomes phlegmatic towards happiness or unhappiness, joy or pain; it means that joy and pain, happiness and misfortune are for him allotted to their proper place in life.

Observing the human being during the life of day, we can see how the Ego and astral body are working in the physical body. This means that we know something of their activity in the physical body. But we know nothing about the workings of the soul and spirit within the Ego and astral body. If, as a materialist, I am speaking to a human being, listening to his words, I say to myself: Lungs, larynx are at work as he speaks; vibrations are set up in the air and they strike on my ear. But if I see the process truly, I perceive in the words and speech the man's astral body in which his kinship with the Divine-Spiritual world is expressed. I say to myself: When, during the life of day, the astral body is within the physical body, it conceals itself in the man's speech and similar activities; during the night, however, the astral body participates in the life of the higher Hierarchies. And it is the same with the Ego.

When the human being sleeps he is not merely resting from the fatigues of his daily life. Here in the physical world, man sleeps, works and speaks with his physical body; but he is active too in the spiritual world, while he is asleep. Since materialism denies that Ego and astral body exist and operate in full reality of being during sleep, materialism cannot possibly understand the world in its entirety. What is the ‘moral world’ to materialism? To materialism the ‘moral world’ is something the human being formulates in thought—something that has nothing to do with the actively creative powers of the world. But those who have true and penetrating perception of human life know that man lives within the moral world-order during sleep just as truly as during waking life he lives in air and light. This again leads us to something more that it is essential we should understand.

The workings of speech (and the same holds good for karma, too) accompany us when we die. Through the course of our life we have been connected—rightly, or perhaps inadequately—with the world of the Archangeloi. This relationship has repeated itself in every period of sleep, and we bear with us through the Gate of Death into the spiritual world what has been given us by the Archangeloi during sleep. We can then find the way rightly into the spiritual world which is, indeed, the Logos, the world consisting of cosmic principles which have their images in the words of speech; we can find our way into the spiritual world to live out there our life between death and a new birth.

But the matter is not so simple. After death we have no physical body; we are able to turn to good account what the Archangeloi have conferred upon us from our periods of sleep. But when as physical human beings on the Earth, we wake from sleep, we have again to descend into a physical body. The Archangeloi cannot bestow upon us the power to do this. Still higher Hierarchies must add their work, namely, the Beings designated in Occult Science the Exusiai and the Kyriotetes. Into the urges, instincts and desires of the physical body—which offer resistance to us—these higher Beings must introduce the fruits of what we have achieved in communion with the Archangeloi through the spirituality of speech; and this now flames up within us, as the voice of conscience. When that which we bring out of sleep into the body lights up as the voice of conscience, there is working, in this voice, all that has been bestowed by the Hierarchy of the Exusiai and Kyriotetes—a Hierarchy more sublime than that of the Archangeloi.

Thus when we discover in the physical world a man whose conscience is so strong that instincts of a higher order arise in his physical body, we realise that as a result of idealism in his speech, Kyriotetes and Exusiai have worked upon him.

Again, when through universal human love a man forms a real link with the Archai, the results of the work that he himself does on his karma appear in the body of the next earth-life when, in early childhood, while he is sleeping his way into life, he learns to walk, acquires balance, skill in the use of his arms, control of the glandular system, and so on. All this is possible because he has been able, between death and a new birth, to work in communion with the Archai. But in order that in his life on Earth a man may develop delicate sensitivity, a quick and clear consciousness in regard to his own deeds, it is necessary for the still higher Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Dynamis to work together with the Archai.

When a man lacks wide-hearted love for his fellowmen, lacks interest in his human environment, he does not find a true link with the Archai. The result is that he prevents himself from weaving his karma rightly for the next earth-life, and the compensation has to wait for later incarnations. In the present earth-life such a man suffers from increasing lack of power to carry into the physical body the judgments that he forms—satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the actions performed by legs and hands. This cannot be achieved by ourselves alone; through intensified human love we need to have entered into a true relationship with the Dynamis. These Beings then bear into our physical body the requisite power; otherwise we come to grief, although we may perceive quite clearly what is right.

In thought we can be free. But in order to use this freedom aright in the physical body, the proper equilibrium must be established in waking and sleeping life because we must be united not only with the Archai but also with the Dynamis.

The highest Hierarchy of all—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—bear our deeds out into the universe. From out of sleep, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes bear as moral power into our bodily nature what we grasp in thoughts: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones bear this out into the universe, so that our own moral forces become world-creative forces.

When the time comes for the Earth to pass over to the Jupiter condition and for our moral forces to perform their true functions in this great process of transformation, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones can only play their part if we are able to offer them the necessary foundations. If, because of feebleness, we have only forces of destruction to offer them, then we are working for the destruction of the Earth, not for the upbuilding of Jupiter.

When Anthroposophy speaks of the manifoldness of the spiritual world, this is by no means a mere naming of particular stages, but we are enabled gradually to behold the whole warp and woof of the world and to perceive the connection of the human being with the spiritual world as clearly as we perceive his connections with the physical world. The power to promote and upbuild life arises in men who acquire in this way a true insight into their connection with the spiritual world, who realise that the purpose of sleep is not merely repose but that the after-workings of the physical body may bring the human being into a right connection with the spiritual world.

It is quite possible for a man to deny the spiritual and moral world because, to begin with, at his present stage of Earth evolution, he is not aware of its reality. He is asleep in this respect. A true science must evoke into the realm of consciousness, realisation of the heavenly existence which reaches into earthly life. Sleep comes over man for this very purpose—that he may, himself, draw out of the spiritual world the power he needs for his physical life.

And now, from this point of view, study the connection of what I have sketched today in outline with my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As I have stated with emphasis there, it is not a matter of establishing the theory that the will must be free, but that the thought must be free. The thought must control the will if man is to be a free being. But a man's life must be suitably directed and ordered if the will is not to present insuperable hindrance to the thought that is free. As men in the physical world we can make our thought free. Feeling² becomes free only when we have established a true relationship with the Archangeloi; will becomes free when we have established a true relationship with the Archai.

The living content of speech, as well as all that lives in our limbs, passes out, during sleep, together with the soul and spirit. Astral body and Ego go forth, but the ether-body remains with the physical body. The thinking that is bound up with the ether body continues within the ether-body; but we know nothing in ordinary consciousness of how this ether body thinks from the time of falling asleep to that of waking, because we are outside it. It is not true that thinking ceases during sleep; we think from the moment of falling asleep until we wake. Man's thoughts are in perpetual flow in his ether-body, only he is unaware of it. Not until the moment when he returns to the body do the thoughts light up in his consciousness. Man can become free in his life of thought because his thoughts are bound, through the ether-body, with the physical life of Earth; for he has been placed upon the Earth in order that he may become free. From the spiritual world alone can he draw the power of freedom—the power that leads to freedom in feeling and in will.

It will be clear that throughout the whole of his life on Earth the human being retains the real foundation for his thinking—the ether-body. Astral body and Ego pass out into a cosmic world during earthly life; not so, the ether-body. The ether-body emerges only at death. Then comes the backward review, lasting one, two, three days, of the life that has just ended; the human being sees his whole life as a panorama. Always, without exception, the human being looks back, after death, upon his earthly life which has now run its course. The whole ocean of the thoughts that have arisen in him between birth and death, both in sleeping and waking life—a great sea of inter-weaving thoughts—is present before him during these three days after death, but immediately thereafter the thoughts are claimed by the Cosmos; the thoughts dissolve, and after two or three days the whole panorama has passed away—into the Cosmos. We are accustomed to say that the ether-body has been detached and has dispersed, but in actual fact the Cosmos has absorbed it into itself. The ether-body has continued to expand, until finally it is completely absorbed into the Cosmos. Then, as Ego and astral body, the human being is received into the bosom of the Higher Hierarchies. Only when an ether-body is again bestowed upon him, can he descend to a new earthly life and continue the work which will make him a free human being. For it is the goal of earthly life that man shall become free. The foundation for freedom lies in the activity of pure thinking—a faculty that is bestowed upon man on Earth. Therefore is the ether-body bound to the physical body for the whole course of earthly life, releasing itself only at death in worlds where freedom is not to be acquired. Freedom is acquired during life on Earth, and moreover, as you know, during certain epochs only of Earth life.

We can thus understand that there is a true relationship between freedom and karma, for freedom is connected with those members of man's being (physical body and ether-body) which remain behind during sleep. Karma is woven by the Ego during the period of sleep,—that is to say, in a realm beyond and apart from those members wherein freedom has its foundations. Karma does not weave the texture of free or unfree thoughts; karma weaves at feeling and will. Karma emerges from the depths of human nature, out of the ‘dreaming’ feeling and the ‘sleeping’ will. Into this we can pour, or rather over against this we can place, the power that lives in the free activity of thoughts, in pure thinking, in the ethical and moral impulses as I described them in the book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for these impulses must have their root in pure thinking.

Everything, you see, fits into a whole. It is essential to realise that the further we progress in Anthroposophy, the more completely do we find the details uniting and forming one whole. Contradictions may well be found in what is said concerning one particular domain or another; this is inevitable, because before arriving at any real insight in one domain we need, in reality, to study this domain in connection with the whole. Otherwise our conclusions are like that of a man who makes statements about a planet and is unable to understand the causes of its specific movements. In such a case it is of course necessary to reckon with the whole planetary system. Thus, if we wish really to know something about the world and about life, we must try to fathom all the connections, all the details of actual realities, both in the physical world and in the worlds of soul and spirit.

This was what I wanted to say to you today, my dear friends, when it has been possible for us to be together again in a Group Meeting. My desire has been to help you to develop that attitude to karma—that is, to universal justice—which arises in a man when he finds his true bearings in Anthroposophy. More important than the mere comprehension of theories is the feeling, the attitude of soul which we carry over into life itself. May you succeed, in ever greater and greater measure, in making the gifts of Anthroposophy the very substance of your soul, receiving them verily not into your thoughts alone, but into your heart and soul. The more Anthroposophy becomes the heart-substance of those who desire to understand it truly, the more will it be possible to introduce Anthroposophy into cultural spiritual life in the wide sense. This is a deep and urgent need, for with antiquated traditions mankind will be incapable of progress. Try to tread the path of Anthroposophy which leads from the head to the heart, for in your hearts Anthroposophy will be secure.

• 1. The Aim of the Goetheanum and the Task of Anthroposophy, Berne, 5th April, 1923
• 2. The German word here is ‘Gemut’—a word that means more than “feeling,” for it includes also the perception and understanding that belong to the heart.