The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like, dear friends, to consider today’s lecture as affording a kind of typical example of how we intend to proceed with the rest of the course. We may naturally have occasion to extend or modify our method from time to time. To begin with, we will take as a basis for our discussion together, the case of a boy who will presently be brought in. The history of the case is as follows.

The boy has been with us since 11th September, 1923, and was nine years old when he came. During the time of pregnancy the mother felt quite well; in the fifth month she made a tour through Spain. The birth was very difficult, the child had to be turned and helped out with forceps. In the first year, he was well and healthy, and there was no thought at all of abnormality. When six months old, he lay once for a very long time in the sun, with the result that he was overcome afterwards with a kind of faintness, followed later by fever. He was breast-fed for three months only, and from nine months to three years old was a very poor eater. During all this time he had really no desire for food at all. In the second summer of his life, the parents noticed that the boy's eyes were changing and becoming less clear. In this second year he was also not yet able to speak or to walk; and he would frequently start screaming and crying at about four o'clock in the morning, without apparent cause. He developed a habit at this time that should never be disregarded in children—the habit, namely, of sucking his thumb. Cardboard splints were on this account strapped to his elbows, and at night he was made to wear aluminum shields on his hands. The wearing of the shields was continued for three years. The boy was all this time backward in his development and at the age of five was still unable to speak connectedly. Then we come to the time of the change of teeth, beginning from the seventh year. The middle teeth have been changed, but the other upper teeth are not all changed yet. Or has he by now changed some more? Yes, he has got one new tooth. One of the front teeth is also not yet there. Yes, I see it has come through. The other was already strongly developed when he came to us. The mother informs us that the father too as a child was very late in his development, and the second dentition was with him also very considerably delayed.

At the time when he came to us, the boy was in a weak state of health. He weighed scarcely 53 lb. He has delicate bones, and his hands and feet are disproportionately large. He is very clumsy with his hands. External tests all give a negative result. After he came, he showed signs of increasing restlessness, and grew more and more difficult to manage. His manners are rather bad. The bodily functions are in good order.

Since January of this year, the boy has become decidedly quieter and more human. The things in the world outside have begun to interest him and arouse his wonder. A quality is developing in him which we must do our utmost to encourage—attentiveness to the world around. I do not mean an attentiveness merely of the intellect, but a turning with heart and feeling to the things of the world. Things he sees around him call forth wonder and astonishment in him. Let me take this opportunity to emphasize that mere intellectual attention to the world can never work therapeutically; the feeling and the will must also be engaged. The boy is moreover becoming friendly; whereas at first he would pass people by with indifference, he now recognises them again. It is not easy to rouse him to be active in any way. What he does, he does unwillingly. By January, however, he did manage to acquire some proficiency in the useful art of knitting. What is important is that one introduces the child to an occupation of this kind which on the one hand brings him into mechanical movement, but yet on the other hand makes him pay attention, for in knitting one can easily drop a stitch! He likes best of all to play with a little cart or sledge. He will talk for hours at a time of nothing but his little cart. That will remind you of the symptom of which I was speaking yesterday. He is also learning quite quickly to speak and understand German. There, then, you have the description of the immediate facts and findings.

And now, if you will begin to observe the child for yourselves—(to the boy) Come here a minute!—you will find many things to notice. Let me draw your attention, first of all, to the strongly developed lower half of the face. Look at the shape of the nose and the mouth. The mouth is always a little open. With this symptom is connected also the peculiar formation of the teeth. It is important to note these things, for they are unquestionably bound up with the whole soul-and spirit constitution of the child. We must not make the mistake of attributing the open mouth to the formation of the teeth; both are to be traced to a common cause, namely, that in this child the lower man is not fully under the control and mastery of the upper man. If you can see that, then much will become clear to you. Imagine that here you have the upper man, the nerves-and-senses man. This works upon the whole of the rest of the human being. For, as you know, this is the part of man that is the most developed in the first period of life; it brings the most forces with it from the embryonic time, and during that time had in it the most highly developed forces. The rest of the body is more or less dependent on what forms itself here in the upper man. Whereas the lower man forms itself directly from the constitution of the mother body, the rest of man is only indirectly dependent on what forms itself here. The formation you see here in the jaws—the jaws belong, of course, to the limb system—should be completely taken into the head system. But in this case the head system is not strong enough to bring the limb system fully into itself; consequently, external forces work too powerfully upon this limb-system. Look at a well-formed human being, where the lower part of the head is in harmony with the rest of the head. You will be quite right in concluding that you will find in such a person a nervous system that is in the highest possible degree master of the metabolism-and-limbs system. No external forces will in this case exercise undue influence. If however the head is incapable of controlling the rest of the body, then the forces that come from without will work too strongly into the rest of the body. In the child before us, we have clear evidence of this in the fact that the arms, and also the legs, have not the proportions they would have if they were brought into right relation with the upper part of the body, but have grown too big, because external forces have worked upon them in excess. (Look, he's amused! I think Fraulein B. was asking him why he keeps his mouth open, and his reply was: “To let the flies come in.” This is a firmly fixed opinion of his.)

All that we have been describing is, you see, due in the first place to a weakness in the upper part of the organisation. Observe now how the head is narrow here (in front) on both sides, and pressed back; so we have in this boy the symptom of narrow-headedness, a sign that the intellectual system is but little permeated with will. This part (at the back) expresses strong permeation by the will. The front part of the head is accessible only to external influences that come via sense-perception, whereas the back part of the head is accessible to all manner of influences from without. You have therefore here a beginning of what manifests so strikingly in the arms and legs; the brain enlarges and spreads out at the back of the head.

The study of such a child can be very interesting; indeed a child like this is more interesting than many normal children, although many a normal child is easier and pleasanter to deal with.

Here (in the front) you have that part of the whole head organisation which has its substance supplied to it from the rest of the organism. What is deposited here in the way of substance—not forces, but substance—is derived entirely from external nourishment. Here, on the other hand (at the back) substance begins to be supplied, not from food, but from that which is received through the breathing, through the senses, etc., and is cosmic in origin. The back of the head is, as regards substance, of cosmic origin. Here (in the front) as we remarked, the head is pressed together. In all probability this points back to a purely mechanical injury, either at birth or during pregnancy, a mechanical injury in which we can see nothing else than a working of karma, for it can have no connection with the forces of heredity. As a result of this compression, the head tends not to let enough substance get carried up into it from the food that is eaten as nourishment. For it has anyway no inclination to start working upon the nourishment that does reach it, the demand for nourishment being so slight in this front part of the head. You can see therefore, simply by observing the external form of the head, that the boy is bound to be at some time quite without appetite. Here, in this front part of the head, the accumulation of what is received by way of nourishment begins to be deficient.

The insufficiency in the control exercised upon the whole limb system has its influence upon the breathing system. The entire system of the breath is very little under control, and breathing tends to become disturbed and uneasy. This is connected with the whole way in which the lower jaw is formed. The lower jaw receives into itself a great quantity of air—too much, indeed; with the result that substance is accumulated in too great measure, both here in the lower jaw and in the limbs. Hence the symptom that is so conspicuous in a child of this kind: the inbreathing is not in right relation to the outbreathing, it is too vigorous as compared with the outbreathing. Consequently, the boy is unable to develop within him the right and necessary quantity of carbonic acid; he is deficient in carbonic acid. So here you have also a clear demonstration of the fact that in a human being who is deficient in carbonic acid the limb system will be found to be over-developed; and with the limb system is of course connected everything in the human being that has fundamentally to do with movement. What ought to happen is that gradually, in the course of life, the whole system of movement in man should become a servant of the intellectual system. (To the boy) Stand still a minute! And now come here to me and do this! (Dr. Steiner makes a movement with his arm as if to take hold of something; the boy does not make the movement.) Never mind! We mustn't force him. Do you see? It is difficult for him to do anything; he has not the power to exercise the right control over his metabolism-and-limbs system. If he had, he would have lifted his arm in the way I showed him. With this is also connected the lateness of the second dentition. In order for the change of teeth to go forward in the right way, there must be a co-operation between senses-and-nerves system and metabolism-and-limbs system. The working together of the two systems provides the foundation for the change of teeth. These phenomena are all closely connected with one another.

And now what is the result of all this? As we have seen, when the child was born, and for as long as the metabolism and-limbs system had not yet developed—as is the case, of course, with a very young child—he was able to be in control of his body. No one noticed that there was anything abnormal. Only in course of time, when he had grown quite a bit, could the abnormality, which was present all along, show itself. And it is just as we might expect, that he should attain comparatively late those faculties which depend on the upper system's having the lower system under control. He was late, namely, in learning to speak and to walk. What would have been the right educational treatment for this child in very early years? Obviously a special effort should have been made to begin with Curative Eurythmy even before he was able to walk, simply moving his limbs oneself in eurythmic movements. If this had been done, then the movements carried out in this way in the limbs would have been reflected in the nerves-and-senses organism, and since at that early age everything, is still supple in the child, the form of the head could actually have grown wider. By beginning in good time to produce in a child movements that have the right forms, a great deal can be accomplished for the forming of the head, and one cannot but rejoice at the results that can be achieved in this direction. In the case of the boy before us, where the very bones of the skull have been narrowed by external pressure, it is certainly difficult for the head to grow any bigger.

During the time when I was engaged in teaching, an abnormal boy of eleven and a half years old was given into my care. I have written about him in The Story of My Life. The parents and the family doctor were at their wit's end what to do with this child. He would have to be put to learn some trade—and that was terrible to contemplate! With the exception of his mother, who took the matter quietly, everyone was frantic about it; what a disgrace for a highly respectable city family to have to put their boy to a trade! To pass comment or criticism on the matter was not my business. The boy was, among other things, hydrocephalic. I stipulated that he should be left entirely to me. His attainments up to that time may be judged from the fact that he had completely failed a short while before in the entrance examination for one of the lowest classes in the “Volksschule¹ All he had done in the allotted time was to rub a large hole into a copy-book with a piece of india-rubber. The boy had also the strange and singular habit of not wanting to eat at all at table, but of eating with great relish potato skins that had been thrown away as refuse.

After a year and a half had passed, the boy had progressed so far as to be able to attend the First Class in the “Gymnasium”.² The secret of the matter lay in the care and attention given to the movements of the limbs; through this, it came about that the hydrocephalic condition disappeared. The head became smaller—a clear sign that results can be achieved in this direction. Where, as in the boy before us, the bones of the skull have been pressed together by a blow from outside, there will, as I said, be great difficulty in achieving any enlargement of the head, but some improvement might nevertheless have been attained.

And now the question is: What guidance can we gain from our observation of the child, as to how we are to proceed with his education? Of primary significance for us as educators is the fact that the boy has had to bring his soul-and-spirit nature into a body whose forces are not harmoniously developed. Karmic complications lie behind this. Believe it or not, the boy is a genius. What do I mean by that? (He doesn't understand what we are saying.) I mean that, in accordance with his karmic antecedents, he could have been a genius. In the conditions, however, under which the boy finds himself at the present day (and he was of course obliged to be born into these conditions) he has been unable to develop the possibilities that were present in him by virtue of his antecedents; hence, and to that extent, there is abnormality. The choice of his parents has clearly had its bearing on the situation. It has made things difficult for him; he looks out upon the world under difficult bodily conditions. For he has a body that has grown hard and rigid, owing to the fact that the forces of the upper and of the lower man do not interlink properly, do not fit well together. We have thus to do here with a hardening of the organism. When the boy wakes up, the astral body and the I organisation cannot dive down into the organism as they should. They come up against a kind of brick wall.

But now man's whole faculty of attention, the ability we possess to be attentive to the world around us, depends on our being able to establish the right adjustment between soul-and-spirit on the one hand and the bodily-physical nature on the other hand. Suppose we are unable to do this. Then, in so far as we are concerned merely with the more superficial side of life, the inability to establish the right adjustment will show itself in clumsiness, in unskilfulness. Traces of this sort of inability can be observed in the majority of people today. In my experience—I apologise for the hard verdict!—most persons are highly unskilful. They find it difficult to develop skill and deftness. If I go over in my mind all the eight hundred children we have in the Waldorf School, I cannot say that any large percentage of them are distinguished for skill and ingenuity. And wherever you go, you will find evidence that this inpouring of the astral body and I organisation into the physical organization does not come off as it should. The reason is to be sought in the fact that we are now living in the full flower of the age of intellectualism. The thinking, the mental and spiritual activity, that belongs to our time, reaches only into the bones—not into the muscles. And a person who sets out to make use of his bones does not thereby become skilful! The intellectual system in man is adapted for making its way into the bony system, but in order to get the bony system moving, it requires the help of the muscles; and the ability of the astral body and I organisation to insinuate themselves into the muscular system is in our time astonishingly small. How is this? The root of the trouble lies in the fact that this intellectual age of ours is not devout, is not genuinely religious in character; the churches of the various denominations do not really make for deep and sincere religion. But now, the development of the muscles attached to the bones depends on the presence in the world of great men who are revered as examples, as heroes. As soon as a human being can look up, even if only in thought, to great souls and see in them his pattern and example, then a right contact begins to be established between his muscular and his bony systems. And in the boy we are considering, lack of interest has been from the first a marked characteristic.

And now you can also see in this boy a striking confirmation of what I told you earlier—that thoughts do not themselves undergo change. The thoughts a person produces cannot ever be false. It is only a question of whether he produces the thoughts at the right occasion, or again of whether he produces too many thoughts, or too few. The thoughts themselves are reflections of the external ether.

When the boy is asked why he keeps his mouth open, and replies: So that the flies can fly in—that is an exceedingly clever answer; the thought is, however, wrongly applied. The same thought, applied later in life to some machine that people were trying to invent, could turn out to be the grand idea of a clever inventor. Thoughts are, in themselves, always right and correct; for they are part of the world ether, they are contained in the thought constitution of the world ether.

It is of the greatest importance that the possibility should be there, for the soul-and-spirit to make proper connection with the world outside via its own bodily sheaths. In dealing with such a child, we have to go to work on a twofold principle. We must put before him as few impressions as possible; and we must try to bring these few impressions into association with one another. The instruction we set out to give must be so simplified, must contain so few elements, that it can quickly be perceived as a connected whole. And it will be, if we take the trouble to make it so. Whenever we want to get children to do something—for what I am saying now is true not for this boy alone; you will be able to prove its truth with the other children too—whenever we want to get them to do something, we must take special pains to accompany what the children have to do with things to stimulate the children's interest and attention. Where we have children of this kind, who are unable to come forth out of their body, who fail to bring the soul into the body and so become master of their own bodily nature, the important thing will be to provide every possible opportunity for their interest to develop. Suppose we are beginning to give them painting. We must, in the first place, be careful to avoid getting at all anxious or worried if the children make a dreadful mess of their work! (This warning has been equally necessary in the Waldorf School.) If we teachers are bent on having everything left perfectly clean and tidy when the lesson is finished, we shall be following a false principle. Tidiness is a matter of quite secondary importance. On the other hand, it is of very great importance that the teacher should be constantly watching to see that the children are attentive to each single movement they are making with their hands, to see that the children follow with close attention all that they are doing. This requires that the teacher shall be himself fully “there”. Even more than with other children is it necessary with these, that the teacher is wide-awake and on the spot the whole time, not allowing himself ever to lapse into vacancy or vagueness of thought.

“Look! Take up your brush! And now draw it over the paper!” If we accompany the whole process with a constant rousing of interest and attention, we shall achieve something; we shall find that even right up to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth years, a great deal can be done in this way in the direction of rendering the organism more supple and pliant. As we go on, we must find it possible to talk to the child somewhat as follows: “Look! Do you see the tree out there? I want you to draw that tree. Look at its branches! Can you show me now on your paper what the tree is like?”

One has, you see, to be right there the whole time. “Look, there comes the pony! He's running!” At the same time you point out the colour of the tree, the pony, etc. “And now there's Mussolini, the little dog, going to meet him! The little dog is barking at the pony, and the pony is going like this with his legs!” You must try to live the whole story with intense vivacity. And this lively participation in everything that happens, which is really a manifestation of spirit, is infectious; the children catch it! You will find that if you want to help children in this way you need plenty of verve and enthusiasm. If you are dull or apathetic, if you are the sort of person who prefers to remain seated and dislikes having to stand up, the sort of person who has not the smallest inclination to be constantly rousing himself into activity and movement—then you will never succeed in anything you undertake in the way of education. For it is not a matter of being ready with all sorts of cleverly thought-out devices; it is a matter of doing, on each single occasion, just what that particular occasion demands.

Another thing you must do with children of this kind is to engage them in conversation—as much as ever you can. This boy did not at first take part in conversation. Now he does. Listen, and you will see how far he has advanced in this respect. (To the boy) Do you remember, you told me one day that a pony had arrived? Tell me now, how big is the pony? Have you ever taken him out?—“Yes, the pony runs about in the Sonnenhof³ all the time; and it lies down on the grass.”—Is it in the stable when it rains? And is there a big pony too?—“Yes, the big pony is called Markis.”—You see, if you make conversation with him in this way, he joins in and talks with you; whereas before, he used to roar and bellow at you. Another extraordinarily interesting thing to observe is the following. When he came to us the boy spoke English only. He has learned comparatively quickly to speak German. You can indeed see in him a beautiful example of how language pours itself right down into the ether body and physical body. But the construction of his own language had become more firmly fixed in him than it is in other children; we have, in fact, in this boy a wonderful opportunity to study how the construction of a language sticks fast. He does not say “Ich bin gewesen” (I have been), but “Ich have gebeen”. He is finding his way into the German language quite well, but takes with him into the German the form and configuration of the English. He has many other similar expressions. Instead of “Geh weg!” (Go away!), he says “Geh aweg!” From this very firmness with which the English language has established itself in him, you can see how stiff and rigid his body is. If you take pains to get him to talk, doing all you can to draw him out, you will discover that he has a great deal more to overcome than most children. For what he has already learned sits terribly tight in him. By bringing life into him however, constantly new life, we shall gradually enable the stiffened body to grow inwardly supple and mobile. If you can, for instance, get him to say “Ich bin gewesen”, that will be a real achievement on his part; for it will mean he has roused himself to inner mobility. Beware however of trying to reach the result by force, by driving it home, as it were; no, it must be arrived at by conversation, by engaging the boy again and again, untiringly, in conversation. A child of this kind should be able to notice that we take an interest in him, and share in what he is doing. We must ask him questions, for instance, about things he has had to do with, things with which he must obviously be familiar, making plain to him in this way that we ourselves are concerned in what he has experienced. That is for him very important.

It will not, I think, be difficult for you to realise how helpful Curative Eurythmy can be for a boy like this. Suppose he does the movements for R and L. R is a “turning”; something is turning round, is revolving. There at once you have mobility. Most of you are attending the lecture course on Eurythmy, and will know also what L signifies. Think what formative forces the tongue is developing when L is spoken! L is the sound that signifies yielding or compliance, adapting oneself to fall in with something. And that is what the boy's organism needs: to be made pliant and supple, so that it shall be ready to adapt itself. And then you will remember how I said that in him the inbreathing process outweighs the outbreathing process. We have therefore to see that the outbreathing is stimulated as much as ever possible, and that the boy himself participates in it. This happens in M. M is the sound that belongs particularly to the outbreathing. When it is done in Eurythmy, the whole limb system comes in to help. And N provides the tendency to lead back into what belongs to the intellect. We shall accordingly have for this boy R, M, L, N. As you see, once we have a comprehensive picture of the child's condition, we know what we have to do. For this we must, of course, know, first of all, the true nature of each particular sound, and be absolutely at home in Eurythmy; then, we must on the other hand have also the ability to look with clarity and discernment into the bodily organisation of the child. Both of these are things that can quite well be learned, but both are completely lacking in the pedagogy of the present day.

In the case of such a child as we have now before us, I need hardly say it is even more urgent than with other children that he should be led to writing by way of painting. We shall therefore begin our teaching with lessons in painting, working in the way I indicated a little while ago.

All that I have described to you will have helped to make it clear that in this boy the astral body and the I organisation do not penetrate the physical body and ether body. We must come to their help. And for this purpose we shall have to intervene also therapeutically. What is it that needs our support, our backing, as it were? The nervous system, in so far as it is the foundation for the astral body and I organisation. How can we strengthen the nervous system? What can we do?

There are, as you know, three main ways in which we can work upon the human being therapeutically: by medicines taken internally, by injections, and by means of baths or lotions. When you give a person medicine to take internally, upon what does the medicine work? Fundamentally upon the metabolic system. You reckon, do you not, on the medicine taking effect in a simple, straightforward manner on the metabolic system. If you want to help the rhythmic system, you must give injections. But if you want to work upon the nervous system, you will have to give baths or lotions. Now, arsenic has a powerful effect on the mobility of the astral body, the mobility it requires for diving down into the physical and ether bodies—and, in fact, also on the form of the astral body. It can be observed in people who have undergone arsenic cures that their astral body just slips into the physical body, glides smoothly into it. When therefore you have a child in whom you want to produce a right harmony between astral and ether and physical bodies, arsenic baths will be your obvious remedy. Prepare a certain quantity of Levico⁴ of a particular percentage and let the child have a bath in it. This will work upon the nervous system and strengthen the astral body.

And now there is somewhere else where our help is needed. The forces of the head system are too feeble in their influence upon the rest of the body. We must come to the help of the stream of forces which goes from the head to the lower organism. This stream of forces is particularly powerful in the earliest years of life, but it is still maintained between change of teeth and puberty, and even increases in strength during that period, being at the end of it more powerful than in the seventh, ninth or eleventh year. We can strengthen this stream of forces and so help to induce a right correspondence between metabolic system and nervous system, by making use of a secretion of hypophysis.⁵ For this gives, as it were, a helping hand to the stream of forces, and exercises from the direction of the head a harmonising influence upon the metabolic system. We shall therefore have, side by side, treatment with hypophysis cerebri, arsenic baths and Curative Eurythmy. With these three working together, we shall make progress with a boy of this kind.

And now finally I want to ask your special attention again to what I said of the need to be always alive and alert, the need to be right there in whatever we are doing. Particularly in the education and teaching of backward children, the importance of the need cannot be over-emphasised. If once we have the inclination and goodwill to try to attain this, then we shall find that our study and work in the Anthroposophical Movement will make us more ready to be wide-awake and alert in all that we undertake. There are, it is true, tendencies at work among us in an exactly opposite direction. One suffers at times a kind of pain when one comes into an assemblage of Anthroposophists. Such a heaviness in the air! No inducing the members to get a move on! If one begins a discussion, no one else so much as opens his mouth; why, their very tongues are heavy—heavy as lead! And they pull such long faces! Out of the question to expect them to look happy or to laugh! And yet, do you know what is the first and most essential qualification for a teacher of these children? Humour! Yes, real humour, the humour of life. You may have mastered every possible clever method and device, but you will not be able to educate these children unless you have the necessary humour.

There will have to be a feeling and understanding in the anthroposophical movement for what “movement”, mobility, really is! I do not want to enlarge on this subject, but I can assure you that I never meet with less understanding than when, in answer to a question as to what is to be done in a certain situation, I reply: “Have enthusiasm!” Enthusiasm—that is what counts; and particularly in dealing with children who are abnormal.

This is what I wanted to say to you today.

• 1. Primary School up to age of fourteen.
• 2. Grammar School from age of eleven or twelve.
• 3. The home for backward children in Arlesheim, Switzerland.
• 4. water [A Spa water containing iron arsenic.
• 5. A Weleda preparation is certainly meant.

Before we pass on to another case, I would like to say a little more about the boy we were considering yesterday. For in this boy we can really see a whole series of psychic facts demonstrated. Right at the beginning of his stay with us—indeed, he brought it with him—he would speak of a little sprite that he had on the forefinger of his right hand. He has always, quite consistently, called this little sprite “Bebe Assey”. He carries on conversations with it just as one does with one's fellow beings, speaking to it, talking with it and altogether treating it as a real being. And then I must tell you of another idiosyncrasy. The boy will every now and then suddenly undergo a change, something like the changes we read of in the Werewolf stories. For a considerable time, for instance, he thought he was a lion and went about roaring like a lion. Has he changed into any other kind of animal? His favourite animal, anyway, has been a lion. We have here a sign that the boy's astral body is not in good working order. The astral body should by rights dive right down into the physical body. Instead of this, remnants of it have got left behind. For obviously, this “Bebe Assey” is (to begin with) nothing else than a remnant of the boy's own astral body. Then of course it can happen that this piece of astral body, which is left hanging out loose, becomes ensouled by an objective elemental being from the world outside. Subject and object then merge completely in one another.

What is of main importance for us as educators is the fact that, owing to the organism having become hardened, the astral body does not entirely enter it. Supposing you were to draw your astral body out of your physical body, so that you no longer had it pulsating there in its entirety within your physical body, then that astral body of yours would begin to show itself in all possible metamorphoses, it would begin to assume animal-like shapes. For when the astral body loosens itself from the physical and etheric—it may be still quite near to them, it may perhaps be still half or even three-quarters united with them—but so soon as the astral body becomes to any extent independent of the physical and ether bodies, it begins to manifest in animal form.

All these symptoms are particularly characteristic of the boy's condition, and they go to show how very difficult it will be to establish in him the right and proper harmony between the astral and etheric and physical bodies.

Now we will go on to consider another child. Let me give you the history of the case. The mother says that the child was born four weeks late. In the first four months of pregnancy the mother was on the stage and sometimes had to jump a great deal. Later on, she had a fall. At the age of two and a quarter, the child suffered from a digestive disturbance. Not until two years old was he able to stand. Throughout the first four years he was apathetic, but greedy for food. The first sound he uttered was R, which is most unusual. He even cried in R. Up to the fourth year he could only stammer out isolated words. Then he was given speech exercises; he had to speak sentences forwards and backwards. This was done by my advice. At the same time that he was learning to speak, he began to be restless, to make restless movements. He sleeps little, and does not fall asleep at all easily. In the evening he is very excited and tired, and cannot go to sleep. He takes his food greedily.

You would not be able to tell, from looking at the boy, how old he is. He is now six and three-quarters—not far off seven years old. As you see, he is backward in the development of his whole physical organisation. The head is rather too big, though scarcely enough to be noticeable. Taken altogether, the boy is backward. In the first period of life, from birth to change of teeth, the period during which the physical organisation ought to be particularly active—just in this period the physical organisation has in his case been inactive. Let me remind you of what I said about the physical organisation in the first period of life—that it is the inherited organism. So you see, it is an inherited organism that the child has had in the epoch through which he has already lived. The I (ego) organisation is now beginning to come forward, but it lacks the ability to bring about much deviation from the first physical organism. For it is the ether body that is active now, and the boy's ether body has adapted itself extraordinarily closely to the model body of the first seven years. The boy is behind-hand also with the change of teeth; that has not yet begun. So that there too we have to note a retardation of development.

Before going any further let us see that we are quite clear about the objective facts of the case. We find in this boy a relatively very weak astral body and a weak ego organization, which cannot make headway against the inherited organism. And we have also to note that this inherited organism has itself remained small. Now there is room for doubt whether the information given us is correct—for we are not at all obliged to assume that it was correct!—the information namely, that the child was born four weeks late. If this was so, then it was owing to the child's being too small; the child will have remained an embryo longer than usual because it was too small, because at the end of the ten lunar months it was not fully developed.

And now we have to ask ourselves the question: how has it come about that the child is in this condition? The explanation is given to us in the fact that the mother was acting on the stage during the first four months of pregnancy. She was a member of an independent troupe, who worked enthusiastically, and there can be no doubt that she was following her calling with enthusiasm and devotion. This meant that a considerable strain was put upon the astral body of the mother, which actually affected the form of the astral body of the child and turned its activity in a direction where it cannot do much in the way of growth—in the direction, namely, of intellectual capability. And so the process of intellectualisation begins in this boy even before birth, with the configuration that was given to the astral body during the embryonic period. We have then to do with a case of retardation, the causes of which lie right back in the embryonic period.

And now we have to consider how we are to treat a child of this kind who is altogether behind-hand in his development. As you will see for yourselves, the body has remained quite powerless. Throughout his earliest years, the boy was apathetic and developed nothing but the purely animal instincts of the physical organism. He was greedy, and late in learning to speak. And then, as I told you, the very first sound he learned to say was R. (Turning to the boy) Say “Robert runs!” (The boy says it in a deep, growling voice.) He is, you see, completely at home in the sound R. Do not forget that in a symptom like this a whole life can be expressed! Think of the mother during pregnancy. Think how she was continually in movement on the stage. And then try to enter into the being and character of R, which we have described in the Eurythmy lectures as the sound that has to do with turning and you will discern in the boy's speech a continuation of the play-acting of his mother. This one fact is of such overwhelming significance as to throw all others into the background. In this one fact opportunity is given us to acquire an extraordinarily deep insight into connections that need to be grasped and understood if we want to be clear in our minds about the condition of this child.

Let me remind you that what ought to happen during the first years of life is that the metabolism-and-limbs system of man is ordered and regulated by a strong astral body and ego. In this child the astral body is weak, and fails in its task; hence we find in him two symptoms to which we must give careful attention.

I do not know whether all of you were present at the lectures where I explained the true significance of the human brain.¹ I spoke of how the entire human organisation—all that we carry within us—is divided into upbuilding processes and breaking-down processes. With the latter are always connected products of excretion, for these are simply relics or traces that have been left behind by the process of disintegration. Let us look, first, at the boy's head. In the head a process of disintegration, a process of breaking down, is taking place. As you know, the intellectual activity of the soul, the whole thought-and-feeling activity of the soul, in so far as it makes use of the head as its organ of support, originates in a disintegration process. In this boy, the process of disintegration, having to be carried out by a weak astral body, is itself irregular. Waste products are not carried away with regularity, they remain; moreover, they do not harden as much as they should. We have not here to do with an actual case of hydrocephalus, but you see before you a head that holds within it too soft a brain. And now turn your attention to the reflected image of the brain—the content, that is, of the intestines. This too cannot be in order, and will not be. The activity of the intestines cannot ever have been in good order. Irregular brain activity and irregular intestinal activity go parallel with one another, especially in a child. This does not mean that you can set out with the resolve: I will see to it that the intestinal activity becomes regular—and imagine that thereby you will bring order into the activity of the brain. If you want to adjust the latter and bring it also into good harmony, you will have to work with medical knowledge.

Then there is a certain impurity in the relation and behaviour of the soul to the outside world. Try asking the boy to do something which he quite well understands; he will just grin a little, he won't meet what you say with openness and candour.

I shall have more to say afterwards about this case. I would like now only to add, in regard to the speech exercises that were begun with him at four years of age, that whenever speech exercises are done in this way, first forwards and then backwards, they help to regulate the connection of ether body with astral body. The exercises that were given to the boy at that time had this end definitely in view: to induce a harmonious co-operation of astral and ether bodies.

What the child needs is to be brought to feel and perceive his own physical organism. For as he does so, forces of growth will begin at the same time to insinuate themselves, as it were, into this physical organism. We must therefore choose for him exercises in Curative Eurythmy, which bring it about that he “discovers” his own physical organism. E (Eh, as in gate) is particularly helpful here, for in Eh man touches himself in his own organism; also U (as in rune) and O. O is chosen for its regulating influence. U and Eh are chosen for the purpose of helping the child to become aware of himself in himself. In his case, everything that makes for the realisation and apprehension of one's own organism can be of help. What else have we been doing with him besides Curative Eurythmy and Speech exercises? He has painting with the group. He must of course have painting; he is just about reaching school age. Progress with this child may be slow but it will be sure.

(The next child is brought in.)

I got to know this boy on a Journey. A rather difficult child! He is eleven years old. And now let me tell you where the trouble lies. The boy is an only child. Birth is reported to have been normal, although the mother is said to have lived unwisely during pregnancy; it seems she even drank a good deal. Development is said to have taken its course in the first three years without any marked individual feature. We will say more about that later. As a matter of fact, it cannot have been quite as represented, for at three years old the child fell suddenly ill, with high fever, and had convulsions during the night, the attack lasting only a short time. Such attacks became then for a while very frequent, coming on as a rule at night; later they grew much less frequent, occurring on an average once in three months. The attacks have, as you see, the characteristic symptoms of convulsions, that we spoke of earlier. Characteristically also, they began in the fourth year. Before that, the organism had not developed so far as to push back the astral organisation; the point had not been reached when the outside coverings—the walls—of certain organs began to repel the astral organisation. During the convulsions there is complete unconsciousness. This too, we saw, is quite usual. The child has violent spasms of twitching, particularly over the left half of the body; the eyes are also turned to the left. Afterwards he is very exhausted, and vomiting often occurs.

This means, you see, that by the time the child reached the third year, the walls of the organs were beginning to hold back the astral organisation, not allowing it to get through. Hence the convulsions. And with the convulsions—for the reason I explained to you—is associated loss of consciousness. But now in his case the astral organisation does succeed after a time in breaking through the walls of the organs to some extent. The child, unconsciously or semi-consciously, strains every effort to bring this about, and this struggle on his part lasts exactly as long as the attack. Then he has won through; but there is in consequence a certain emptiness in the organism in comparison with the previous condition, and this anomaly finds expression in the violent twitchings and spasms.

Now, as you know, the left half of the body of man is rather weaker than the right. When, the attack being over, the astral body is wanting to get free, it will naturally try to escape in the direction of the weaker part of the organism—that is, it will seek escape to the left. This finds expression also in the fact that the child turns his eyes to the left.

According to the diagnosis of doctors in Jena, the boy had encephalitis—a year ago, in January, was it? At that time, he had severe convulsions following on digestive disturbance and fever. So that here we have, preceded by stomach trouble, a major fit. Two weeks after the child was better again, paralysis of the left arm and leg showed itself—a most characteristic symptom, and easily explained. For, you see, what happens is this. The child goes on wanting to push the astral body through; but each time he puts forth these efforts and succeeds, he becomes aware afterwards of an emptiness behind the place where he succeeded in pushing the astral body through. Then he gets twitchings, and lets his astral body escape—to the left.

A process is taking place here which it is important to observe. Anything that enters into the organisation from without—that is to say, that has not been duly prepared by the organisation itself, but has forced its way in—is poison for the human organism. Suppose the astral organisation has suffered a displacement from right to left, and this displacement is continued—as it may well be, when it is a serious one—into the etheric organism, with the result that the physical organism also becomes involved. Then a slight infiltration of poison is set up towards the left side of the body, and this manifests outwardly in the symptom of paralysis. The child was given massage, and after three months the paralysis showed signs of improvement. The affected part was left a little weak, as one can still observe. (Turning to the boy and holding out an object) Take hold of it like this! As you see, he is clumsy with the left arm.

Since January 1923, the fits have essentially changed in character. They last now only a very short time, coming on as a rule nine hours after falling asleep. Suddenly the child will cry out, wake up, and stand up on his feet. At such moments you can observe also that extreme flatulence is present—a characteristic symptom. At the present time the boy has a fit nearly every week, but there is no longer the disturbance of consciousness. Neither do the twitchings occur. The fits pass and he jumps up all right. In 1924 a puncture was made in the corpus callosum, but with no result. The latest thing we have tried is treatment with calcium lactate.

The child is late in going to sleep and often talks in his sleep, especially if he has had a late meal. Appetite is good.

He has no liking for fruit or vegetables or anything acid, but shows a marked preference for meat. Digestion is at present fairly good; earlier on, he was inclined to be constipated and was also very quickly tired. The boy has a lively fantasy. He is friendly with everyone, but has no special affection for anyone in particular, not even for his parents. He is quick-tempered, and loves animals and plants. And we must not omit to note a trait that is strikingly characteristic of his condition, namely that he is a great chatterbox! That is part of the illness. It is for him a real need; he simply must chatter.

I think the very behaviour of the boy will have revealed to you the facts of his condition; you cannot help seeing them all simply by looking at him. There is however another feature of the case to which I must call your attention.

The child is now at the stage where the second body has already been developed for a long time, for he is eleven years old; but the condition in which we find him suggests that the model organism had itself become decadent, owing to the fact that the mother did not live wisely and carefully during the time of pregnancy, but drank a good deal. The whole manner and condition of the child now, makes it highly probable that the first body, the model body, was exceedingly irregular. And we are strongly inclined to the view that, although no such information has been given us, the birth may have occurred too soon, perhaps early by as much as two weeks—the mother failing to maintain her own organism in a condition that would render it a right and fit home for the embryo, which requires of course plenty of room to develop on all sides. This is frequently the case when alcohol is taken during pregnancy.

It is stated in the report given us that development in the first three years was without any peculiar features or symptoms. What seems to me more probable is that there has not been the readiness or ability to watch for more delicate deviations and irregularities. The astral (and the ego) organisation have been hanging out about the neck or mouth, and it is clear from this that the child must at any rate have felt, comparatively early, a need to speak. He must always have found difficulty in diving down into the ether and physical bodies. A certain nervous excitement, that manifests externally and that tends to hold back the principle of imitation and to allow more play to the inner organic impulses in evolution, must have already been present in the first three years.

And then we have, manifesting especially as the age of three-and-a-half approaches—the age that is halfway through the first seven-year epoch—the reactions that naturally arise when during the first seven years the ego and astral body are unable to work as they should from the direction of the head organisation. These organs here, which were at that time slowly and gradually coming into being—for they are finished and complete at seven years of age—turn out to be stunted in their growth. Why should they be so? The organs are stunted because the child did not finish the embryo period. They would have been more complete and more perfectly shaped if the child had gone through the whole embryo period. As it was, he had no fully developed model. When therefore, at the important age of three-and-a-half, the organs are beginning to take shape, the model comes short, and a condition develops where the astral body wants to penetrate the whole organisation and make its way through the walls of the organs, but is unable to get through; and there follow all the symptoms of which we have spoken. That in such a case the stomach and intestines must also inevitably become disordered ought not to be difficult to understand. For if the astral body does not succeed in bringing about the right streamings from the head to the limbs, then the intestines and the whole digestive organisation must necessarily remain weak. The ego organisation is not properly in them.

Consider now for a moment this weak digestive organisation—that is to say, a digestion that is weak in its forces, not having the ego organisation properly in it. Such a digestive system simply cannot tolerate just the particular kind of food that should find its specific field of activity in the digestive organisation. Imagine you have before you the plant.

Where in man does the root of the plant have its field of activity? In the head organisation; and the foliage in the rhythmic system; and all that develops above in the way of fruit or flower works in the intestines, in the whole digestive organisation. There is however no affinity between such a weakly developed digestive organisation and these upper parts of the plant. On the other hand, the boy's astral body, which is lying freely, as it were, in the whole belly without making its way right into the digestive organisation, has a hankering for meat. (The astral body of man is, you know, by its very nature strongly attracted to meat). We saw also that the boy shows a dislike of anything acid or sour. That again is understandable. Acid substances work with particular force upon the astral body. If the latter has dived down properly into the organism, then it unloads, as it were, upon the physical organism the acid influences it has received. But if it has not entered rightly into the physical organism, then this astral body is left painfully sensitive to the acid influences that reach it.

It is from observations such as these that you can obtain a true picture of how the organism works. When there is an irregularity of the kind I have described, one need not be at all surprised when stomach disorders occur. Stomach disorder is only a symptom of the presence in the metabolism of this irregularity. The illness consists entirely in the irregularity; the symptoms are occasioned by it, and there is naturally always the possibility that the onset of a fit should be preceded by stomach disturbance.

Since January 1923, there has, as I said, been an important change in the character of the fits. These last now only a short time, coming on about nine hours after the boy has fallen asleep. He suddenly starts screaming and crying, and wakes up. There is also extreme flatulence in the bowels. At present a fit occurs about once a week. With such a state of affairs, the outlook seems at first distinctly serious; it has nevertheless hopeful features. For there are signs of recovery, there are signs that a natural betterment is taking place. We have in fact reached a kind of crisis, that is expressing itself inwardly in an explosive manner; it takes its course slowly, but we could not expect anything else.

Why do the fits occur nine hours after falling asleep? Because that is the time when the astral body is beginning to set out on its return journey into the physical body. It still has difficulty in returning, it cannot make its way in; it keeps diving down, and then being driven back again. You can well imagine how all the symptoms follow from this—the starting up and the screaming. When however the astral body is once inside the whole physical organism, it is an easier matter for it to remain there throughout the day. The extreme flatulence arises from the fact that the astral body is not completely membered into the bowels organisation. To the relative independence and detachment of the astral body are due also the characteristic features of the boy's soul life—his continuous chattering, his excitability, his lively fantasy. And now the question is: what are we to do in such a case?

Important before all else is to remove from the astral body—which works powerfully and independently—all possibility of its developing forces that hinder it in the process of adaptation to ether body and physical body. When you have the child standing before you as you did today, you can see at once the first thing that needs to be done—his toy must be taken from him. That toy is a veritable poison for his soul. What he needs above all, is to have his imagination stimulated—as it can be only when he has to handle something that is not already complete and perfect. He must be got to paint as much as possible, but especially also to fashion forms, to carve. He should simply be given a piece of wood, and encouraged to “form” it in the shape of a human being. Here then will be our point of attack, as it were, in the educational sense. We must avoid bringing him in contact with things that are finished and perfect, and have it as our aim that he shall be constantly making things himself. This will bring his limbs into movement. We have not yet hit upon quite the right ways to achieve this; that still needs to be done.

A peculiar feature of this boy's condition is that one cannot say it is some particular organ which does not let the astral body through; the totality of the organs is formed and developed in such a way that they all equally hold back the astral body. Hence the slight tendency to deformity. And since, when the astral body does succeed in diving down, it is by the left side that it manages to escape, the danger is always present that symptoms of paralysis will show themselves on the left side. At his age they do not matter very much—as long as they are slight. They could, however, lead on to a more severe paralysis.

It would be good if along with foods for which he has a liking, the boy could be given sour fruit in exceedingly small quantities. (You will remember, we explained how his very constitution obliges him to have a strong dislike of all acid foods.) If this is done, then, while grabbing at the food he likes, he will take also with it your little dose of acid. All you have to do, before you give him some meat, is to pour on to the plate a small quantity of some dish that contains acid fruit juice. In this way you will find you can accustom him to eating very small helpings of stewed fruit with his meat.

And then it will be important that he should begin—or continue—to receive regular teaching on a right and sensible method, such as the method followed in the Waldorf School—irrespective of whether he makes rapid progress or not. We shall give him Eurythmy exercises, not limiting ourselves to particular sounds, but doing with him whatever brings the limbs especially into movement. In this way we can strengthen the limbs in their efforts to give form to the astral body.

In his present condition the boy himself helps in his own progress.

On the other hand, a child like the one we were considering earlier is extraordinarily difficult to deal with, the reason being that you have there before you a kind of little demon. What you must realise is that while the child remains small in his physical body, his astral body is all the time growing in inverse proportion. It does not adapt itself to the physical organism, but is as big as the latter is small. Now as a matter of fact, the child is, without knowing it, well on the way to become an actor in his astral body. Supposing you decide to appoint, instead of one teacher, a whole staff of teachers to train actors for speaking on the stage, assigning a particular task to each member of the college—then, if you were to develop him in a one-sided way, this squat little fellow could quite well be trained to teach the actors the sound R and related sounds. In spite of his apparent quietness and calm, the child is in reality very excited and agitated. You have before you, as I said, a kind of demonic being. An absolutely real super-sensible being is present in this boy. What you had sitting there in front of you was just a dwarfish little fellow, a mere Tom Thumb. But the actor is present there too all the time in full force, turning all kinds of somersaults etc., while the boy is perhaps sauntering along in an indolent manner.

You have here, you see, to do with a child who is most difficult of access. Whatever you attempt with the physical body meets with no response there, but only from the mercurial astral body—with the exception of Curative Eurythmy and speech exercises. These do contact the physical body and bring the intellect into activity; but it is no good trying to approach the child via the physical body by any other means. Indeed, it is quite possible you may fare like the “sorcerer's apprentice” who split the broomstick which would not behave and then found he had two broomsticks to deal with instead of one. For if you should ever succeed in making some sort of approach via the physical body—apart from Curative Eurythmy and Speech exercises—it may easily happen that through your intervention the constant restlessness is actually aggravated. That, then, will be your main problem in connection with this boy—that you are dealing all the time with an extraordinarily mobile and restless astral body.

How must we proceed, if we want to educate the boy? We must arrange our lessons so as to achieve a reversal of what we very frequently set out to achieve. Very often, as you know, we attach particular importance to making the course of the lesson lead up gradually to a dramatic climax. But for the boy we are considering, this gradual enhancement of interest must then at once be followed by a decline of interest. The dramatic quality must ebb away and subside. And this principle must be observed throughout all the teaching we undertake with him. We must have the patience and perseverance to carry it through. First, we must bring it about that the boy's attention is thoroughly roused. He, of course, has no knowledge at all of what is going on in his astral body; but anything that has the quality of true fantasy and imagination will help you to make your approach to this astral organism. You must invent the most delightful stories, full of vivacity and movement. When you are with this child, you must really become a poet, rich in imagination. And then, having gradually worked your story up to a high pitch of dramatic movement, and having succeeded at last in gaining entrance into the sub-conscious astral organisation—then you must, as it were, reverse and try to tone it all down, try to push back the stream of interest. Perhaps you hold up to ridicule some incident in the story, so that the charm of the thing is a little spoiled. Let us say, you begin to poke fun at the one who is the hero of the story and with whom the child has been enraptured. You could say: This great hero, you know, whenever he sets out to do his valiant deeds, he cannot begin until he has first blown his nose! With some such remark or other, you raise a smile at the person or thing that has aroused such enthusiasm and interest. And you go on in this way, until at last the whole thing evaporates like a soap-bubble. But beware that you do not at the same time spoil the child's enjoyment; you must see to it that the anticlimax, the discovery of how it all vanishes like a soap bubble, is also followed with pleasure and delight. And now while this is taking place, while you are undoing, as it were, the inner process which you yourself first stimulated the child's astral body is all the time gradually adapting itself to the physical body.

If you have the patience to undertake this kind of education with the child—first becoming a poet, and then again turning round on yourself and pulling your poetry to pieces with your irony until no shred of it remains—if you can have the patience to do this, you will manage to bring it about that by his ninth or tenth year the child will begin to grow in quite a natural manner. And that would be a great achievement. The super-fantastic organism that was created long ago during embryonic development would then be changed back again. The symptoms now present would gradually disappear in the course of your treatment. On the other hand, the very least result of all will be obtained by making direct attack on the symptoms themselves. To set about trying to break the child of his R would be as hopeless as it was once with a certain actor in Weimar—although he was no child!—who had a habit of emphasising each single syllable in every word. This actor would never say “Fréunderl” as we say it, but adhered strictly to the principle of giving equal emphasis to both syllables. Thus he used to say “Fréundérl”, “Kópfchén”, “Kíndléin”.² It is impossible to combat symptoms of this kind by direct attack. Any attempt to break our boy of saying and living in R would be utterly futile. It would only leave him empty and lazy and indolent. If, on the other hand, you carry out the measures I have described, the predilection for R will disappear of itself.

• 1. On 2nd March, 1924.
• 2. Comparable English words would be friendship kitten, darling.

To begin with, dear friends, I want to show you the drawings done by this boy here, of whom we shall be speaking later on. He makes very good pictures. He has a feeling for detail; the drawings give evidence of a clear grasp of detail. Notice in this one, for instance, how accurately he has perceived everything. Here is another, where you can see how he plans and arranges his picture. Evidently he likes to do things in the way he learns to do them at school. And this is how it is done in our school here; and then each child is left free to fill in the picture in his own way. As you will see, we are economical and always use both sides of the paper. (Turning to the boy) Allow me now to draw you on the blackboard. There, that is what I wanted you for!

(Another child is brought in.) Bring the little one over here; that will be best—so.

Just look how tremendously large the head can become in a hydrocephalic child! We will discuss presently how that happens. The head actually measures 64 cm. When we first admitted the child, the measurement was 44 cm.¹ On the 25th February it was nearly 54 cm, by the 7th April it had increased to 56 cm, and between the 7th and 11th it grew still bigger. On the 19th April the measurement was more than 58 cm, on the 28th May it had risen to nearly 61 cm and on the 1st July to 64 cm. Otherwise, the child's bodily development has not been at all abnormal; he is just like any other child. He takes hold of things, he has a very good appetite, and with the exception of one crisis he has been cheerful and happy.

You can get an idea of the size of the head by looking at the little ears which are of course of ordinary size; you will at the same time notice just where the enlargement begins. It begins, you see, here, and then continues in this direction. The face is not affected; it is a little swollen and puffy, but not enlarged. As you look at the child, you will very likely think that he is perceiving things with his eyes. As a matter of fact, he has no more than a general impression of light—no precise impressions at all.

And now we have to take note of the tragic fact that just before I came here to give these lectures I received a telegram to say that the father of the child has died of a heart attack.

If you look at the child as a whole, and compare it with the form and proportions of an embryo, you will find that you have in this child nothing else than a giant embryo! You can see quite plainly that he has remained at the embryo stage, his growth in the post-embryo stage continuing to accord with the laws of growth of the embryo stage. That we have not up to now succeeded in achieving any reduction in the size of the head must be attributed to the extraordinary strength with which the internal tendencies that make for enlargement are working. I am however quite hopeful that after a certain point has been reached, we shall be able definitely to bring the head more nearly into harmony with the rest of the body. The child is in all other respects quite a jolly little fellow.

A striking fact that comes home to us when studying the riddles of human nature is that abnormalities of this kind throw great light upon the life of man as a whole—not only upon the life of man, but upon the life of the entire universe.

(Some extracts from the history of the case are read out.) The child was six months old when he came to us. He was born in August last year, and received from me his name; it was just in the time when I was away in England. The birth was normal. The mother was strong and healthy throughout the time of pregnancy. Please note these facts carefully; later on we shall have to find their interpretation. And let me ask for your special attention to what I said last—that the mother felt particularly well during the pregnancy. In this time she did a great deal of typing. There was nothing strange or unusual to be seen in the child at birth. Mark that well: at birth—that is to say, immediately on his being let go, as it were, from the embryo condition—the child showed nothing unusual. The embryo condition had, you see, been normal throughout; not until after the child started breathing with the lungs did abnormality begin. The umbilical cord was wound round the neck; the amniotic fluid contained meconium. The baby weighed 5 ¾ lb. Two weeks after birth he had convulsions—a solitary attack; an important fact to note, for it provides the first clear evidence that the ego organisation and the astral body are finding it impossible to make their way into the physical and the ether body. The child hit out around him with his arms and got blue in the face. Blueness is always a sign of inability to dive down into the physical body. If it is very marked, it has a more individual significance. It may mean nothing else than that the astral body had at birth a strong and pronounced configuration. For this, you know, can happen; as it did with Goethe, who was born quite blue and could only after some time be induced to receive into him the astral body and ego organisation. In the child now before us, the convulsions (and blueness) occurred of course later. Development is said to have been entirely normal during the first half year. It was not entirely normal; but the lack of right relationship between head and limbs escaped observation in the earliest months, and was noticed only later on. The child was breast-fed. The head was at birth noticeably small, which goes to show that the causes of the trouble are not to be sought in any weakness of the nerves-and-senses organisation. From September onwards, we are told, the size of the head began very gradually to increase. It began of course earlier than this. The mother did not yet consider the head abnormal at a time when it must already have grown to a considerable size. The enlargement of the head was noticed only when the discovery was made that in one week the child had put on weight to the extent of nearly 1 lb. In the middle of December the head measured 19 inches. The child was quiet, and did not cry much; he was apathetic. The fontanels were taut. Appetite was good. Blisters filled with pus began to form on the skin of the head. Appetite and evacuation of the bowels were good. And then the child was brought to us.

What we have to do, when such a case is brought to us, is to take the facts as they lie there before us—and among them the most important of all are of course whatever we can observe for ourselves by simply looking at the child—and then, working from these, win our way through to where we can “behold” also the spiritual in the child. Following this line of investigation we were able to see that the child carries in him an astral body which bears clearly and unmistakably the characteristic features of the astral body of the mother. The mother was of course present at the time. Seldom indeed does one come upon such a striking resemblance as here stood revealed! The same cannot be said of the ego organisation. The ego is still no more than rudimentary; it reminds one of an ego organisation such as children have in the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. The child has in fact remained at that stage. Owing to the astral body being so extraordinarily strongly developed, the ego organisation seems to have missed sharing in the life and development of the last months of pregnancy. And now, after birth, the child retains within him, thanks to this powerful astral body, all the forces he had in the embryo time.

Let me at this point remind you that in the first few months after birth, the orientation of the embryo time virtually continues, with the result that in these first months the development of a child outside the body of the mother still bears a strong resemblance to its development in the embryo time. How are we to account for this? The radical change which the bodily nature of the child undergoes at birth is concerned, first or all, with the breathing system. The child comes into connection with the outside air. But now this connection with the air does not establish itself all at once, but only slowly; a considerable time has to go by before it is extended over the whole organism. The connection with the air has its influence upon the organism from the beginning, as we very well know. Nevertheless, the complete establishment of the connection throughout the organism is a gradual process. Consequently, in the earliest months, since the embryonic forces continue to work as before, there may frequently be no sign of any such devastation as can show itself in the organism later on, if infantilism goes so far as it does in the child before us; for we have in him an extreme instance of infantilism, where the embryo organisation is simply retained and continued.

Now, the characteristic feature of the embryo organisation is, as you know, that we have there to do with an immense head organisation and a small body. The head organisation owes its origin entirely to the co-operation of cosmic forces. Almost everything that takes place with the head organisation in the embryo condition is to be regarded as a work of cosmic forces. The mother's womb provides the place where the work that is going on can be protected from the intrusion of earthly forces. You must think of the mother's womb as a bodily organ that encloses a space, shutting away this space from earthly influences, so that it can be reserved for cosmic influences alone. Thus we have in the womb of the mother a space that stands in immediate connection with the cosmos, a space within which cosmic influences have free play. And there, in that enclosed space, the development of the head organisation goes forward.

When the time comes for the human forces of the mother's womb, in so far as these do receive the child at all—when the time comes for these human forces of the womb to work upon the child, then the metabolism-and-limbs organisation begins to let itself be orientated into these forces. In this child, the cosmic forces have simply continued their working into the post-embryo condition. The cosmic forces have had here the ascendancy over what should have been provided for by the strength and forces that normally a child receives in addition for his earthly development, notably for the development of the system of metabolism and limbs. What follows from this is obvious. For suppose the child had remained longer in the womb of the mother. It is of course an absurd hypothesis, but suppose the child had remained there beyond the ten months, what would have happened? The head would have gone on growing, and the limbs would not have been able to develop. For there, in the mother's womb, it is the extra-earthly, the cosmic, in the human being, that alone is given opportunity to grow.

And now we have to ask ourselves the question: What has led to this condition? And here I must say, it is most significant, it is indeed quite startling, that in the very moment when we are going to speak together about this whole strange case, a telegram is handed in, telling that the father has died of a heart attack. The following became clear to me and I confirmed it afterwards from the mother's memory. For I felt it necessary to ask her: “Did you not have a rather special feeling in your soul during pregnancy?” I even worded the question as follows: “Were you not sorry that the child did not remain within you instead of coming into the world?” The mother assented to this. She had founded her whole connection with the child upon the close association of the embryo period; as far as her feeling was concerned, the situation was that she was sorry she could not keep the child with her in the womb, she was sorry when it was torn away from her by the event of birth. This feeling on the part of the mother points on the one hand to an extraordinarily strong karmic connection between her and the child; on the other hand it has provided the conditions under which the forces that are active in the embryo time have been able to remain in the child. The abnormality of soul begins, you see, in the mother, and as one would naturally expect with such a deep karmic connection, transfers itself to the child.

The relationships of life are very complicated, and it is not at all easy always to see everything in its right connection. Many a time, however, the facts themselves will place the things together for our perception; and they do so here. Look at what has happened! Not a year has gone by since the child was born, and the father dies of a heart attack. There is always some connection to be found in such events; they don't just “happen”. The father had for a long time been suffering from a diseased heart. Now, you know what a strong connection there is between heart disease and the condition of the limbs. Under the influence of certain kinds of heart disease, the organisation of the legs will grow weak at once; for just the most important and essential part of the limbs, namely the tissues of the joints and the synovial fluid, suffer in consequence of heart disease. And then you must remember that, in the relationships of heredity, it is the limb organisation that is more strongly influenced by the father, and the head organisation by the mother. Now imagine, conception takes place. In certain circumstances it can happen that an incapacity on the part of the father to bring the forces of his organisation into the limbs is transferred to the child; in which case the head organisation, which is under the influence of the mother, is bound to undergo an inordinate development. And now you have the explanation of the fact that the mother loved to have the child in her womb. It was because the child received but little of heredity forces from the father, and the mother was accordingly able to make the main contribution.

There you have then a description of the case that is before us. And you must know that such a case is typical of a great number of children suffering from abnormality. For what you have observed in this child is an extreme instance of infantilism—an infantilism, namely, that goes back to the embryo condition; and you will find infantilism in all possible forms throughout the stages of child development. Here it is the embryo condition which, like an overgrown plant, spreads itself out over the later development; but the first epoch of life may do the same, extending its working beyond the change of teeth. Or again, just as there can be this failure to grow and develop rightly into the post-embryo condition, so can it also happen that a boy or girl does not grow into the third epoch of life in the right way. There are children who attain puberty in the outward sense, but do not with their full and entire constitution grow into the epoch that lies between puberty and the beginning of the twenties; such children retain instead during that epoch the orientation of the forces that work between the seventh and fourteenth year. Actually a whole succession of infantilisms can be met with. We have here the absolutely radical example; and it is fortunate from a medical and educational point of view that you should have opportunity to observe in this extreme case what you will be able to detect, to a lesser extent and in less pronounced form, in a vast number of backward children.

Our purpose in today's lecture is to make adequate preparation for passing on tomorrow to the therapy and pathology of the cases in question; I will accordingly confine myself to giving descriptions of the cases, and then tomorrow we will carry our consideration of the same to a conclusion and speak also of their pedagogical aspect.

You saw, at the beginning of the lecture, the boy of whom you may well be inclined to ask: Why ever is he brought forward for demonstration? A sensible question, for when you make his acquaintance in an ordinary superficial way, you can hardly do otherwise than find him a kindly disposed and friendly little boy, who learns painting just as other children do, who answers you quite properly and with perfect friendliness when you speak to him, a little boy, in fact, with whom you could quite happily converse by the hour. Is it not so? Those who have to do with him will tell you that it is as I have said. You would not be able to notice anything abnormal about the child, and would perhaps say to yourself: “Strange people these Anthroposophists! They put their children in a clinic for treatment, when all the time they are children who might well be held up as an example to other children!” The fact is, the boy is a kleptomaniac. You would never think it! But that is due to a characteristic feature of kleptomania—namely, its almost complete isolation from the rest of the soul life. And in this boy you will find that consciousness—which should, generally speaking, send its light into all the events and doings that occur in the life of man—is simply shut out from his kleptomaniac actions. You will have the distinct feeling that he himself has very little knowledge of what he is doing, in spite of the fact that he carries it out—and please note this!—in a most clever and crafty manner. He had to be expelled when he went to school in Berne, and again also when he attended a school in another town; and he had arranged everything so slyly, that the authorities had to go to no end of trouble before they could establish grounds for his expulsion.

The boy is not at all egoistic in the matter. He is quite capable of making presents to his friends of the things that he steals in this wily manner, or of spending it all on some jollification in order to give them pleasure. The whole situation leads to the development of a special form of not altogether conscious lying; for he does not himself know exactly what has happened, the details of the event not being shone upon by the light of consciousness. He will relate the most incredible stories to explain how he has come by some object, which he has of course simply stolen. He will show you, with real shyness, just how he found the things and just where they all were, making a long story of how it all came about. There is really something impish about the way these thefts take place. If I understood Frau Dr. Wegman aright, quite a long time can elapse during which it seems as though the boy has become a perfectly well-behaved little fellow, and then suddenly one day, without our knowing that he has taken anything it will transpire that something is missing out of someone's pocket. In a curious way different people will begin to make the discovery that things of theirs are simply disappearing. So then we would be confronted with these two facts side by side. On the one hand, the strange report of the dematerialisation of things in the Clinic, and on the other hand the knowledge that the boy had been compelled to leave one school after another. For that was known to us from his past history. These two facts stood there together, side by side.

It is, moreover, you will agree, an unpleasant situation suddenly to be placed under the necessity of supposing that it might also be some adult who had taken the things! We have in the Clinic at present fifty-two persons, and it might be this one or that one, one simply did not know. What one did know was that a spiritualist would have had here a grand opportunity to make a full and thorough explanation of how things dematerialise! A whole theory of the dematerialisation of objects could have been built up.

We have the child here with us in the Clinic, and I would like you to observe him and notice how firmly the head organisation is compressed here (at the temples) and how it goes apart here (towards the back of the head). As to the spiritual findings, they are to the effect that the parts of the astral body belonging to the several organs are extraordinarily strongly developed, particularly here on the left side. Externally, you will not find much else to note about the boy.

And now be so good as to bring in the other child. We will speak about methods of treatment tomorrow.

(The next child is brought in.) Look at her! A dear little girl! Charming, is she not? Look at her lovely fair hair. An interesting incident has taken place with this little girl. One day the children were left alone together for a short time. They were on very friendly terms with one another; and presently the boy whom you saw the day before yesterday got the idea that he must go and find some scissors. It was this little girl of course who made him fetch the scissors. Being a polite and obedient little gentleman, he brought them to her. What did she do, but cut off all her hair! As you see, not at all a conventional young lady! And now I would especially draw your attention to her lovely blue eyes, and then to her fair hair with its beautiful lustre. You can see at once, the child is very sulphurous. And she is so in her behaviour too—extraordinarily sulphurous. A dear child, but with this strongly marked sulphurous quality. She is always on the go and full of vigour. (The girl bites at Dr. Steiner's arm.) She is only biting my sleeve. She weighed at birth a little under 4 ¼ lb., but had been carried in the womb for the full nine months. Thus the embryo period had been gone through in the regular manner. The child was breast-fed for seven months, and when a year old learned to walk. That is a comparatively early age to learn to walk, but not abnormal. She learned also to talk at the right time. Development continued to give the appearance of being normal. By the time she was a year and a half the child had ceased to wet the bed, although she still wet herself during the day, but never any more at night. Here, you see, is already an abnormality, in the fact that this weakness in the child's organisation makes itself evident only when the astral body is present, and not when the astral body has been removed.

A year and a half ago, when she was three and a half years old—note that this is exactly half-way through the epoch of the first seven years and is a moment of great importance, as is also the corresponding moment in the second epoch, half-way between the seventh and fourteenth years—when three and a half years old, the child had headaches with high fever, and immediately afterwards measles. She was a child who readily caught illnesses. Since that time, she has been particularly restless and excitable. The mother too was ill at the same time with influenza and has also been restless since, and easily upset. You see the parallelism between mother and child. The child's appetite is always poor. And yet she is a fine, sturdy little girl, with powerful limbs. As you know, however, the organisation of the limbs is not built up, so far as substance is concerned, from food, but from the cosmos via the breathing and the activity of the senses. It is in the head that you will find the results of this poorness of appetite. A poor appetite, which means then of course impaired nutrition, affects the activity of the child's head. The little girl is lively and imaginative; she is restless, not merely in her body, but in her thoughts too. It can plainly be seen in her that her imagination and fantasy come not from the head but from the limbs. Her head organisation is very weak, her limb organisation particularly strong. Clearly, her life of fantasy comes from her limbs.

The child often has restless dreams. Now, it is important to take careful note of how she dreams—in particular, whether the dreams occur just after falling asleep or before waking up. Up to now, according to this report of her case, it is the former alone that have been observed. But the waking-up dreams must also come under observation. If we can bring her now and then to relate these, they will be found to reveal much that is of very great interest for us when they are in this way recalled to memory. We must get her to tell them to us.

These then are the three cases I wanted to put before you. Tomorrow we will meet again at 8:30 and speak about methods of treatment.

• 1. If accurately reported, this must refer to the earlier time when the child was first brought to the Clinic for advice.

We had before us yesterday a succession of children to whom we gave our attention. It is in this way for the most part that the study of the treatment of abnormal children has necessarily to be pursued—namely, in relation to particular examples. Abnormality manifests in all possible directions, and each single case is a case by itself. The only way you can begin to learn how to deal with such children is to devote yourself to an individual case, and thereby, as time goes on, gradually acquire the skill that will be needed for dealing with other cases.

You will remember the boy of twelve years old who was brought before us yesterday and whom I had to describe as a kleptomaniac. I explained to you how spiritual vision can discern, in the case of such a kleptomaniac, that on account of hindrances in the astral body, he has no means of access to the capacity for judgement that ordinarily belongs to human beings in the world. In this connection, you must realise that everything which has to do with morality, everything of which it can be said that our conception of it must needs include moral impulses, comes to expression within Earth existence alone. We really could say—it would of course be misunderstood by the superficial thinking of the present day—that where the Earth comes to an end, where one goes out beyond into the super-sensible realm, moral judgements such as we are familiar with on Earth cease to exist; for the reason that out there, in the realm of the super-sensible, morality is, so to say, a complete matter of course. Moral judgements begin only where there is a possibility of choice between good and evil. For the spiritual world, good and evil are simply characteristic qualities. There are good beings and there are bad beings. As little as you can say of a lion that he ought, or ought not, to be lion-like, just so little can you say, when you have come away from the Earth, that good and evil ought or ought not to be as they are. To speak in this way pre-supposes the possibility of choice, of saying Yes or No, a possibility which comes in question solely within the organisation of man and where human beings are living socially together. Now, in the case of an illness such as kleptomania, owing to the hindrances of which we spoke, the person in question has not evolved his astral body far enough to enable him to develop a sensitivity to moral judgements. Consequently, the moment a boy of this kind feels a particular interest in some object, he sees no reason at all why he should not take it. He does not understand that it may “belong” to someone, the idea of “mine and thine” has no meaning for him. His astral body does not get far enough into the physical world for him to be able to appreciate the concept of possession.

We have here exactly the same kind of phenomenon as when someone is colour-blind. It's no use talking about colours to one who is colour-blind; and it would have just as little sense to speak in the higher world about possession and non-possession. The child does not find his way far enough into the physical world for him to be able to attach any meaning at all to what he hears people say about “possessing” things. What is particularly strong in him is the idea of discovery—the idea that he has lighted upon some object or other which astonishes him, which fills him with delight and interest. But there his capacity for forming ideas comes to a full stop. The truth is that up to now his astral body has not penetrated to the region of the will, but has remained more or less in the intellectual sphere. We have evidence of this in the fact that the organs of the will are deformed at the side. Consequently, whatever he finds good intellectually he at once turns into will. Let the same defect show itself in the intellect, and you will find the children are dull and stupid; but when, as here, it shows itself in the will, they are kleptomaniacs.

An abnormality of this kind is very difficult to contend with. For at the age of life when it would be important to make a strong stand against the failing, it generally escapes notice altogether. At this early age, the child is naturally imitative, doing what he sees done around him, and so one may easily fail to discern in his behaviour the tendency to kleptomania. Only after the change of teeth, will the tendency begin to be apparent. When the change of teeth has taken place, the child is however even then not far enough out yet on the physical plane to develop a sense for any moral judgement other than: What I like is good, what I don't like is bad. His judgements, that is to say, are entirely aesthetic. It will therefore be for the teacher to awaken in the child the feeling for the good—the meaning of “good”—by bringing it about that the child looks up to him and takes him for his pattern and example. That is why in our Waldorf School education we take particular care that authority shall make itself felt in this age of life. Quite as a matter of course it should come about that the child regards his teacher with devotion. The teacher will then speak of things that are “good” always in such a manner as to arouse the child's interest and enjoyment, and of things that are “bad” in such a manner as to arouse his antipathy. For this to achieve the desired result, it is of course essential that there be first the natural acceptance of the teacher's authority. If this is necessary in the case of a so-called normal child, it is in the very highest degree necessary in the case of such a child as we are considering. In all education nothing contributes so much to true progress as that the child has trust and confidence in the one who is his teacher; and in dealing with abnormal children it is absolutely essential that this right relationship between child and teacher can be relied on from the outset.

In a course of study such as we are now engaged in, we must not omit to point out how important it is, when dealing with quite little children, to make careful observation of the whole way in which their development takes place. If we notice that a little child grows very happy and animated on account of something he has learned—learned, I mean, before the change of teeth—if we notice, for instance, that a child who is learning to speak takes inordinate pleasure in some new sound he has learned to utter, then we must be prepared for the possibility that things may go wrong with that child! Children who later on become kleptomaniacs, develop this kind of egotism in the tender age of early childhood; they will perhaps click their tongue with satisfaction, when they have acquired a new word. This is rare with very young children, but it certainly can occur.

One has to learn to be able to look ahead and see what may be the outcome of such a trait in future years. Far more important for the doctor as well as for the educator, than the principles upon which he has to work—although a knowledge of these is, of course, to be taken for granted—far more important for him is that he should acquire a sensitive perception for what is going on in the world around him. You must not, you see, be like Wulffen;¹ you must be ready to appreciate what a vast deal depends on the environment of a growing child. Take, for instance, such a case, where a very little child has the habit I spoke of just now: he clicks his tongue with satisfaction over some new thing he has learned. This delight at acquiring something in the intellectual sphere will change, about the time of the second dentition, into a conspicuous vanity; the child will grow vain and conceited in relation to other things as well. It should indeed be a matter for grave concern, for instance, if at about the time of the change of teeth a child develops—as it were, from an inborn tendency—a hankering after fine clothes. Symptoms of this nature should be carefully noted. But let us now consider two kinds of environment into which such a child may grow up.

The child may be born in a region—we will imagine for the purpose some quite small territory—where people are accustomed to live in an easy-going way and let things take their course, and where they look upon the militia as something that is necessary for the defence of their territory, but that arouses in them no enthusiasm or at best an enthusiasm that has to be artificially stimulated. There will then develop in every child as a matter of course, during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, a feeling for what is expected of him as a member of the community. The boy grows up; and if particular care has not been taken that he is able to look up with love and respect to his teacher (for parents, as you know, do not always concern themselves about such a matter in this period of the child's life), then the tendency which we have seen at work in the intellectual sphere slips down now into the will, and it is quite possible that kleptomania may ensue.

And now let us see, on the other hand, what happens when a child of this kind grows up, not in a country where the militia is regarded as a somewhat troublesome burden, but in a region where the child finds himself surrounded by a kind of Prussianism. (As you will see, I am giving just characteristic features of a particular case.) Militarism is here looked upon by no means merely as a necessity, but as something that gives one tremendous pleasure, something that thrills one with wonder and admiration and to which one is loyal through thick and thin. The child does not remain at home in the family, he is sent to school and then later to the University. And now the trait that was not at all advantageous to the other boy turns out to be of great advantage to him. The disposition of which we have spoken and which was already present in him as a child finds its fulfilment and expression when he becomes a researcher in natural science. He is engaged in preparing microscopic slides; he will look round in all directions for objects to bring under the microscope, and in this regular—and at the same time irregular—way, satisfy his longing to acquire things for himself. The impulse will experience its full satisfaction. For the boy has found his way into a milieu within which the habit of stealing has no place; if things are “taken”, then it is things with which one does not associate the concept of stealing. The kleptomania will in this case go on developing beneath the surface. The boy becomes later a lecturer in physiology, he becomes the most famous physiologist of his time. Something of the kleptomaniac propensity remains with him for life, but it is associated in him with a kind of enthusiasm for war. This enthusiasm now changes however the sphere of its activity, finding its way especially into the imagery he uses in his lecturing; these are all about fighting and going to war. And then, strangely enough, this tendency may in certain circumstances degenerate into a kind of vanity. A feeling may get hold of him that his rhetorical figures are his own possession and that no one else has a right to use them. Suppose some daring and rather mischievous student of his, who is a bit of a genius, ventures in his examination to use the very same figures of speech. That student will certainly be failed. And if he should go so far as to click his tongue at the same time, then things will go very badly with him.

Once we have the insight to see and understand things of this kind when we meet them in life, the insight itself will guide us to the right method of dealing with them. We must resolve to make ourselves acquainted with life in all its manifold shades and varieties. Then we shall be ready to notice quickly when traits begin to show themselves that point in this or that direction.

I have already spoken to you of a good curative measure that can be employed in the psychological sphere. You have to cultivate your power of invention and tell the boy a story, in which this characteristic of his plays a part. You tell him of people who do the same kind of thing, and then you make it clear that all the time they are only digging a pit for themselves into which they afterwards fall. If the dramatic character of the story be developed with real enthusiasm, you can attain your end in this way, provided you sustain the effort without any slackening. In addition, you will at the same time need to treat such a child therapeutically; he must receive injections with hypophysis cerebri and honey, because, as you saw, the temporal lobes are stunted and we must do all we can to encourage forces of growth that shall counteract this deformation.

Very good results can also be obtained from the use of Curative Eurythmy; but it must be carried out with tremendous energy. All the movements that belong to the vowels, the boy must be got to make with his legs. For what we have to do is to expel from the will the intellectual element, and at the same time impel into the will the striving, the taking pains, that lives in the vowel sounds.

Finally, it is most important that by virtue of the authority we have with the child, we should find it possible to speak with him quite plainly and unreservedly on the matter, showing him how objectionable such a habit is. But this must not be done too early. It has to be brought home to the child's intellect, and by attempting it too early we can easily spoil everything. We must go to work with our stories in the first place, and then gradually lead over to this appeal to the intellect.

It is most difficult to point to any success in these measures, for the good results are simply not noticed. The truth is, however, that many a kleptomaniac would never have been one at all, if early on, so soon as symptoms began to show themselves, those in charge of the child had at once begun telling the right kind of stories. Such stories always work; but we must have patience. One can be quite sure that in such a case as this boy, good results can be achieved—although, if the habit is deeply ingrained, perhaps only after a very long time.

And now for the other difficult child of whom I was speaking yesterday, who is not yet quite a year old, the case of hydrocephalus. Treatment has indeed in this instance been very difficult so far. For what do we observe in this child? What strikes us about him? First and foremost, excessive excitability and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system. This it is that has made possible such a prodigious enlargement of the head. Marked irritability of nerves and senses will always be found to express itself in an enlargement of the head. We must however be careful here to look at relative and not absolute measurements. If a person who is predisposed to be small altogether, has a head of the same size as that of a big, tall person, then he has what is for him a large head. This must not be forgotten when we are considering cases that are not abnormal. The child we saw yesterday is abnormal. The inordinate sensitiveness and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system, which are so evident in him, have been induced by the conditions under which he was living in the embryo time; I described these conditions to you yesterday, explaining them as due to the uneven way in which the influences of mother and father co-operated in the embryo.

What must we do in order to bring the child nearer to normality? Everything that could excite or irritate the nerves-and senses system must be shut out for as many hours of the day as possible. Accordingly we have had the child in a dark room, a room that is completely darkened, so that as he lies there, he is all the time in the quiet and the dark, receiving no impressions. As a matter of fact, I overestimated at first the results that could be attained by these means, for the child is actually not yet responsive to light. His sensitivity to light is exceedingly weak; on this account the exclusion of light is of less importance than might have been presumed. Nevertheless, this is the right principle to go on—to let the child live in the quiet and in the dark, having around him as few impressions as ever possible; then the impulse for quick and restless movement—an impulse of the will—will be aroused from within, and will work counter to the nerves-and-senses system. This then will be the first rule we set out to follow. Another thing we must do is to try to influence the nerves-and-senses system through the appropriate agencies. We have been using gneiss as an internal remedy. Quartz itself, used directly, would induce shock, and that we must at all costs avoid; with gneiss, the effects of the influence of quartz are more distributed. In quartz, the forces are strongly “radiant” in their working, sharp and spear-like; whereas when the same forces are distributed as in gneiss, they are mild in their working and spread out in the organism, reaching the periphery with a lighter touch. Gneiss in a high potency can here lead to the desired result. And then we must try to calm down the excited state of the nerves in the region also of the will. For in a very little child the whole human being, you must remember, is nerves-and senses system. This can be achieved by giving poppy baths. Baths are prepared, using the common field poppy.

When you see before you a state of affairs such as shows itself in this child, two things must go hand in hand the whole time—observation of the case, and whatever therapy is possible. You are dealing, you see, with an individual case. You will be in a better position to appreciate the importance of what I am saying if I tell you now what further symptoms have presented themselves to our observation. To begin with, we noticed that during the time of the treatment by injection the temperature dropped. Shortly afterwards the head was found to have increased in size. The child was sleeping by day and crying in the night. That changed when we began to give poppy baths in the evening. The fæces are hard, and a difference can be noticed according as the baths are given in the daytime or at night. The connection of astral with physical body is quite different morning and evening.

What we have to do is to bring order into the processes whereby what comes from the digestive system works into the brain. You will easily realise that mother's milk is not able under all circumstances to benefit a child of this kind in the same way that it does another child. (Normally, you know, mother's milk has an inherent tendency, a natural readiness to transfer itself from the digestive system to the nerves-and senses system.) We therefore discontinued mother's milk at the beginning of March, and the child was from then on nourished by other means. Nectar was given—the content of the nectaries found in the flowers of certain plants. Nectar has the effect of strengthening the ego in the region of the will. By administering a nourishment that develops—with something even of the dynamic of a parasite—in the region of the blossom, we make appeal to the inner individuality of the child, we try to call forth this inner individuality and bring it to activity. We have had some measure of success in this direction. But I must warn you how necessary it is, when one has a plan of this kind on hand, to decide on a suitable time for carrying it out, and then prepare oneself thoroughly for the occasion. Set-backs can always occur, and these are misjudged by anyone who looks at the matter from a layman's point of view. We have it here on record that for some days the child was having nectar and the fæces became softer. Afterwards diarrhoea ensued. The nectar was then discontinued. The diarrhoea stopped, and a condition set in during the night of 11th-12th June, that brought a kind of crisis. The child was crying, and blinking, and passing a great deal of water; the body sank in with every expiration; there were attacks of cramp in the left leg, while the left arm grew tense and rigid; the fontanels were also quite taut, and the reflex actions more pronounced. Hot compresses were applied, and compresses of poppy juice, after which the child fell asleep, and his condition on the following day was good. Appetite and evacuation of the bowels were in order.

You must understand that it is impossible to steer clear of such crises—unless one is prepared to steer clear of all hope of a cure! For the very work we have to set ourselves to do in the organism is bound at some time or other to express itself in such a crisis. When this happens, it is of course necessary immediately to intervene—as Frau Dr. Wegman did. After the application of hot compresses and poppy juice compresses the crisis will subside in a proper way. The only advice that can be given for a crisis of this nature is on no account to allow yourself to be alarmed or thrown off your guard. There are moments in such a case when everything depends on prompt and immediate action.

I would like to tell you of an interesting little experience that I had on this occasion. News reached me from another quarter that the child was in a very bad way. Frau Dr. Wegman herself said nothing about it; I was accordingly reassured, and was confident that the condition was taking its inevitable course. For one must, you know, retain the whole time a mood of readiness for the natural development of the illness; that is essential. And then one can listen quite quietly to someone or other who, without any real understanding of the case, is frightened and disturbed at the turn the illness is taking. In cases like this, where anything may happen, we must first be perfectly clear in ourselves that we are doing what requires to be done; if this is so, then we can also rest assured that everything is as it should be. It is of course most important to be watchful for crises and, when they come, to give them every care and attention; but we must know that they will certainly occur in a case of this kind. Feelings of pity and the like, which tend to make one agitated and upset, cannot help. It is never of the least use to be overcome with a feeling of pity, that way we merely get bewildered and distraught; the one and only thing that can help is to face the situation quite objectively and do what has to be done.

And now let us go a little further into the subject of treatment. As we have seen, it is not possible to do anything much yet in the way of psychological-pedagogical treatment; we have only one possibility in this direction, namely, to help psychologically by giving rest and, as far as possible, darkness. It is important however to find a way of bringing into the organism the principle of disintegration. We must replace the strong tendency that is at work there towards the watery element, towards fluidity by the principle of disintegration. Water does not fall asunder or disintegrate; it flows and spreads. We want to call upon forces that can promote disintegration, that can aid and encourage it. Such are the forces of lead. In lead we have a most effective means of inducing decomposition, disintegration. Whenever you see that upbuilding forces are rampant in the very place where breaking-down forces should be at work—and is not a preponderance of upbuilding over breaking-down forces the fundamental phenomenon to be observed in a giant-embryo such as this little child?—whenever you see this, you may always start on a course of medical treatment with lead. Lead, especially when injected, can have extraordinarily good results.

Let me describe to you how lead takes effect in the organism. Lead has, of course, long been known as a remedy; for thousands of years those who have had any understanding of such things have pointed to the medicinal influence of lead. The knowledge of its beneficial working has however been tending gradually to disappear—although now in our own time it is coming into notice again in a most remarkable way, from quite a new quarter. But now consider for a moment—where, in the whole earth, are the most powerful forces of disintegration to be found? We find them where radium occurs. And from radium we get, along with helium, an intermediary product which, undergoing further transformation, produces lead. Here, then, you have the inner connection. In the great world outside, in the cosmos, the most powerfully working forces of cleavage produce in lead the substance in which these forces of cleavage are ultimately concentrated. If therefore you bring lead into the human body, you are bringing into it cosmic destruction, cosmic disintegration. Think what this means. You introduce the lead, by means of injection, into the blood-circulation. In the circulation of the blood we have an immediate reflection of the structure of the universe. The 25,000 years that the sun takes to go round the universe—these 25,000 years we have in the circulation, in the pulsation of the blood.² And now you bring disintegrating forces straight into the organism. The cosmos, as we know, gives itself time to work; nevertheless, if we have a real insight into the matter, it will be evident to us that the introduction of such a substance as lead can be of real help.

Treatment for this child will therefore be as I have described. We have also used hypophysis, applying it to the legs as an ointment; the formative, shaping forces that are active in the secretion of hypophysis counteract deformation. We shall in this way “form” while we heal. We have of course at the same time to see that the right stimulation is provided in order for the remedies to be able to work.

One can, you know, be very thankful that we have now surmounted a first crisis; one can be glad of the crisis that occurred between the 11th and 12th July, when the child manifested the symptoms we described. He will in all probability have to go through many such crises, and we must be very watchful to see that we cure the child, in the positive sense. For it is, you know, quite possible for a cure to take place in a negative sense. It comes to this—we have to cure, not for death, but for life. It is indeed a most delicate matter ever to deal with an organ therapeutically.

I would like also at this point to draw your attention to the fact that nothing could be achieved by puncturing and letting water flow out; the trouble then only starts again and grows even more serious than before. Obviously, however, so long as we have not yet ourselves attained any success in diminishing the size of the head, it is not for us to begin criticising other methods of treatment.

This is going to be a particularly interesting case, and for me personally it has as a matter of fact quite a special interest. For, whenever I think of this little fellow, whenever I look at him, it is not merely this child that I see before me. Imagine to yourselves this child grown to be thirty years old. He would then be an adult human being. It might well happen. He would be about six times as big as he is now. The head would be perhaps three-and-a-half times its present size, and the rest of the body six times. Imagining this, I see before me a man whom I actually did have before me when I was a boy of six years old. We used to meet constantly, for he was always there at the station when the trains arrived. He was obliged to use crutches, because his body could not carry his head. The whole muscular system that is involved in walking had not developed properly. He had an immense head. The man had in fact remained an embryo, he was a thirty-year-old embryo.

The reason why this man made such a remarkable impression on me as a little boy was that he was unbelievably clever. I did so enjoy talking to him! A deformity is of course a bit of a shock to a boy of seven or eight years old; but then, on the other hand, the man was, as I have said, astonishingly clever. One could learn a great deal from him; and all his judgements were pervaded with a great gentleness. This gentleness and mildness seemed to overflow from him—like his head! When he spoke—his sentences were not unduly drawn out, they took the normal length of time to utter, but as he spoke them, it was almost as though he had some sugary moisture on his lips, as though he were rubbing his lips together and tasting the sweetness all the time. There was indeed something quite original about the man. He was moreover genuinely inventive. Inventions of many kinds were attributed to him—which he was said to have made first on a small scale. Altogether, a most interesting personality. In course of time he had become less sensitive about his abnormality, he had grown accustomed to it. After all, he lived, you see, in a village, where a person of this kind is regarded with a certain measure of understanding. I have in fact never yet come across a village where some afflicted child had not grown up in this manner, becoming the child of the whole village, and receiving constant care and help from those around.

If we should have a child of this kind to look after, who is rather older than the little fellow we are considering, we would have to adopt other measures, such as I described to you in part when I told you how I had to treat the hydrocephalic boy of eleven years old who was given into my care, and who was in time completely healed.

Now let us go on to the next—the little girl who was rather unruly and troublesome. This child weighed 41 lb. at birth, was a nine months child and was breast-fed for seven months. She learned to walk in her first year, and learned also to speak at the proper time. When a year and a half old, she ceased to wet the bed at night, but wet herself by day. At the age of three-and-a-half she had an attack of influenza with headache and high fever, and three weeks later developed measles. The mother had influenza at the same time and was nervous and worried. The child's appetite is bad. She sometimes has disturbing dreams.

We have here a condition that is frequently to be met with among these children; we might even describe the little girl as a “normally” abnormal child. Our chief concern must be to see that the astral body receives the right form and configuration that will enable it to fit itself into the ether and physical bodies in a harmonious manner. To achieve this end, we always give arsenic baths—that is, we use arsenic externally; and occasionally we administer arsenic internally as well. The treatment has the effect of harmonising the relationships of astral body, ether body and physical body. Then, to ensure that the externally administered arsenic shall really strike home, we reinforce it by applying mustard compresses to the feet before and after the bath, using also grated horse-radish for this purpose. I should add that in the latter case, you must make sure that the horse-radish is not grated until immediately before use. It is most important that it should be freshly grated; if allowed to stand for some hours, it loses its efficacy.

Coming to the psychological aspect of the case, we must try to cure the child of the habit of being so excited. For she is still always restless and excited; I don't think the environment here has so far had any marked influence on her. We must break her of this habit. Altogether, the breaking of some habit or trait of character in a child can often lead to most salutary results—a fact that should not be overlooked. In the case we are considering, a great deal can be achieved by bringing the child to be quiet and still at the very moment when something is being told her of a kind that generally makes her excited and restless—even if, in order to keep her still, we have to resort to mechanical means. First of all, therefore, we observe, when we are relating some story, what things in the story particularly excite the child. Then, we compel her to restrain herself and not get excited, to become inwardly a little stiff and hold herself in. If we can bring this about we shall find, as time goes on, that the characteristic trait in the child is somehow being broken down. Instead of evincing excitement, she will begin even to show signs of weariness when the story is told. We let this weariness work—say, for a week or two; and then for a while we simply let the child go her way, treating her as though she were quite normal. After a time there will be some return of the excitability; then we shall have to set to work all over again, and repeat our course of treatment. The pauses are necessary; otherwise, if we go straight on without interruption, a reaction will come. The weariness, the slight signs of depression, will, if we push too far with our treatment, lead on to conditions of bodily depression, and we shall harm the child rather than heal.

We have now come to the point where I can indicate for you the principle that underlies the psychological treatment of all such children. We have to be ready and attentive, watching what is there in the child, realising that the abnormalities of soul are symptoms of what is going on within him, symptoms of the behaviour of ether body, astral body, ego organisation, etc. I say “etc.”; what do I mean? For when we divide the human being into

1. Physical body
2. Ether body
3. Astral body
4. Ego organisation
5. Spirit-Self

we generally go on to say, do we not, that the spirit-self has not yet been evolved by man and does not therefore immediately concern him. We read about it of course in the books, but in the present epoch, man reaches only as far as the ego organisation, and so we have no call to trouble about the spirit-self. But, my dear friends, that is not a true and full picture of the situation. Human beings, we say, reach as yet only as far as the ego organisation; but not all the beings with whom we humans have to do, come only as far as the ego and no further! When we are dealing with growing children, we are necessarily brought into contact with beings who attain to the spirit-self, beings who are further on in evolution than man. If we set out to develop Waldorf School pedagogy and really mean our work to have life, then we must appeal not only to the human beings who are congregated there in our school, but also to spiritual beings who are more highly developed than man, spiritual beings who show quite clearly that they have evolved to the spirit self. In dealing with a growing child, we shall particularly have to do with one specific class of such beings, namely, the beings to whom we give the name of “Genius of Language”. Were it left to the human beings themselves to hand on language to the next generation, man would pine away and perish. Being lives in language, as truly as ever being lives in man himself. Along with speech and language something enters into man, wherein beings live whose whole life bears unmistakably the stamp of the spirit-self, even as man in his life bears the stamp of the ego organisation. These beings inspire us; they live in us through the fact that we speak.

Think how in Eurythmy we have to develop an artistic speaking in order for a visible speech and language to arise. We are really very far from comprehending what speech is in its fullness! A little part of the working of the Genius of Language we elaborate in Eurythmy, so as to enable a visible speech to come to birth. And then again in Curative Eurythmy—think how we appeal there to what these beings can achieve with the spirit-self, in the intuitive stimulation of man's will!

It is really so: the moment we begin to speak of education, we have immediately to make our appeal to spirits who have evolved the spirit-self. And whenever we try to elucidate what lies hidden in speech, we are actually describing the spirit-self. I would therefore recommend anyone who is setting out to educate abnormal children, to meditate upon what he can read in our books, about the spirit-self. He will find this a good material for meditation. It is a prayer to those spiritual beings who are of the same kind as the Genius of Language.

Such spiritual beings are verily present among us. Say, we come into the schoolroom. If our behaviour and gestures as we enter give adequate expression to what we are feeling and experiencing in our soul, then they have an immense influence upon the child. And they are moreover a proof that we are connected with the spiritual beings who bear within them the spirit-self.

There is a habit that is all too common among people today—I am far from suggesting you should start inveighing openly against it; in matters of this kind, one must adopt a completely objective attitude, the same objective attitude as is required in dealing with the crises that occur in the little child. It is nevertheless a fact that when whole communities of people have a habit of keeping their hands in their trouser pockets and so avoiding any use of gesture, it means nothing else than that they want to be God-forsaken, they want to be left alone by the Gods—the Gods who are next above the spirit-man. It means, they would rather not have any knowledge of the beings who have developed the spirit-self—even as man has developed the I organisation. And one of the first things that happens to such persons is that their speech begins to be slovenly. This, is, in fact, the great danger that faces the civilisation of the West—the danger that speech and language, instead of being developed to become what they should become, deteriorate and grow slovenly.

In dealing with the growing child it is of the very first importance to see that he speaks clearly and distinctly, and this is more than ever necessary in the case of the abnormal child. We must on no account overlook the smallest sign of slovenliness of speech. In all your dealings with abnormal children, make it a rule to be watchful of how they speak, mindful always that their speech shall be clear and distinct and well-formed. Your watchfulness will react favourably on the condition of the child.

And then for the very young child who does not yet speak himself, it is good if he hears well-formed speech spoken around him—unless of course special instructions have had to be given that he is to be left still and quiet! And for children between the ages of seven and fourteen whom we have received into our care as abnormal, we need not have the slightest hesitation in bringing to them just as much as ever we can in the way of good speaking and recitation. To listen again and again to good speaking, well-ordered and articulate, is for abnormal children an absolute need, a need that springs from the inherent nature of the abnormality itself.

• 1. See Lecture 2
• 2. The exact number is 25,920.

And now we must go on to say something about the cases you have with you at Lauenstein.¹

I would like to speak first of that eldest boy of yours, who is sixteen years old, and in whom we can clearly recognise an inferiority occasioned by the failure of the I and astral body to penetrate the physical organisation. He was given into your care comparatively late; you did not, I think, have him with you until he was in his sixteenth year? So you have here a case with antecedents that have already undergone marked development. If the boy could have been taken in hand earlier on and given the advantage of Waldorf School education, then, in the time between the change of teeth and puberty, he would have experienced the principle of authority in the right way. Care would also have been taken, first of all, to watch all the time and see what things really interested him, and then, starting from these, to extend his field of interest. Had this been possible, and if in addition the boy could at the same time have been given lead in gently administered doses, then notwithstanding his inherent difficulties the boy's soul would be today on quite a different level. For it is plain, the boy has interests. He has moreover definite ability. You will however have seen from the quite simple test that we put to him, where the lad's trouble lies.

You will remember, I set him a comparatively simple sum in arithmetic—a problem in subtraction, put in the form that accords with the methods of Waldorf School education. For we always ask, you know: What have I to take from a given number in order to leave another given number as remainder: Thus, we do not, as is usually done in teaching arithmetic, give the minuend and subtrahend, but instead the minuend and the remainder, leaving the subtrahend to be found. This way of stating the problem puts the condition of mind and soul to severer test; on the other hand, the child is helped far more in his development when he has to tackle the problem in this form, than when it is put to him the other way round. As you saw, the boy was able to do the sum, but not able to do it at once. As soon as he had solved the problem, he came up to me with great delight; but it must have been an hour and a half later. He took thus an hour and a half to do the sum, and was happy and delighted when he had found the answer. There was therefore no doubt about it, the boy had the necessary ability, he was able to do the sum. All the members of his organism were in readiness to be directed to the task; there was, so to speak, no “fault in the contact”. The trouble with him is only that he needs longer time. And the reason for this is, that from the very outset his ether body and his physical body offer resistance; they fail to unfold the activity that is proper to them, in spite of the fact that the possibilities for the activity are there all the time.

Follow carefully how the boy's interests work. You will find they remain in the head organisation; they cannot make their way down into the rest of the body. This fact was clearly demonstrated in a little incident that took place during my visit. You saw how the boy came up to us with his little Kodak and wanted to take our photograph. He managed it quite well, carrying the whole thing through with intense interest. Afterwards I tried to suggest to him that he should make another exposure. This would have necessitated his going to fetch a new film; his interest would have had to reach beyond what lay immediately to hand. He resisted the idea, and nothing would persuade him to listen to it. When an interest seizes hold of him in the very movement, here and now—he is ready for it—he is “all there”: but if the situation requires that he should bring the interest down into his metabolism-and-limbs system, then at once his ether and physical bodies set up a powerful resistance. What should one do in such a case?

With a boy already in his teens, it is of course much more difficult than it would have been earlier; we should however set ourselves even now to intervene with our pedagogical therapy. Taking as our starting point things that the boy follows with a certain interest, we should go on from these, widening the circle of his interest in all directions. A great deal can be achieved by recognising and appealing to an entirely healthy instinct that the boy undoubtedly possesses—despite his difficulties. For you must realise that even in persons who are abnormal, healthy instincts are yet always present. And with this boy, you will find that as soon as you draw his attention to objects and processes that call for skilful handling, he will at once begin to experience a widening of his circle of interests.

The boy has, you see, difficulty in following the road that leads from the head organisation to the metabolism-and limbs organisation, and thence, as I have explained to you, out again beyond. This latter part of the journey he accomplishes only with great difficulty, since there is in him no capacity to perceive what is going on there. Even the slight measure of perception that is present in a normal human being is in his case lacking. Once, however, he can be brought to see, he has an object plainly before him, the skilfulness of his own limbs, the sight will fill him with joy. You must get him to do things which will bring this about. An excellent plan will be to give him Curative Eurythmy exercises, to be done with legs and hands, but especially taking care to see that the toes and fingers move with great energy. Then draw the boy's attention to these movements that are going on in his limbs, let him watch himself making the movements.

If it should happen that you have to do with younger children who already show signs of this kind of difficulty, where what has been decided upon by the head does not easily find its way down into the rest of the organism, try getting them to touch their feet with their head. In the case of the boy we are considering, it is too late for this, but you may any day receive into your Home quite little children with the same disability. Try it yourselves; you will find it is no easy matter! But for small children it is a very good exercise; they can be brought even to kiss their own toes. Another thing that never fails to help in such cases—and it could prove a real blessing even to your boy—is to get the child to hold a pencil between his great toe and the next, and with the pencil contrive to trace out some letters of the alphabet, and so have the enjoyment of discovering that he can write with his feet. It is quite possible that even at his age this boy of yours could receive very great benefit from such an experiment. For in cases such as his, Curative Eurythmy—and writing with the toes is a kind of Curative Eurythmy!—can be of the very greatest help. Whether also a course of treatment with lead will at his age afford him the help he stands in need of, we shall discover when we begin to make trial with it and note its effects.

All that I have been saying will have demonstrated to you the imperative need for a delicate and fine power of observation. The simple calculation that took the boy an hour and a half to make, the reluctance to go back into the house to fetch a new film—facts like these may seem trifling and insignificant, and yet it is just this kind of thing that we must learn to make the object of careful observation. As we come to do so, we shall realise what an invaluable aid it can be to the educator of backward children if he is sensitive to every little thing that happens with the child he wants to help.

And now you will be wanting to say to me: It looks as though the education of backward children is going to take up all one's time; one will have to be perpetually giving one's whole attention to the children, and will have no time left to meditate, no time in fact to do anything else whatever! That is not the case; and the esoteric nature of a life-work such as you are undertaking should not allow you ever to admit for a moment this point of view. What is wanted is not that you should all day long be constantly on the watch—not that at all, but rather that you should acquire a quick sense for characteristic happenings. If one has already learned how to watch quite a number of children and knows how to make the right use at every turn of one's powers of perception, it is, under certain circumstances, quite possible to carry out a thorough investigation of a single child in five or ten minutes. It does not depend at all on the length of time one devotes to the matter, but wholly on the degree to which one is able to unite oneself inwardly with the act of perception. If people would only realise that one has to really connect oneself inwardly with the phenomena in question then a great deal of time would be saved, especially for those who work in the professions.^E1

Now, there was at Lauenstein another boy, a typical case, a fifteen-year-old epileptic. You could see the same type in the boy we had here before us the other day; only, your boy at Lauenstein is several years older. The first thing that claims our attention in his case is the difficult situation created by the fact that he is at the age of transition to puberty. He has been castrated, has he not? Now what we are concerned with is the process of attaining puberty as it has to go forward in the whole organism. The fact that the boy has been castrated, means that in his case we have to reckon with a phenomenon that manifests in him with extraordinary vehemence—namely, the reaction that is induced as a result of this unnatural influence that has been brought to bear on the evolution of sex. The boy gives indeed every appearance of one in whom the transition to puberty is going to prove difficult. The gradual attainment of puberty is, as we have said, a process that belongs to the whole organism; and the sole significance that castration possesses for the boy at the present time consists in the reactionary influence it has in him upon the attainment of puberty.

The first thing to do therefore is to see that the boy is placed where he will be sure of being treated in the way that is right and necessary for boys who are attaining puberty—that is to say, where care is taken to provide conditions under which such boys have their interest aroused in all the processes that go on in the world in which they find themselves. Boys who are at the age of puberty urgently need Waldorf School education. This boy must not be left to the mercy of his own impulses and emotions; we must try to bring it about that he is continually occupied with something outside himself, and takes a keen interest in the objects and processes that he finds around him. Tell me, how is he getting on at school? Perhaps you can tell me this?

(S. “He can neither read nor write. During the past year we have not even made a beginning with school for him. Frau F. did once begin to teach him reading and writing; it was on the Montessori method, and he did not get on at all, he seemed unable to make any progress. His school attainments have really to be counted as nil.”)

He shows, you see, a certain obtuseness to external impressions. We shall here be under the necessity of applying Waldorf School education in the way we are accustomed to do with quite little children—taking our start, that is, from painting, and so providing the opportunity for the boy to put out into colour whatever is tormenting him inwardly. Get him to paint, and you will see what can be got rid of this way. And then you can go farther with him in whatever direction his own inclinations and abilities indicate.

There can moreover be no question but that we must intervene here also with our therapy. We have not, I think, up to now, prescribed any medicaments? The boy should have algae and belladonna. Therapeutical treatment will consist then of these two remedies. You probably understand in a general way the nature of algae injections, but you will do well to enter a little more deeply into the significance of them; for you should, you know, be ready to make use of them on your own responsibility, in individual cases. Why do we propose for this boy algae injections?

In the algae we have plants that have neither strongly developed root formation nor strongly developed flower formation. It is indeed almost as though flower and root had been telescoped. The leaf organisation is the main thing; everything else is produced from it. In algae therefore, since foliage preponderates, we find no very near relationship to the earth. Nor, on the other hand, is there any very near relationship to the outer cosmos. There is however a relationship to the watery and airy elements that are active immediately over the surface of the earth. Algae—and the same applies also to mushrooms—are plants that are, as it were, completely steeped in the interplay of air and water. And these two kinds of plants have in addition this characteristic in common, that they are strongly attracted to the minute quantity of sulphur which is to be found everywhere today in water as well as in air. Consequently, when these plants are introduced into the rhythmic organism of man, they are peculiarly adapted to restore harmony between astral body and ether body. And harmony between astral body and ether body is precisely what is lacking in a boy of this type.

In cases where we perceive a disturbance due to the ego organisation making too great demand upon the astral body and not allowing it to enter into the etheric body, we must have recourse rather to the mushroom type of plant. The algae, which come nearer to the ordinary plant, are to be used when the physical body and etheric body refuse to allow the astral body to enter—that is to say, when the disharmony is due not to an excessive attraction exerted by the ego organisation, but to a special resistance put up by the ether body.^E2

Then there was a girl you had at Lauenstein. Perhaps you would kindly describe her for us, in accordance with the indications I gave at the time?

(S.: “I too have seen this girl only on that one occasion—a girl with protruding lips. You pointed out that something very serious must have happened to her astral body between the ages of 3 and 4; the child must, you said, have had at that time a violent attack of itching and scratching. The mother confirmed afterwards that high temperatures had occurred at that age, accompanied by irritation and itching. For treatment, nicotiana enema was prescribed; and if that did not help, nicotiana injections were to be given. The girl is fifteen years old.”)

So we have here a girl who has attained the age of fifteen, and in whom we can see quite clearly that the astral organisation has made very weak connection with the organism as a whole. The girl is obviously of that type.^E3 One notices at once that the astral organisation is far too weak to restrain the ego in face of the temptation that always assails man when he eats—the temptation to enjoy the eating too much, to revel in the sweet and pleasant taste of the food. When the astral body is not sufficiently active in the lower region of the face, then the lips will be found to protrude noticeably—a symptom that is due to the excessive pleasure experienced in tasting food and also in the initial process of digestion, that takes place in the mouth. Phenomena such as these have far-back antecedents; obviously they cannot be making their appearance for the first time at this somewhat late stage of childhood. As has been said, I stated at the time that an irregularity must have occurred in the child's development about the 3rd or 4th year.

How can you learn to perceive such facts for yourselves? You can find your way to such perceptions if you set out to do so with the love that I have described to you and upon which you will remember I laid such stress. You must never say: In order to perceive such things, I should have to be clairvoyant. To say that betokens an inner laziness—a quality that must on no account ever be found in one who undertakes the task of education. Long before you attain to the clairvoyance that is required for spiritual research in general, you can beget in yourself the faculty simply to perceive what is really the matter. The power to do this can be born in you, if you approach with loving devotion all that shows itself in the child, and especially just those developments that come with abnormal conditions. What you say to yourself at that moment will be true. There is of course need here for esoteric courage. This esoteric courage can and does develop in man—provided only that one thing does not stand in the way.

It is strange, and at the same time significant, that these inner intuitions are so little noticed by the very people who are, comparatively speaking, well able to have them. Anthroposophists have many an opportunity to pay heed to such inner intuitions! For they have these intuitions, far more than is supposed, but they fail to attend to them—the reason being that in the moment when they should do so, they find themselves assailed by a vanity that is hard to overcome. With the discovery of faculties not known before, all manner of impulses that spring from vanity begin to crop up in the soul. Along with the other characteristics of our age that I described for you in my lecture yesterday, as well as on several other occasions, we have to reckon also a tendency to grow vain and conceited, for it is a tendency that is terribly prevalent in present-day mankind.

This is a matter that should receive serious consideration from those of the present-day Youth—and you yourselves are of course among the number—who are devoting their lives to some great and noble calling. There is in our time great need that young men and women should rise up among us and exercise a regenerating influence upon mankind; and what I am now going to say is not said out of misunderstanding of the Youth Movement of our day, nor from lack of understanding, but out of a true understanding of it. It is a necessity, this Youth Movement, it is something of quite extraordinary significance; for those older people who can understand it, the modern Youth Movement is interesting in the highest degree. Not a word shall be uttered here against it. Nor shall we attempt to deny that there is only too often a deplorable lack of readiness on the part of the older generation to understand this Youth Movement, and that a great many plans have suffered shipwreck just because the Movement has not been taken seriously enough, just because people have not troubled themselves to look into it sufficiently. But the Youth Movement does need to beware of one thing when it sets out to undertake specific practical tasks; and it is incumbent on those of us who have had experience in the matter to call attention to it, for it makes one seriously apprehensive for the whole future of the Movement. I mean a certain vanity that shows itself there on every hand.

This vanity is not so much due to a lack of education and culture, but is rather the consequence of an inevitable situation. For the will to action necessitates of course a strong development of inner capabilities, and then it follows all too easily that under the influence of Ahriman vanity begins to spring up in the soul. I have had opportunity in my life to make careful and intimate observation of persons who were full of promise—persons too of the most various ages of life—in whom one could see again and again how with the dawn of the Age that has followed Kali Yuga, vanity began to grow and thrive in their souls. It is not, therefore, only among the Youth that the vanity shows itself. What concerns us at the moment however is the special form of it that manifests in the Youth and that has in point of fact hindered them from developing the right and essential character that lies inherent in present-day Youth, waiting to be developed. Hence the phenomenon with which we are so familiar, this endless talk of “missions”, of great tasks, with all too little inclination to set to work upon the details, to take pains about the small things that require to be done in carrying out these tasks.

These will emphatically be need in the future for what has been described in simple words as devotion to detail.

Devotion to detail and to little things is something which the Youth of our time need to develop. They are far too apt to revel in abstractions; and this revelling in abstractions is the very thing that can then lure them with irresistible force into the snare of vanity. I do beg you to bethink yourselves of the difficulties that beset your path on this account. Make it a matter of esoteric striving to master this tendency to vanity; for it does indeed constitute a real hindrance to any work you undertake.

Suppose you want to be able to speak to some fellow human being from out of an intuitive power of vision. The things you need to behold in him are by no means written plain for all to see; and you may take it that statements made about backward children from the ordinary lay point of view are generally false. What you have to do is to see through what lies on the surface, see right through it to the real state of affairs. If therefore you want to come to the point of being able to say something to him out of intuitive vision, what do you need for that? You need to tell yourself with courage and with energy—not just saying it at some particular moment, but carrying it continually in your consciousness, so that it determines the very quality and content of your consciousness:—“ I can do it.” If, without vanity, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and in earnest endeavour to overcome all the things that hinder, you repeat these words, not only feeling them, but saying them to yourself over and over again, then you will begin to discover how far you are able to go in this direction. Do not expect to find the development of the faculty you seek, by spinning out all manner of theories and thoughts. No, what you need to do is to maintain all the time this courageous consciousness, which develops quite simply of itself when once you have begun to fetch up from the depths of your soul what lies hidden there, buried (metaphorically speaking) beneath an accumulation of dust and rubbish.

Generally speaking, people are not able to achieve anything of this kind in the realm of pedagogy. They could do so if only they would set themselves seriously to bring to life within them a certain truth. Let me explain to you how this can be done.

Try to accustom yourselves to live your way every evening into the consciousness: In me is God. In me is God—or the Spirit of God, or what other expression you prefer to use. (But please do not think I mean just persuading yourself of this truth theoretically—which is what the meditations of the majority of people amount to!) Then, in the morning let the knowledge: I am in God shine out over the whole day. And now consider! When you bring to life within you these two ideas, which are then no longer mere thoughts, but have become something felt and perceived inwardly, yes, have even become impulses of will within you, what is it you are doing?

First, you have this picture before you: In me is God;

and on the following morning, you have this picture before you: I am in God (see Figure 3, right). They are one and the same, the upper and the lower figure. And now you must understand: Here you have a circle (yellow); here you have a point (blue). It doesn't look like that in the evening, but in the morning the truth of it comes to light. And in the morning you have to think: Here is a circle (blue); here is a point (yellow). Yes, you have to understand that a circle is a point, and a point a circle. You have to acquire a deep, inner understanding of this fact.

But now, this is really the only way to come to a true understanding of the human being! You remember the drawing I made for you, of the metabolism-and-limbs man and the head man (see Figure 1.). That drawing was nothing else than a realistic impression or record of what you have before you now in this simple figure for meditation. In the human being it becomes actual reality; the I-point of the head becomes in the limb man the circle—naturally, with modifications. Adopting this line of approach, trying, that is, to understand man inwardly, you will learn to understand the whole of man. You must, first of all, be quite clear in your mind that these two figures, these two conceptions, are one and the same, are not at all different from one another. They only look different from outside. There is a yellow circle; here it is too! There is a blue point; here it is too! Why do they look different? Because that drawing is a diagram of the head, and this a diagram of the body. When the point claims a place for itself in the body, it becomes the spinal cord. It makes its way in here

and then the part it plays in the head organisation is continued in the spinal cord. There you have the inner dynamic of the morphology of man. Taking it as your starting point, you will be able, by meditation, to build up a true anatomy, a true physiology. And then you will acquire the inner intuition that can perceive in how far the upper and lower jaws are limbs; for you will begin to see in the head a complete organism in itself, sitting up there on the top of the human being, an organism whose limbs are dwarfed and have—in process of deformation—turned into jaws. And you will come to a clear perception of how teeth and toes are in polarity to one another. For you have only to look at the attachments of the jawbones, and you can see it all there before you—the stunted toes, the stunted hands and feet.

But, my dear friends, meditation that employs such pictures as I have been giving can never take its course in the kind of mood that would allow us to feel: Now I am going to settle down to a blissful time of meditation; it will be like sinking into a snug, warm nest! No, the feeling must be continually present in us that we are taking the plunge into reality—that we are grasping hold of reality.

Devotion to little things—yes, to the very smallest of all! We must not omit to cultivate this interest in very little things. The tip of the ear, the paring of a finger-nail, a single human hair—should be every bit as interesting to us as Saturn, Sun and Moon. For really and truly in one human hair everything else is comprised; a person who becomes bald loses a whole cosmos! What we see externally—we can verily create it inwardly, if only we achieve that overcoming which is essential to a life of meditation. But we shall never achieve it so long as any vestige of vanity is allowed to remain—and vestiges of vanity lurk in every corner and crevice of the soul. Therefore is it so urgent, if you want to become real educators, and especially educators of backward children, that you should cultivate, with the utmost humility, this devotion in the matter of little things. And when you have made a beginning in this way in your own sphere, you can afterwards go on to awaken in other circles of the Youth Movement this same devotion to little things.

And then it will indeed become possible for you to receive, for example, indications that are afterwards verified from external evidence—as happened, you remember, in the case we are considering. And here I must say in connection with this very case, I have occasion to find grave fault. The same kind of thing happens only too often in connection with the various undertakings that have been begun within our anthroposophical movement. The situation was as follows. Here was a girl concerning whom I told you that a kind of abnormality must have occurred in her development between the third and fourth year. You question the mother, and the mother confirms that it was so. What did you do then? Please tell me, honestly and sincerely: What did you do, when the mother confirmed the fact? (Silence.) Please be esoterically honest and tell me the truth, you three: what did you do? (Silence.) If you had done the right thing, you would now be telling me: “We danced and jumped until we made a hole in the ceiling!” And the after-effect of this jumping for joy would be still expressing itself today—and not merely in words, it would be shining out from you like a light.

That is what you need—enthusiasm in the experience of truth. This enthusiasm is an absolute sine qua non: you cannot get on without it. For years it has been so terribly painful to me, the way the members of the anthroposophical movement stand there as if they were rooted to the spot—and the young too, almost as much as the old. But now consider what it means, That they can stand there so impassively. Look at Nietzsche! What a different sort of fellow he was—even if he did get ill from it! He made his Zarathustra become a dancer. Can't you become dancers—in the sense Nietzsche meant it? Why, you should be leading lives of joy—deep inner joy in the truth! There is nothing in the world more delightful, nothing more fascinating, than the experience of truth. There you have an esotericism that is far more genuine, far more significant than the esotericism that goes about with a long face. Before everything else—and long before you begin to talk about having a “mission”—there must be this living inner experience of truth.

The girl had, when three or four years old, an occult fever. It is even called that in the medical world—one of those instances where medicine has retained an earlier form of speech. When a doctor does not know what is the cause of a fever, he calls it an “occult” fever. This occult fever, then, made its appearance. During the period round about the third and fourth years, the astral body was particularly weak. The physical body and the ether body reacted to this and developed too strongly; and then the astral body was unable to keep up with them. It is exceedingly important that we take cognisance first of all of this fact: at the age of three the growth of the astral body suffered a significant check, the child's astral body became stunted and cramped within itself. I must come to its aid. It must receive help to make up for what has been lost; and this help can be given through education, by awakening the child's interest in many directions. Tell me now, how has it been with this girl at school?

(S.: “We are not having the girl with us in the Home, she will come only for treatment. She was in a school for giving special help to backward children up to the beginning of her sixteenth year, and can read and write, and work with numbers up to about a thousand. In all other respects we have really no knowledge of the girl, we had her there only in order for you to see her. Enema containing nicotiana was prescribed.”)

It will be important to treat this girl with Curative Eurythmy.^E4

As a result of the stunting of the astral body, a strong tendency to deformation has, you see, made its appearance in the upper organism. The child has about her an extraordinarily animal look, the reason being that all that part which belongs to the organs of mastication is deformed. We have already been making very careful tests here in the Clinic of the influence of nicotiana juice in counteracting deformation; and this girl is just a case in point, where it will be able to do its good work. So you see it will be possible right away to begin—slowly—to make some progress. The nicotiana juice is given by the mouth, to start with; and then one has to watch carefully—one must acquire an eye for such things—to see whether the organs of mastication are beginning to come more under the control of the organism. For, as it is, the organs of mastication lie almost entirely outside the realm of the child's control. They just hang there—limp. The child can thus be treated with nicotiana juice given by the mouth in suitable decimal of dilution, beginning with the sixth and going up to the fifteenth. If it should turn out that this does not work strongly enough, we shall have to resort to injection of nicotiana juice in a high potency into the circulation, so that it may make direct contact there with the astral body and enable us to achieve in this way what we failed to achieve when we administered nicotiana juice by ingestion.

I have also a further suggestion to make. The nicotiana juice is intended to work within the astral body and remain there, and it will perhaps be good if we try to prevent its influence from entering too powerfully into the ego organisation—if we try, that is, to arrest it before it reaches the ego organisation. This result can be induced by giving—not often, perhaps only once a week—a weak sulphur bath.

Tomorrow we will speak about the other cases that you have at Lauenstein, and I shall be particularly glad to be able to consider with you the interesting phenomenon of albinism, which we have opportunity to study in two of your children. One of them is fifteen years old and the other a much younger sister of hers. (Dr. Steiner asked Dr. Vreede [the original leader of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum] if she had drawn their horoscopes, and she handed them to him. The dates were 6th December, 1909, approximately 4 a.m., and 18th May, 1921, approximately 3 a.m., both at Jena.) How does Uranus stand? Did you not find any special constellations? (Dr. Vreede replied that she had—namely with Uranus and Neptune. In the case of the elder girl, Neptune was in opposition to Uranus.)

Such children always show two main characteristic peculiarities: fair hair; and poor sight, with the variation in the eyes. These are the essential phenomena of albinism. No more than a superficial study is required to discover that in albinos we have to do with an organisation that is very feeble at assimilating iron, but on the other hand assimilates sulphur with the greatest ease. The organisation resists iron; it resists dealing with it, and this applies especially to the periphery of the body; assimilation of iron stops short of the periphery. Sulphur, on the other hand, is driven to the periphery; and not only so, but driven even out beyond it. That is how it comes about that in the region of the hair, you see, all around, a sulphur-aura, which pales and bleaches the hair and takes the strength out of it. And in the eyes (which are formed comparatively independently, being built into the organism from without, in the embryo time)—in the eyes you have a still more striking manifestation of a sulphur-aura. Here it has the effect of fairly forcing the eyes to betake themselves out of the etheric into the astral. In such children we see the eye plucked right out of its “grotto”, the etheric body of the eye left disregarded and its astral body very much to the fore and fully engaged.

Very important questions arise at this point. If we consider the “forming” of man, we find that he stands in connection on the one hand with the telluric forces that divulge themselves to us in the substances of the earth, and on the other hand, with the whole cosmos. He is dependent on both. Both sets of forces are present in the individual process of evolution, as well as also in the stream of inheritance. Let us take first, in considering these two children, the stream of inheritance. Neither in the case of the father nor of the mother is there any indication of albinism. They are both perfectly normal human beings. There was however somewhere in the antecedents—was it a grandmother, of whom it is reported that she had signs of albinism? (Frl. Dr. K.: “It was a sister of the mother.”) An aunt, then. Albinism has been known in the family; that is all that need concern us at the moment. A tendency to albinism is present in the antecedents. And did you not tell me that there had been other cases in the Saal region, also at Jena? (Frl. Dr. K.: “Yes, two children; and one adult, aged thirty-two, who is already married. Of these three, in only one case had there been albinism before in the family history.”) It would seem, therefore, that albinism is in some way endemic to a certain part of the country, but meets also with many counter-influences. And so in fact it makes its appearance quite sporadically! Only under certain circumstances will an albino be born there. The equation will immediately suggest itself: How does it come about that an albino is born in a particular territory?

In the case of an albino we have, as we have seen, a sulphurisation process working outwards, so that little sulphur islets occur in the aura, in the periphery. And now we look round in the native environment of the children to see where we can find sulphur. The whole valley of the Saal abounds in iron sulphide. Iron and sulphur are thus present in combination. You can study first the presence of iron in the neighbourhood, and then again the presence of sulphur; and you can take special note of the whereabouts of the beautiful pyrites (iron sulphide). These delicate and lovely cubes of pyrites with their beautiful golden gleam are a characteristic product of the valley of the Saale. Other regions nearby yield gypsum. Gypsum is, as you know, calcium sulphate with 20 per cent water. So that here again we have an opportunity to study sulphur—this time in combination with calcium. This kind of study of the soil will throw light for us on all that lives in the atmosphere etc.; and so we shall have first of all to give ourselves to the study of that which comes out of the ground and is connected with the absorption of sulphur and iron. For we have here a territory that is also very rich in iron, and the question arises: How does this opposite relationship come about in this territory in regard to earth and man, in the earth has a great power of attraction for iron, while the human being cannot attract iron at all, or only with difficulty? What constellations must be present to cause the human being to be particularly disposed to reject the iron and accept the sulphur?

Here we come into the realm of the cosmic; we have to set about investigating the constellations that were present at birth (we cannot of course do it for conception). And this will lead us to ask whether there were not in the case of these children who are albinos, quite special constellations, constellations moreover that can only seldom occur. We shall have to find what we can learn, not from the planets that move more quickly, but from the constellations of the planets that take a long time to revolve, such as Saturn and Uranus. You see, therefore, to what kind of questions such cases will lead us. We must first find the right questions to ask; when once we have the questions, then we are ready to begin our study.^E5

Now, for these children also, I would like to prescribe a little course of treatment, basing it on the indications I have given today. We will talk of that tomorrow.

I gather from a remark that was made to me this morning, that you are wanting something more than is contained in the lectures. These (you feel) go too much in the direction of “devotion to detail”—too much, that is, in the direction that you need! But I am really entirely ready to meet you in this matter, and propose to use here the new method I have been using with the workmen at the Goetheanum. For there I have allowed it gradually to come to this—that I ask them on what I am to speak; so that, ever since a certain date, the workmen themselves have been specifying the themes they want dealt with in the lectures. And now they can never complain that they do not get lectures on subjects they want to hear about.

• 1. Curative home in Jena-Lichtenhain, founded by Franz Löffler, Siegfried Pickert, and Albrecht Strohschein.
• E1. Rudolf Steiner visited Lauenstein on 18th June, 1924, almost immediately after the Home was opened. The children were brought to him; and having first had a good look at each in turn, talking with the child and enquiring into the history of the case, he explained to us how this or that condition had come about, and gave indications for therapeutical treatment and education.
  
  The explanations and advice given by Rudolf Steiner on the occasion of this visit were noted down, and provide in each case a most valuable addition to the words spoken by him in this course. Wonderful, above all, was the example Rudolf Steiner set us in the whole way in which he met the children, entering with loving and devout interest into every single detail of their condition. For the little group of us who were taking part together in these first beginnings of the work of Curative Education, the whole visit was a deep experience, and the memory of it continues to be cherished in the “Institutions for the Education and Healing of Children in Need of Special Care”. Some of the indications and instructions given by Rudolf Steiner will be added here as Notes to the Course.
  
  As regards this boy, Rudolf Steiner told us that he is lacking in brain sand (the calcareous concretions of the pineal body). The convulsions and the whole general condition must go back to some fright to which the mother had been subjected during pregnancy. (Enquiry afterwards confirmed this.) He added that one must, in such cases, always ask how things were with the mother during pregnancy. The convulsions, he said, were a secondary effect.
  
  For therapy, Rudolf Steiner prescribed injections of thyroid gland secretion. The medicament must enter the body in a centripetal direction, in order to evoke a reaction that works centrifugally. The preparation should still contain epithelial cells. On the day following the injection, the fever curve, also the pulse and the breathing, should be measured, quantitatively and qualitatively.
  
  In addition, the boy should drink a full glass of Levico water in the course of each day, diluted in the proportion 1:8.
  
  Curative Eurythmy: O, I (ee), L.
• E2. When this poor feeble-minded boy, who was as a rule excessively restless, was brought to Rudolf Steiner, he became for the moment quite peaceful and at rest, and the finer side of his nature, which was generally overlaid and hidden, suddenly revealed itself in a truly beautiful manner. Rudolf Steiner took particular interest in the boy's sense-perceptions, and proved to us that he cannot see far into the distance. When his bad teeth were alluded to, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that his finger nails also were soft and weak. The following notes of the conversation were made at the time: “Did you not notice anything particular about the mother? This is a case where we can see evidence of a remarkable karma. The astral body is over-ripe. Something is working in from the preceding incarnation. The time between death and new birth has been quite short, with the result that the soul has brought into this incarnation something of the astral body of the former incarnation. The boy still has even now strange dreams at night. This fact will reveal itself to you in strange and disconnected remarks that he makes after waking up. Supposing he has at some time or other seen snakes, then it may be that now he will see them coiling and uncoiling themselves. It is a case of a poor astral body, that has its seat mainly in the back of the head.” (Here Dr. Steiner laid his hand, with a gesture of the most intense interest, on the back of the boy's head, which was thickly covered with stubborn black hair. “This condition has to be met by introducing a counter-astrality; and that we can do by the use of algae. For algae draw in the astral forces of the surrounding air. Mushrooms do this still more; but we had better not begin with the strongest influences. All parasitic plants draw in astrality. By means of algae injections, healthy astrality will be attracted—astrality, that is, which is opposite in quality to the astrality already in the body; for there the astrality is bad.
  
  The therapy will therefore be: Algae inoculations D 5; Belladonna D 4, D 10, D 15, D 20, D 30.”
  
  Dr. Steiner was shown the record of the fits. The suggestion having been raised that their occurrence might be running parallel with the rhythms of the Moon, Dr. Steiner said that the influence of the Moon could not in this case be the direct cause of the fits; at the most, it could affect only the consciousness.
  
  Eurythmy should be done, especially with the legs.
• E3. Dr. Steiner said at Lauenstein: “She has a kink in her astral body; its form has no unity or coherence; above, it is weak, whilst below, it is stronger.”
• E4. At Lauenstein the following prescription was given: Nicotiana enema, a five per cent decoction, twice a week. If this does not help, then Nicotiana injections D 6. Curative Eurythmy: F, M, UT (oot), TU (too).
• E5When the children were brought to Rudolf Steiner at Lauenstein, he particularly enquired whether there had not been some weakness or debility in the mother. The mother declared that she had never been seriously ill, but admitted that she had suffered from chlorosis as a girl and had in general been very anaemic. Rudolf Steiner: “So the mother, you see, was evidently, earlier on, in a delicate state of health.” The father too had in his youth been weak and ailing. Their first child, at whose birth the mother was twenty years old and the father twenty-two, died young of pneumonia. The second was the elder of the girls we are considering. The third, a boy, is entirely normal. Then came, as fourth, the younger of our two albinos.
  
  Rudolf Steiner also made enquiries about the geological conditions of the district in which the children had been born. Information was given of the presence of pyrites and gypsum, to which allusion is made in the lecture. He then asked whether the people of the district were strikingly blond. This was denied; on the contrary, they are inclined to be dark. Lastly, he enquired whether the parents were relatives of one another; the answer was in the negative.
  
  Rudolf Steiner then explained to us the connection of the albinism with the sulphur. “These children”, he said, “are completely sulphurous. In them, sulphur processes are permeating the entire body.” The children are “all eye”; processes which ought to be going on in the eye alone are here taking place throughout the body. The quivering in the eyes and the furtive glancing hither and thither are due to oscillation between ether body and astral body.

We will now go on to consider the children of whom we had not time to speak yesterday.

There was a little girl of ten years old, who was suffering from loss of memory. She is only in the Second Class at school (where the children would be mostly about seven years old.) She has adenoids. The symptom is connected with an excess of etheric powers of growth in the region of the bladder, which condition is then reflected in the head. Thus we have here a case where the physical origin of the trouble is immediately patent. The girl is ten years old—that is to say, she is at the age when, as I have repeatedly pointed out, it is particularly important that the teacher shall have made the right relationship with the child.

The child herself has of course, so to speak, slept through the antecedent facts and processes that have led up to the present moment. The inflamed condition that shows itself in the neighbourhood of the bladder and has its reflection in the upper part of the organism is clear evidence of the fact that the ether body is not properly at home in the organism—the reason being that its co-operation with the astral body is not able to come about as it should. You must never lose sight of the fact that where a process of this kind occurs, which finds expression in the soul organism, then its source and origin has to be sought in the subtler, finer organisation of the body; for the coarser, cruder organisation cannot put us on the right track in our search. An irregularity in the higher organisation of man is, naturally, more easily noticed than in the lower organisation. In this child, owing to a defective astral body, the ether body does not function properly, with the result that what the child receives by way of impressions fails to penetrate into the organisation. What we have to do, therefore, if we are to help such a child, is to strengthen as much as ever possible the impressions we intend her to receive; in all our work with her, we must see to it that strong impressions are brought to bear on the child.

For consider how it is with memory. Memory is dependent on a right and proper organic relation between physical body and ether body; astral body and I have no part in the retention of impressions in memory. As you know very well, dreams make their appearance only when astral body and ego have begun to enter into the physical and ether body, not before. As far as astral body and ego are concerned, everything is forgotten between the times of falling asleep and awakening. The impressions are left lying in the part of the human being that remains in bed. But when, as in the child we are considering, this part is not properly organised, then what is left there of the impression of the day does not succeed in embodying itself into it. Our first task will be therefore to induce strong impressions, in order to bring it about that the higher organisation—I and astral body—shall be roused to an energetic activity within the lower organisation—ether body and physical body.

I do not know whether the experiment has yet been made of testing the little girl's memory for simple folk-melodies? (Frl. Dr. K.: “She finds that easier.”) So the capacity for receiving impressions of this nature is, you see, present. Starting from it, we should now try to work on further. We should, for example, take with the child little poems where a refrain is repeated—say, after every three lines. She will in this way receive a powerful impression of rhythm; and then later on, the moment will come when we can approach her with impressions that are without rhythm. Do not imagine that any substantial success can be looked for under three or four years—that is, not before puberty. Working on these lines, we must first reach the point where rhythmical impressions are able to act upon the child, and then go on to non rhythmical impressions. In this way we shall be able to achieve something in the educational sense. The therapy we have already indicated; the girl should have compresses with Berberis vulgaris 10 per cent, and Curative Eurythmy: L—M:S—U.

Note that an inner perception underlies the giving of these particular sounds in Curative Eurythmy. The formative, moulding influence will enter right into the mobile astral body. Then the M, as I have told you, is the sound that places the whole organism into the out-breathing, and so the astral organisation will there meet the etheric. With S, the aim is to bring the astral body into powerful and living activity—but it must be an activity that is restrained, held in check; and for this purpose the U is added. These are the measures that suggested themselves when we had the child immediately before us; here we are simply recalling them. Compresses of Berberis vulgaris are prescribed because the causes of inflammation require to be neutralised, and can be by this means.

And then we had a sixteen-year-old boy, a kleptomaniac of the very same type as the little fellow who was brought before you a few days ago, and in whom you could see a perfect example of kleptomania. Your boy at Lauenstein will have to be treated on exactly the same lines. You will need however to watch whether the impressions you bring to him link up with this or that. The results of our work with kleptomaniacs can differ quite considerably according to the education the children have already received.^E6

And now we must go on to speak of the child who is so restless and fidgety. A sleepy, backward little boy, who has not learned to speak and is behind-hand with all the education he should have received in the first epoch of life. You can see at once what is lacking; the child has entirely failed to get hold of the principle of imitation, he has never attempted to imitate. This means, in other words, that his I and astral body are incapable of bringing his organs into movement. He is a most lovable little fellow, but it is extraordinarily difficult for him to overcome the longing that he has in his physical body for rest and quiet. The first thing to be done is to give him Tone Eurythmy. That will be the way to help him on. (You will understand, I can do no more here than indicate the ideal.) If the boy does Tone Eurythmy properly, it can come about that he is so stirred and stimulated in his astral body that the rhythm begins to take hold also of the ether body.

Another thing you must do is to let him repeat after you rhythmical sentences, so that he plunges, as it were, right into sound as such. Take, for instance, the line: “Und es woget und woget und brauset und zischt.” [From Schiller's Der Taucher.] You must go through the sentence with the child rather slowly (you will discover for yourselves what is just the right pace), first forwards and then backwards. (For this particular case, I purposely say “woget” instead of “siedet”, since we are here using the line with a therapeutical end in view.) Go on doing this again and again, forwards and backwards. Wherever possible, the same method should also be followed with a sequence of vowels. In this way we can awaken the child, inwardly. Surprise, amazement, begin to rise up in him, as we get him to intone A (ah), then E (eh), I (ee); and then backwards, I, E, A; then again, A, E, I, and so on. The child gradually wakes up, and, despite all difficulties, the principle of imitation will begin at last to work. It will be necessary to take the child by himself, and to see to it that imitation has its place in everything you do with him; always stop after a few moments and get him to intone after you.

And then, in addition, some therapeutical treatment will be needed; and here you will have to ensure that two opposite influences work together. First, you must provide a dispersing influence that works centrifugally and drives the substantiality of the organism to the circumference. Hypophysis always works in this way. For the child we are considering, hypophysis must not however be used just in the way we use it for rickety children in whom we definitely want to induce dispersal. Here we have to call into action at the same time the opposite principle that works centripetally. You will accordingly need to find something which will have, while working together with hypophysis, the tendency to build up the human organism out of substance. Both Carbo Vegetabilis and Carbo Animalis are able to do this. You could therefore use Carbo Animalis, alternating it with the hypophysis. The Carbo Animalis will supply the form principle, and then in the hypophysis cerebri you will have the organising principle that tends to encourage organic growth.

One of the most important things to bear in mind, when you are starting a Home for Curative Education, is the necessity for constant observation. Each single person who is helping in the work must observe everything he or she takes in hand to do with the children. And it should really be so that we accompany—and in that way strengthen—all that we do with a certain inner trust and confidence.

In the case of this child, our worst trouble will be, not with the boy himself—you will soon be able to notice progress in him—but with the parents. The mother is firmly convinced it is for us to do wonders with him, and that quickly. I have heard that she even wants to come with the child. (One of the teachers interposed: “She is only bringing him to us.”) That is better, it is a relief to hear that you will not have the mother there with you. But with a child of this kind, it will, in any case, be imperative to hold your own—even with a certain obstinacy—in face of the demands and expectations of the parents. These demands are perfectly understandable, but sometimes terribly foolish and unwise. The parents of such a child do not, and cannot, know what is right and necessary for him.

Now it will be very good if you can bring such a child even physically also into the alternating conditions that can be induced by means of the A E I, I E A, etc. I will tell you an excellent way of doing this. First, put the child into a bath of moderately warm water, and then, comparatively quickly, give him instead a douche, also of a moderate temperature. You will by this means call to life that which needs to be roused to life and activity. As a matter of fact, wherever an abnormality expresses itself in laziness and inertia, this measure cannot fail to have good effect, so long as we are careful not to overdo it. Do not be anxious if, immediately after a bath treatment of this kind has been begun, the children get rather excited. That will pass. You will see, a reaction will come, and a more balanced condition gradually establish itself.

And now we must pass on to another boy who sees everything in colours. He is the boy, you remember, who never has any money! I can see him there before me as I speak. The fundamental fact about this child is that he is incapable of making the right approach to the external world; he remains rooted in himself. In order to render this phenomenon intelligible, I shall have to explain it for you in plastic terms. The boy cannot make his way out into the external world; consequently his I organisation is perpetually pushing at his astral body from within. This gives rise to an inner clumsiness—better expressed, an inner slovenliness. But along with this, in connection with the continual pressure on the astral body, there develops also a delicate sensitiveness; so that the boy has really something gentle and noble about him. And that goes together with the seeing in colour. He sees colours because he is able to be awake in his astral body.

Now, we cannot begin to do anything in the way of education for this boy until we have a clear perception of a state of affairs that is developing in him all the time in increasing measure—namely, a certain dim hankering after ideals, but at the same time a starting-back, a flinching from the world as from something he cannot get on with. The boy can be taught entirely on the lines of Waldorf School education, but everything will depend in his case on how you yourself feel and behave towards him; you must preserve all the time a natural trust and confidence in him. There is really hardly anything more than this to be said.

Take for example, writing. The boy writes something like this, does he not? Now it will be for you to set to work and take the utmost care and pains that he shall gradually change his handwriting and develop it into a finely formed script. And you will find that while he is doing this, there will be clear signs also of a transformation taking place in his whole inner constitution. When he shows a tendency to boast and talk big, then you must at once, on the basis of the trust he has learned to place in you, contrive some means to make his boasting ridiculous.^E7

I was speaking to you yesterday about the albinos, and I came to the point where I said we need to find the cosmic impulse that can have influence in such cases. Let us now first ask our expert on cosmic constellations whether she has noticed anything special in these or other horoscopes that albinos have in common. (To Dr. Vreede) Did you notice that among the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune were particularly prominent? (Dr. Vreede replied: “Yes, there are many such aspects. Apart from that, I should not have anything special to say about them.”) I address my question purposely to you, because you are frequently engaged in the contemplation of horoscopes and have probably often had such things in your mind. Up to now, I have from you only these two that we are considering. We are here treading new ground, and it will be best if we go forward entirely in the spirit of discovery. A great many factors in the case might well claim consideration, but I would like us to give our attention for the moment to the following.

Consider the human being. We divide him into certain members. In accordance with that memberment which arranges the whole nature and being of man rather from the etheric principle, we divide him, as you know, into physical body, etheric body, sentient body, which last we then bring into relation with sentient soul; after that we have intellectual or mind soul (which the Greeks call soul of force or power), and consciousness or spiritual soul. And then we come to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. And all these several members reveal themselves to us as forming together a single, relatively independent whole; taken all together, they compose man. But now, the way in which the members are put together to compose man, differs in each single human being. One person will have a little more power and strength in his ether body, and correspondingly less in his physical body; another a little more power in the consciousness soul; and so on. And right in the midst of all these members stands man in his very own individuality, which individuality goes through repeated earth lives and has the task of bringing under control this whole connection of various members, has the task of uniting them, on the principle of freedom, under one individual ordering.

And now let us see how that which comes to man from cosmic realms unites itself with these several members. The influence of the Sun, which works strongly on man as a whole, works strongest of all on the physical body. In connection with the etheric body we find that the strongest influences come from the Moon; in connection with the sentient body it is the influences of Mercury that work with special strength; and in the sentient soul we have the strongest influences of Venus. The strongest influences of Mars serve to help the development of the intellectual or mind soul, and of Jupiter the consciousness or spiritual soul, whilst Saturn brings its influences to bear especially on the spirit self. And the members that have not yet developed in man find their support in Uranus and Neptune—the vagrants, so to speak, among the planets, who attached themselves at a later time to our planetary system. In Uranus and Neptune therefore we shall expect to find planetary influences which, under normal conditions, exert no very strong influence upon the constellation at birth.

You know of course, from other anthroposophical lectures how strong is the influence of the Moon on man, via the ether body. I need not remind you of how the Moon is connected with the whole principle of heredity, of how it impresses all manner of forces and powers into the model of the physical body, which comes from the parents. Beginning with the earliest embryonic development, this Moon influence determines the whole direction that development shall take in the child.

Now it is possible for a constellation to occur where the impulse from the Moon is sufficiently strong for the human being descending to Earth to receive by way of heredity a disposition to be drawn down into the metabolic organisation. Or again, it can also happen that the Moon influences are to some extent wrested away, turned aside, whilst influences that come from quite another quarter and that refuse to tolerate the Moon influences, namely Uranus and Neptune, attract what should really be in the sphere of the Moon's influence: Other constellations are also possible. But in the case of the children we are considering, the latter is the constellation that we find; and we have here a clear instance of how by looking at what the horoscope shows we can see what is really the matter.

Take first this horoscope (of the elder sister). It will probably have struck you that you find here in this region, Uranus together with Venus and Mars. You will not really need to carry your considerations any further than this triangle. Here then are Mars, Venus and Uranus. Consider first Mars. For this child, who was born in 1909, Mars stands in complete opposition to the Moon. Mars, which has Venus and Uranus in its vicinity, stands—itself—in strong opposition to the Moon. Here is the Moon and here is Mars. And Mars pulls along with it Uranus and Venus.

And now I would ask you to pay careful attention also to the fact that the Moon is at the same time standing before Libra. This means, the Moon has comparatively little support from the Zodiac, it wavers and hesitates, it is even something of a weakling in this hour; and its influence is still further reduced through the fact that Mars (which pulls along with it the Luciferic influence) stands in opposition to it.

Now let us turn to the horoscope of the young child. Again, here are Venus and Uranus and Mars near together, the three of them covering between them no more than this section of the heavens. So you see, once again these three are found near to each other. In the case of the elder girl we saw that they were standing in opposition to the Moon, which was at the time standing in Libra. On this second horoscope, Mars, Venus and Uranus are in close proximity, exactly as before; but when we examine more nearly the position of Mars, we find it is not, as before, in complete opposition to the Moon. It is however very nearly so. Although the younger child does not come in for a complete opposition, there is an approximation to opposition.

But what strikes us as still more remarkable is that when we come to make our observation of the Moon, we discover she is again in Libra—while being at the same time, as we have seen, almost in opposition to Mars, which latter drags Uranus and Venus along with it. We have therefore again a background of Libra. I am not saying that it must have been so; we have, you see, no properly authorised records of the births. On the first horoscope the Moon is in Libra, and here on the second too. (Dr. Vreede said: “It is curious that in both there is also the same constellation between Moon and Neptune.”) That would have to be explained on its own account. Horoscopes require to be interpreted quite individually. It is not a matter for surprise that there is this similarity in the two horoscopes, considering that the girls are sisters. That we find in the elder child a stronger opposition than in the younger (who has been influenced by the elder) is also no cause for astonishment. What is important for us is that we find here a constellation that is perfectly intelligible, a constellation that, when interpreted, shows us the following.

Mars, who is the bearer of iron, makes himself independent of the principle of propagation—independent, that is, of the Moon. He brings away from its true mission that which comes to man through the Venus principle and is connected with love. Mars tears this out of its true path of action, does not allow it to be in connection with generation, nor afterwards with growth; with the result that that which rightly stands in connection with the growth forces and should live in the lower part of the body, presses up into the head organisation. Consequently we find that in the growth process that takes place within the child iron will be lacking, whereas everything that tends to be in conflict with iron, notably sulphur, will be present to excess.

We have therefore here to do with an extraordinarily strong predestination of the will, and our first concern must be to see that we treat the nerves-and-senses organisation of these two children with the utmost care and delicacy. Their nerves-and-senses organisation is, as a whole, slippery and unstable, unable to endure strong impressions; and we must be ready at every moment with the right thing to do, we must sense it in our finger-tips! A fine feeling and tact is needed in all one's dealings with the nerves-and-senses organisation of children of this kind; especially must we avoid straining the eyes in reading and such-like occupations. Try to impart your teaching without requiring the use of the eyes at all—I mean, without any reading. On the other hand, accustom the eyes to colour impressions where the colours shade off gently into one another. For instance, let the colours of the rainbow pass over from one into another, slowly, the child following all the time with her gaze. There you have, you see, measures that will be quite easy to carry out.

If you are also to treat the children therapeutically, there is just one thing I must tell you, and that is, that after puberty the remedies will no longer be very effective. And that can be an important indication for you, since the one child was born in 1909, and the other in I921; the effects of treatment can in their case be thoroughly observed and the difference noted.

What we want to do for a child of this kind is to introduce powerful radiations of iron, letting them stream up from the metabolism-and-limbs organisation. The way to bring this about is to take pyrites in very fine powder form and lay it on a surface that transmits iron radiations only very slightly. A glass surface would fulfil this condition, but naturally you cannot use glass. So you must try using a clean grease-saturated paper; best of all would be a very thin parchment-like paper, but it must be really thin so that it clings to the body. Ordinary paper that is made from linen rags is no good. You must rub resin or something of that sort over the paper and sift the pyrites powder finely on to it. By this means you can bring the iron radiation to enter right into the child. Lay the paper all along the legs and on the shoulder-blades, and then try the application of a “drawing” compress—say, of cochlearia—on the forehead.

If this treatment be applied to the organism at the time when the change of teeth is taking place—a time when particularly powerful streamings and counter-streamings (or radiations) are going on—much can be done towards overcoming the instability.

Such is then the result of our investigations so far. The problem must of course be the subject of further study. Up to now, the world has done nothing with albinos except expose them for show, getting them to tell their tale: “I am rather fat, I have white hair, I can see nothing by day, I can see better at night.” This is the kind of thing that actually goes on with albinos today, and there is on the whole very little knowledge about them; for the scientists of our day do not concern themselves with problems of this nature. But directly we turn our attention to striking facts such as those I have been putting before you here we begin to see how strongly the cosmic influence is working, wherever this complete irregularity is present in the mutual disposition of the members of the human being.

And now I should like you to bring forward any questions you are wanting to ask.

(Question: “That we find ourselves in the situation of having questions to ask has come about through Dr. L. approaching Frau Dr. Wegman on quite other grounds. He was of opinion that the mood of those attending the lectures was not as it should be.”)

It is surely quite unnecessary that we should waste time discussing what is after all a simple matter. Dr. L. came to me and explained that there was a deep feeling among the Lauenstein members of the importance of the task they were undertaking; they felt they were about to embark upon what would prove to be a new mission within the Anthroposophical Movement, and it would surely be good if the karmic connections between those who are engaging in the work could be thoroughly explained and understood. (l. shakes his head.) Well, anyway, let us concentrate our attention on the main point. What L. said amounted to this: The Lauenstein members believe that they have now set out upon a task that is entirely new and of fundamental importance; to which I replied that in that case what they will need before all else will be sincerely and faithfully to learn what is being given in this course. If it should prove that anyone is not satisfied with what is being given in this course of lectures and would rather remain in the realm of abstractions, would rather set to work, for example, to organise a completely new movement, then all I can say is that such an attitude would be no more than the natural result of practices that have been followed only too long among our members. Anyone taking such a path would find himself in danger of megalomania. Nevertheless, in order that the partly justified feelings in the background may have ample opportunity to find expression, I have asked you to put your questions. And so now our best plan will be to ask and consider together quite practical questions.

(S. asks, what connection has the Lauenstein Home with the fact that Trüper [Johannes Trüper, 1855-1921, Founder and for many years Leader of the Youth Sanatorium in Jena.] was the first to undertake the education of backward children.)

What do you mean? That Trüper was the first to concern himself with these children and do something for them? You are attaching too much importance to the work of this man. I do not think that the Educational Homes for backward children which were started in Hanover—very early, comparatively speaking, and not without success—can have been influenced by Trüper. In point of fact, the first step in this direction dates much farther back. But what has been lacking all along is just the very thing that can enable one to look right into the whole being of the child. For we have really no means of discovering the simplest facts without the help of anthroposophical knowledge. And the converse is no less true, that the human beings themselves are constantly affording us new and deeper insight into Anthroposophy.

Consider how it is, for instance, with regard to Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis. In the form it was able to develop under Goethe himself, who was after all a clever man, it appears to us today, does it not, as an abstract theory? It abounds in statements and premises, but has to be content with showing how the leaf lives in the blossom, how a petal changes into a stamen, etc.—treating, that is, of no more than an elementary metamorphosis. When it goes on to speak of animal and man, all that the theory can do is to adduce—rather shyly—the transformation of the vertebrae into the bones of the skull. In no realm of nature does it get beyond the elementary stage. I myself was amazed and perplexed. Did it never dawn upon Goethe—so I kept asking myself all through the eighties—that the whole brain is a transformation of one single ganglion? Spiritually, I could see that it was so; it had dawned upon him. Then, later on, I made a discovery, which showed that it was only Goethe's discreet reserve which had restrained him all the time from giving expression to the truth he clearly perceived. When I came to Weimar, I found in a little note-book—which was written all in pencil—this note: The brain is a transformed main ganglion. It was not until the nineties of last century that that sentence of Goethe's found its way, through me, into print. Suddenly it was as though a new author made his appearance; Goethe became thenceforward the most fruitful of authors.

But now consider what a long way it is from the Theory of Metamorphosis as taught by Goethe to the Theory of Metamorphosis as demonstrated in the one-year-old little child who was lying there before you a few days ago—normal in other respects, but metamorphosed into a giant embryo. That was an instance of a metamorphosis of retardation, where the embryonic condition was retained after birth. And you will yourselves come to acquire a true insight into this kind of metamorphosis if you continue to practise again and again the meditation I gave you yesterday, when I told you: Here is a circle, here is a point; there the circle is a point, there the point of a circle, and so (see Figure 3.). Over and over again you must, in meditation, let the circle steal into the point, let the point expand to the circle. As you do this, you will find that something reveals itself to you, namely, how the metabolism-and-limbs organisation comes into being out of the head organisation. Continue with the meditation until, when you say to yourself: The point is a point, the circle is a circle, you are sensible of the head; and when you say to yourself: The point is a circle, the circle is a point—when, that is, you assert the converse—you discover that you are gliding right down into the metabolic system. You will then have before you the developed Theory of Metamorphosis, and you will see quite clearly that it is only through this kind of thinking that we can ever hope to attain insight into the nature of the defects in backward children. And this is what we have been attempting in these lectures.

Search for the impulses that are already there in the place where you are beginning your work; find what impulses are there that can inspire you with enthusiasm and so make for a continuity. Ask yourselves the question: What antecedents are there here which we can link onto?

Now, as you know, a remarkable historical figure is associated with Jena. Once, long ago, the German Abbot Hildebrand, feeling within him—exactly as do the youth of today—great gifts and capacities, moved too, as they also are, by religious and spiritual impulses (but in his case the spiritual was methodically conceived), went to Rome, became Pope Gregory VII, and strongly influenced the direction given from Rome to the course of affairs in European history. We have thus a powerful Roman impulse, spreading its activity out over Europe, mediated through an impulse that derives from the order of Cluny and has been transplanted into the Roman stream. You should study that passage of history. For the remarkable thing is that in his next life on Earth this individuality is drawn to Jena and appears there as Ernst Haeckel. The development is really just the same as happens in the human being when the disintegrating principle inserts itself, dovetails itself, in a regular manner into the upbuilding principle. So you have here in Jena a centre for currents of influence that are in direct and explicit opposition to the current of Roman activity. Jena is the meeting place of opposite streams.

Haeckel made a speech in Jena on his sixtieth birthday. He was speaking on that occasion at the Phylogenetic Institute. Listening to him, one could really have the feeling that the old Hildebrand was standing there before one. The same manner of expression, the very same kind of delivery—speaking slowly, with a good deal of “padding”, weighing the words carefully, like someone who has done quite a lot of speaking and yet never made himself quite master of the art. Another curious thing could be noticed. Abbot Hildebrand, who had of course always very much the air of being a strict Pope—he would stand there before you as the very mouthpiece of the Church—had, at the same time, this trait in his character: he was fond of relating stories that made the rest of the company smile—not overmuch, but with pleasure and enjoyment. And now with Haeckel, it was really quite delightful to watch how he would sometimes at dinner between the courses fall into the mood of telling funny anecdotes out of his own life, and loosening in this way the tongues of the rest of the company. This sixty-year-old man with his childlike smile would lead the others on, and by his whole manner and behaviour bring them right away from the subject in hand. I can still remember how amusing it was to see Oskar Hertwig sitting there in travail with his speech that could not be brought to birth, while Haeckel went on and on with one funny story after another.

You would, I believe, find yourselves well repaid if, now that I have laid for you this esoteric foundation, you were to get hold of this speech that Haeckel made on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It is not long, but remarkable for being personal and at the same time extraordinarily objective. And then compare with it the speech delivered by Prof. Gärtner, who invariably manifested a disinclination to see in Haeckel a person of any particular historical significance. Indeed, he expressly states in his speech that this time he will leave out of account that Haeckel is the author of the “History of the Creation” and concentrate attention on the vast number of microscope slides that Haeckel has made; for we shall find, he says, that Haeckel has made more slides than all the rest of us put together—a most remarkable fact; actually the rest of us have made so few, that taken all together ours fail to reach the number made by Haeckel alone. A pedant, a regular pedant, this Gärtner! Really quite absurd! In Haeckel's speech you have something so alive, so quick with fresh, new life! Then the scaffold is brought in, and Gärtner comes forward and performs the execution, while the physiologist (a Catholic clerk in holy orders!) looks sadly on.^E8

But what a power Haeckel was amid all that company! What a rejuvenating influence he had upon them! Even the young students grew suddenly brilliantly clever, and showed quite remarkable powers of imagination. Look up the little book where all the songs are recorded which were sung that day. You will find a most witty account of how an archaeopteryx sharpened his bill on a church steeple. That book of songs will enable you to form some picture of the fresh young life that suddenly blossomed forth in Jena on that day.

This event too I would commend for your meditation. By entering meditatively into the event, you will come to have an intimate experience of the place occupied by Jena in the spiritual evolution of Europe.

• E6. At Lauenstein, Dr. Steiner said that the pathological symptoms which reveal themselves in this boy are due to some suffering he underwent in his previous incarnation. He had perhaps been alone for a long time—stranded maybe from a shipwreck and forced to spend long and tedious days in solitude. This experience was then transformed and shows itself today as weakness of the ego.
  
  For treatment, the boy should have sugar injections D 6, seven injections in fourteen days. Afterwards he should be sponged with starchy water, this treatment also to be continued for fourteen days. The body will have to change the starch into sugar, and that will provide another means of stimulating the ego.
  
  Dr. Steiner's advice for the education of the boy was as follows: He must keep a diary, recording all that he has done right through the day. That will strengthen his I. He should have stories told him with pedagogical purpose in them, stories in which it turns out that people who steal get the worst of it. The magpie is always thieving, and in consequence the other birds will have nothing to do with it. Then, the boy should be taught some practical job. He should learn how boots are made. “He could make boots for your whole family!” He could also learn gardening. And he should be encouraged to solve all manner of little practical problems. For example, how the door of a train might be so constructed that as soon as someone got on to the step, the door would open (and afterwards close again) automatically—and other things of that kind.
• E7. In reference to this boy, Dr. Steiner spoke of a “dwarfed or stunted pituitary body.”
  
  Therapy: Injections of hypophysis (pituitary body) and treatment with arsenic, as indicated in the lecture.
  
  Curative Eurythmy: L, M, S, R.
  
  Note 8.
• E8. The title of this booklet is Lieder zum Commers in Jena am 17 Februar 1894. The verse referred to, from the song 'Zoologischer Jubelgruss' by Edwin Bormann is as follows:
  
  Staunet nicht, O Festkumpane,
  Wenn ein Archaeopt'ryx jetzt
  Eben an der Rathausfahne
  Seinen werthen Schnabel wetzt;
  Wer heut' heimwärts sucht die Pfade
  Geh' voll Fürsicht Schritt für Schritt,
  Dass er auf der Promenade
  Nicht'nen Plesiosaurus tritt. :' :
  
  An English equivalent might read:
  
  On your homeward way, good people,
  Should you chance to find a sleek
  Pterodactyl, on the steeple
  Whetting of his noble beak,
  Do not be surprised or flustered,
  But turn the corner with some care,
  For you'll very, very likely
  Find a Dinosauros there.

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.

My dear friends,

For this “Pastoral Medicine” course we are bringing together for the first time the members of two distinct circles of spiritual work. This is of quite special importance. We must inquire, therefore, first of all into the reason for the combination, from the intended content of the course itself. In the first place I would like to point out that perhaps this course will be an example of how ancient traditions must be renewed through a particular form of spiritual activity in our time. For what has so far developed under the name “pastoral medicine” has lost its original content. We will see that this is so in the course of our study. Yet out of the very foundation of this present age there arises a most significant task that as it takes shape may be allowed to bear the name of pastoral medicine. We have made the strict requirement that this course be mainly for real theologians and real physicians, including those who are training to be real physicians, in the sense in which that title can be given them from the standpoint of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum. How this standpoint is to be understood will become clear during the course. We have admitted a few individuals who are exceptions to the general requirement, and these for reasons based on the opinion of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum.

First and foremost, dear friends, there must be an absolutely clear understanding in the part of the theologians and on the part of the physicians what is now going to be made possible by their working together: namely, a new pastoral medicine. Their working together has indeed often been discussed; it has even been pointed out that the anthroposophical movement should try to bring it about. But things have come to light that must be corrected during this course. A proper working together must certainly not be understood to mean any dilettantish interference by one side into the work of the other side. It certainly does not mean that the theologians are to become physicians, or that the physicians are to become in the slightest way theologians. It is purely a matter of the two professions working together hand-in-hand. The course will stress very strongly the importance of preventing any kind of confusion by, for instance, the theologians trying to get their hands into various medical measures that cannot possibly lie in their sphere of work. On the other hand, physicians must be clearly aware of the position they must always hold—in the sense just described—toward theologians. It is tremendously important that this should be thoroughly understood by both sides. A great deal will depend upon it.

Apparently the thought has even been entertained that theologians should actually acquire medical knowledge. Well, of course, it is always good to acquire knowledge. But the important thing here is to realize absolutely clearly that physicians, in addition to the cultivation of their thinking, feeling, and willing, have had specific medical training. People should not play with the idea that they can push their way into the world with bits and pieces of medical knowledge without this specific medical training—even if they are theologians! On the other hand, physicians must develop a special conception of their profession; they must learn through pastoral medicine that something essential is expressed when it is said: The flame of offering belongs to the priest, the Mercury staff to the physician. And only through the working together of the flame of offering and the Mercury staff is a healthful cooperation possible. One must not want to heal with the flame of offering, or to celebrate ritual with the Mercury staff. But one must realize that both are divine service. The more fully this is realized, the better their cooperation will be, with physician remaining physician and priest remaining priest, and the more healing will be their work in the world. Our anthroposophical movement must not be allowed to become an area where everything is thrown together in chaotic fashion: the seriousness that we should be cultivating so strongly within our movement would suffer thereby. One can have knowledge of the general procedure for a foot operation, but one should certainly not think that therefore one can perform the operation. And this holds true for all medical matters. Above all, Anthroposophy must not become propaganda for quackery. Theologians must not be allowed to become quacks.

The Medical Section at the Goetheanum will handle with extreme seriousness whatever is going to give an individual a position out in the world as an anthroposophical physician. But the following must also become an established procedure: that physicians who want to work with the same impulses as the Medical Section at the Goetheanum will have their status and their relation to the Section properly defined by the Section. There will be no progress unless this procedure becomes a complete reality—so complete, in fact, that in the future someone will be acknowledged as a physician if the requirements of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum are filled. From this point of view also, we are justified in not having admitted to this course healers who are not physicians. Those who are here today (with a very few exceptions) can lay full claim in the outside world to membership in the medical profession. Perhaps we have made ourselves clear. I have been speaking more from the administrative angle. But the matter will be the concern of pastoral medicine itself. When the theologians recently raised the question of whether something of a medical nature could be given them, I could not do otherwise than say that I would give a course on pastoral medicine in which theologians could participate. And so the course has been organized by the Medical Section of the Goetheanum, and the theologians are taking part in it. It must be quite clear why we have structured it in this way.

Up to now, pastoral medicine has not been a subject in the medical faculties, but in the theological faculties. And the pastoral medicine that has been taught in the theological faculties has really not contained anything specifically medical. Or perhaps I should ask, have any physicians here who have gone through the academic training had any pastoral medicine in their medical courses? It is not offered in any catalogue of a medical faculty. It hardly appears any more in Protestant theological faculties, but it does have a role in Catholic theological faculties—and for a good reason. Only it contains nothing of a medical nature. In the main it contains, first, the knowledge priests need in order to work as pastors, not only with healthy people who are given into their care, but also with those who are sick. There is a difference in whether one has the care of the soul of a sick person, particularly one who is seriously sick, or of a healthy person. With the sick, perhaps severely sick individuals, the question is how one shapes the soul care, how one relates to it. But I have never yet found a book on pastoral medicine that did not stress repeatedly that the first task of the pastor is to make certain by word and deed that a real doctor is found, and that the pastor should refrain from all medical measures.

A second important subject of pastoral medicine has to do with the hygienic aspects of certain ritual measures. For instance, the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of fasting required for ceremonial reasons is explained for the lay person; also what medical science has to say, for instance, about circumcision and similar matters. For priests themselves—this, of course, has just to do with Catholic faculties—it sets forth clearly what is to be said from a hygienic standpoint about asceticism. This is spoken about very fully.

A further subject has to do with what measures should be taken, for instance, in a parish where there is a doctor, what connection there should be between the medical care and the sacraments. When a religious community bases its activity on the reality of the sacraments, the priest must be prepared to meet the medical treatment that is being given. There is, for instance, the anointing that the priest must perform at the sickbed by the side of the doctor. We have also to consider what significance the earlier pastoral medicine attributed to a person's receiving communion while recovering from a severe illness. Looking at the spiritual aspect, one has to ponder on the working of the sacrament in relation to the processes of healing in a human being.

A further subject examines how the pastor has to relate to the physician in psychopathic cases, cases of mentally handicapped or psychically abnormal individuals. The pastoral work is varied for such cases. This was the principal task confronting pastoral medicine in its earlier days, and it was taken care of through the centuries rather extensively by calling on the authority of the Church Fathers' writings.

That is a field of work that cannot appear in the same light to us who are involved in a renewal of spiritual life. Indeed, from fundamental anthroposophical views we are aware of very important tasks in that field for a new pastoral medicine. And we can discover the extent of such tasks if we consider the subject from two sides.

First, let us consider it from the medical point of view. What are we doing when we apply a therapy? When we give a medicine or apply some healing measure to a sick person, there is always the fact that in the healing process we want to set in motion, whether physical or spiritual or pertaining to the soul, we are going beyond the so-called normal relation of that person to the surrounding world. No matter what therapy we use, in every instance we are going beyond what the person has normally in everyday life, whether it is taking of nourishment, or exposure to light and air, or exposure to soul influences. In every circumstance we are going beyond all of that in our therapy. Even if we simply prescribe a small change of diet, we have gone a small step beyond what the person had permitted in his or her own everyday relation to the surrounding world.

Say we prescribe a medicine. If it's a physical substance, its effect will be that a different process takes place than would take place if the patient were merely eating food. And it is the same with other therapeutic measures. In using any therapeutic measure we are intervening in the life of the patient in a way that is different from the way life usually works upon that person. For what is the normal intervention in human life? How does a person take hold of his or her own life? We can distinguish three kinds of processes that intervene, or can intervene, in human life. First, the process that is active in the person in the same way that physical-chemical forces are active in outer nature. Second, the process that is active in the realm of a person's life forces, in life itself. Third, the process that takes immediate hold of the person in the sphere of consciousness:

1. Physical-chemical
2. Life
3. Consciousness

Here we must grasp an important concept. In ordinary life there are three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The moment we apply an active therapeutic measure, we are intervening in the sphere of consciousness to a greater or lesser degree depending on what the measure is. Such intervention never occurs in such a direct way in the so-called normal course of life. A person who is eating, for instance, is surrendering to the usual process of taking nourishment; then, if this has proceeded normally, waking, dreaming, and sleeping follow in normal fashion. At the most, we might vary a diet for the purpose of bringing about better sleep, but there the boundary is already shifted. Therapy has already begun.

It is quite another matter if you intervene with some therapy when, for instance, a patient has a fever. If you were to apply the same therapy to a healthy person you would alter the person's condition of consciousness. Thus a physician has to work fundamentally with the various states of consciousness. A human being's ordinary relation to the outer world has to do with life forces, but in medical work one is intervening in the states of consciousness. You will find this is so in every single therapeutic measure. And it is the specific characteristic of a therapeutic measure that it does enter into what has to do in some way or other with the variability of consciousness. In fact the only effective therapy is one that takes such deep hold of our human constitution that it penetrates to the source from which our various states of consciousness come. But thereby you are intervening as physician, as therapist, directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. Your alteration of someone's condition of consciousness means that you are intervening directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. And when you have a really active cure, through this penetration into the state of consciousness, even though it may be into subconsciousness, you are always drawing the soul of the person into the therapeutic process. You do not remain in the physical sphere. Ordinary consumption of food, ordinary breathing, and other ordinary processes remain in the physical sphere, and the higher members work indirectly through the physical sphere. Higher forces are active through the physical organism. In contrast, when you are working as a physician or therapist you draw the patient's soul directly into his or her physical body. Indeed we can say if physicians understand their profession properly, they realize that they enter directly into the realm of the spiritual. It only seems that therapy is merely a physical or biological process. True therapeutic measures always involve the patient's soul, even though at first this may remain unknown to the ordinary consciousness. You should observe what actually takes place in a patient when, let us say, a fever is suddenly lowered by some therapeutic means. In this event processes are introduced into the innermost depth of the patient's being—just as the illness itself had worked into this depth—beyond the merely physical and biological realm. So we have looked at the picture from the medical point of view. We have seen how doctoring, healing, by its very nature leads from the physical realm into the spiritual.

Now let us examine the priest's profession just as carefully. Priests whose calling is not one of teaching, if they are truly active priests, then they are connected with the ritual, and the ritual includes the sacraments. But the sacraments are not symbols. What are they? They consist of the fact that external events take place, which are not exhausted, in chemical or biological processes. They contain orientations which are embodied in the physical-biological sphere, but which have their origin in the spiritual world. Sense-perceptible actions are performed, and spirit streams into the actions. Spiritual reality is present in the ritual on the level of sense perception. And what takes place there in front of the congregation takes place first of all before their conscious observation. Nothing is permitted to take place except what does take place in that way. Otherwise it would not be ritual, not sacrament, but suggestion. The sacraments—if they are done right—are never allowed to contain any element of suggestion. All the more, therefore, they are able to contain what is spiritual. They take place before the waking consciousness of the participants, but they work into the sphere of the life forces.

In communion a person is not just eating the material substance; in that case it would not be a sacrament. Nor is it a matter of symbols. Rather it has to do with reaching into a person's life, because a sacrament is enacted, is celebrated, through an orientation toward the spiritual world. Therefore one can say therapy leads from life to consciousness; the ritual with its sacraments leads from consciousness to life.

Therapy: life to consciousness
Ritual (sacraments): consciousness to life

There you have the two activities in polarity: therapeutic activity and the celebration of the sacraments. In therapeutic measures, the course leads from life to consciousness, and consciousness becomes a helper, at least (in ordinary consciousness) an unconscious helper, in the healing process. In the celebration of the sacraments life is made a helper for what is enacted before the consciousness. Both of these activities have to be grasped spiritually in deep inwardness—not merely diagrammatically as it is now being presented to you. They require the involvement of the total human being if that individual wants to make one or the other a vocation. In our present civilization therapy has left behind the spiritual element, and theology has left behind the concrete world. In our present civilization therapy has taken a false path into materialism and theology a false path into abstraction. For these reasons their true relationship has become completely veiled. This true relationship must be reestablished. It must become active again.

Again it must become clear that for diagnosis physicians need a trained observation that enables them to see a biological or physical process in the human organism as a spiritual process. For all processes in the human organism are spiritual. For diagnosing, and still more for treatment, physicians need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the spirit within the physical. Priests need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the physical reflection of a spiritual event. There is a polarity again. But there must always be polarities working together in this world, and these are no exception.

To see how they are to work together will be a task within the sphere of Anthroposophy and based on Anthroposophy, a task also to be fulfilled within anthroposophical spheres of activity. So one can think that out of this gathering for a pastoral medicine course there may actually be created future anthroposophical physicians—physicians who will hold the right relation to priests because of their own relation to the spiritual world. The priests themselves will have come out of the Movement for Religious Renewal. Something quite special will develop out of this course for the physician and the priest so that they will work together in a true way.

For what in this case can it mean that they work together? Surely not that the priest does dilettantish doctoring and that the doctor is a dilettante priest! If their working together were to consist of priests knowing a few medical facts and physicians vesting themselves as priests, then I'd like to know why they should work together. Why should an experienced physician be interested in half priest-half doctor dilettantism? It makes no sense. And why should a priest want to interfere in medical matters except when the physician asks for a pastor? On the other hand, if the physician is a good physician standing squarely within the medical profession, and if the priest is a real priest, they can work together. It means that one offers help to the other out of professional abilities, not that one pushes into the other's professional domain.

Such an association will bring about a profoundly important result for our culture. The physician will truly understand the priest, and the priest the physician. The priest will know as much about being a doctor as is needed to know and the physician as much about the vocation of the priest as is needed to know. And then in time we will see to what extent physician and priest can work with the teacher to accomplish something beneficial to humanity.

In that area, too, people will have to work together—and in the most manifold ways, because education is also something that must be looked at from a fresh point of view. The priest cannot be a physician, nor the physician a priest, but they can both in a certain sense be teachers. But all the details of these new associations will have to be thought out quite concretely. Therefore I would like to ask you from the very beginning to count this earnest request as part of all that this pastoral medicine course is going to present: that everything be worked out on a professional and expert basis. Priests will truly help actual physicians if they reject all thought of medical dilettantism. That will be one of their responsibilities. And physicians will be able to do very much at the sickbed to bring the mission of the priests to proper fulfillment—precisely at the sickbed, where often a priest has to intervene in life in a really essential way.

Dear friends,

If we are going to consider the mutual concerns of priest and physician, we should look first at certain phenomena in human life that easily slide over into the pathological field. These phenomena require a physician's understanding, since they reach into profound depths, even into the esoteric realm of religious life. We have to realize that all branches of human knowledge must be liberated from a certain coarse attitude that has come into them in this materialistic epoch. We need only recall how certain phenomena that had been grouped together for some time under the heading “genius and insanity” have recently been given a crass interpretation by Lombroso¹ and his school and also by others. I am not pointing to the research itself—that has its uses—but rather to their way of looking at things, to what they brought out as “criminal anthropology,” from studying the skulls of criminals. The opinions they voiced were not only coarse but extraordinarily commonplace. Obviously the philistines all got together and decided what the normal type of human being is. And it was as near as could possibly be to a philistine! And whatever deviated from this type was pathological, genius on one side, insanity on the other; each in its own way was pathological. Since it is quite obvious to anyone with insight that every pathological characteristic also expresses itself bodily, it is also obvious that symptoms can be found in bodily characteristics pointing in one or the other direction. It is a matter of regarding the symptoms in the proper way. Even an earlobe can under certain conditions clearly reveal some psychological peculiarity, because such psychological peculiarities are connected with the karma that works over from earlier incarnations.

The forces that build the physical organism in the first seven years of human life are the same forces by which we think later. So it is important to consider certain phenomena, not in the customary manner but in a really appropriate way. We will not be regarding them as pathological (although they will lead us into aspects of pathology) but rather will be using them to obtain a view of human life itself.

Let us for a moment review the picture of a human being that Anthroposophy gives us. The human being stands before us in a physical body, which has a long evolution behind it, three preparatory stages before it became an earthly body—as is described in my book An Outline of Esoteric Science.² This earthly body needs to be understood much more than it is by today's anatomy and physiology. For the human physical body as it is today is a true image of the etheric body, which is in its third stage of development, and of the astral body, which is in its second stage, and even to a certain degree of the ego organization that humans first received on earth, which therefore is in its first stage of development. All of this is stamped like the stamp of a seal upon the physical body—which makes the physical body extraordinarily complicated. Only its purely mineral and physical nature can be understood with the methods of knowledge that are brought to it today. What the etheric body impresses upon it is not to be reached at all by those methods. It has to be observed with the eye of a sculptor so that one obtains pictorial images of cosmic forces, images that can then be recognized again in the form of the entire human being and in the forms of the single organs.

The physical human being is also an image of the breathing and blood circulation. But the entire dynamic activity that works and weaves through the blood circulation and breathing system can only be understood if one thinks of it in musical forms. For instance, there is a musical character to the formative forces that were poured into the skeletal system and then became active in a finer capacity in the breathing and circulation. We can perceive in eurythmy how the octave goes out from the shoulder blade and proceeds along the bones of the arm. This bone formation of the arm cannot be understood from a mechanical view of dynamics, but only from musical insight. We find the interval of the prime extending from the shoulder blade to the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, the interval of the second in the humerus, the third from the elbow to the wrist. We find two bones there because there are two thirds in music, a larger and a smaller. And so on. In short, if we want to find the impression of the astral body upon the physical body, upon the breathing and blood circulation, we are obliged to bring a musical understanding to it.

Still more difficult to understand is the ego organization. For this one needs to grasp the meaning of the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word.” “The Word” is meant there to be understood in a concrete sense, not abstractly, as commentators of the Gospels usually present it. If this is applied concretely to the real human being, it provides an explanation of how the ego organization penetrates the human physical body. You can see that we ought to add much more to our studies if they are to lead to a true understanding of the human being. However, I am convinced that a tremendous amount of material could be eliminated not only from medical courses but from theological courses too. If one would only assemble the really essential material, the number of years medical students, for instance, must spend in their course would not be lengthened but shortened. Naturally it is thought in materialistic fashion today that if there's something new to be included, you must tack another half-year onto the course!

Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization. In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection. In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body. For instance, we can have: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego organization. (Plate I, 1) Then, in the waking state, the so-called normal relation prevails among these four members of the human organization.

But it can also happen that the physical body and etheric body are in some kind of normal connection and that the astral body sits within them comparatively normally, but that the ego organization is somehow not properly sitting within the astral body. (Plate I, 2) Then we have an irregularity that in the first place confronts us in the waking condition. Such people are unable to come with their ego organization properly into their astral body; therefore their feeling life is very much disturbed. They can even form quite lively thoughts. For thoughts depend, in the main, upon a normal connection of the astral body with the other bodies. But whether the sense impressions will be grasped appropriately by the thoughts depends upon whether the ego organization is united with the other parts in a normal fashion. If not, the sense impressions become dim. And in the same measure that the sense impressions fade, the thoughts become livelier. Sense impressions can appear almost ghostly, not clear as we normally have them. The soul-life of such people is flowing away; their sense impressions have something misty about them, they seem to be continually vanishing. At the same time their thoughts have a lively quality and tend to become more intense, more colored, almost as if they were sense impressions themselves.

When such people sleep, their ego organization is not properly within the astral body, so that now they have extraordinarily strong experiences, in fine detail, of the external world around them. They have experiences, with their ego and astral body both outside their physical and etheric bodies, of that part of the world in which they live—for instance, the finer details of the plants or an orchard around their house. Not what they see during the day, but the delicate flavor of the apples, and so forth. That is really what they experience. And in addition, pale thoughts that are after-effects in the astral body from their waking life.

You see, it is difficult if you have such a person before you. And you may encounter such people in all variations in the most manifold circumstances of life. You may meet them in your vocation as physician or as priest—or the whole congregation may encounter them. You can find them in endless variety, for instance, in a town. Today the physician who finds such a person in an early stage of life makes the diagnosis: psychopathological impairment. To modern physicians that person is a psychopathological impairment case who is at the borderline between health and illness; whose nervous system, for instance, can be considered to be on a pathological level. Priests, if they are well-schooled (let us say a Benedictine or Jesuit or Barnabite or the like; ordinary parish priests are sometimes not so well-schooled), will know from their esoteric background that the things such a person tells them can, if properly interpreted, give genuine revelations from the spiritual world, just as one can have from a really insane person. But the insane person is not able to interpret them; only someone who comprehends the whole situation can do so. Thus you can encounter such a person if you are a physician, and we will see how to regard this person medically from an anthroposophical point of view. Thus you can also encounter such a person if you are a priest—and even the entire congregation can have such an encounter.

But now perhaps the person develops further; then something quite special appears. The physical and etheric bodies still have their normal connection. But now there begins to be a stronger pull of the ego organization, drawing the astral body to itself, so that the ego organization and astral body are now more closely bound together. And neither of them enters properly into the physical and etheric bodies. (Plate I, 3) Then the following can take place: the person becomes unable to control the physical and etheric bodies properly from the astral body and ego. The person is unable to push the astral body and ego organization properly into the external senses, and therefore, every now and then, becomes “senseless.” Sense impressions in general fade away and the person falls into a kind of dizzy dream state. But then in the most varied way moral impulses can appear with special strength. The person can be confused and also extremely argumentative if the rest of the organism is as just described.

Now physicians find in such a case that physical and biochemical changes have taken place in the sense organs and the nerve substance. They will find, although they may take slight notice of them, great abnormalities in the ductless glands and their hormone secretion, in the adrenal glands, and the glands that are hidden in the neck as small glands within the thyroid gland. In such a case there are changes particularly in the pituitary gland and the pineal gland. These are more generally recognized than are the changes in the nervous system and in the general area of the senses.

And now the priest comes in contact with such a person. The person confesses to experiencing an especially strong feeling of sin, stronger than people normally have. The priest can learn very much from such individuals, and Catholic priests do. They learn what an extreme consciousness of sin can be like, something that is so weakly developed in most human beings. Also in such a person the love of one's neighbor can become tremendously intense, so much so that the person can get into great trouble because of it, which will then be confessed to the priest.

The situation can develop still further. The physical body can remain comparatively isolated because the etheric body—from time to time or even permanently—does not entirely penetrate it, so that now the astral and etheric bodies and the ego organization are closely united with one another and the physical organism is separate from them. (Plate II) To use the current materialistic terms (which we are going to outgrow as the present course of study progresses), such people are in most cases said to be severely mentally retarded individuals. They are unable from their soul-spiritual individuality to control their physical limbs in any direction, not even in the direction of their own will. Such people pull their physical organism along, as it were, after themselves. A person who is in this condition in early childhood, from birth, is also diagnosed as mentally retarded. In the present stage of earth evolution, when all three members—ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body—are separated from the physical, and the lone physical body is dragged along after them, the person cannot perceive, cannot be active, cannot be illumined by the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. So experiences are dim and the person goes about in a physical body as if it were anesthetized. This is extreme mental retardation, and one has to think how at this stage one can bring the other bodies down into the physical organism. Here it can be a matter of educational measures, but also to a great extent of external therapeutic measures.

But now the priest can be quite amazed at what such a person will confess. Priests may consider themselves very clever, but even thoroughly educated priests—there really are such men in Catholicism; one must not underestimate it—they pay attention if a so-called sick person comes to them and says, “The things you pronounce from the pulpit aren't worth much. They don't add up to anything, they don't reach up to the dwelling place of God, they don't have any worth except external worth. One must really rest in God with one's whole being.” That's the kind of thing such people say. In every other area of their life they behave in such a way that one must consider them to be extremely retarded, but in conversation with their priest they come out with such speeches. They claim to know inner religious life more intimately than someone who speaks of it professionally; they feel contempt for the professional. They call their experience “rest in God.” And you can see that the priest must find ways and means to relate to what such a person—one can say patient, or one can use other terms—to what such a human being is experiencing within.

One has to have a sensitive understanding for the fact that pathological conditions can be found in all spheres of life, for the fact that some people may be quite unable at the present time to find their way in the physical-sense world, quite unable to be the sort of human being that external life now requires all of us to be. We are all necessarily to a certain degree philistines as regards external life. But such people as I am describing are not in condition to travel along our philistine paths; they have to travel other ways. Priests must be able to feel what they can give such a person, how to connect what they can give out of themselves with what that other human being is experiencing. Very often such a person is simply called “one of the queer ones.” This demands an understanding of the subtle transition from illness to spirituality.

Our study can go further. Think what happens when a person goes through this entire sequence in the course of life. At some period the person is in a condition (Plate I, 2) where only the ego organization has loosened itself from the other members of the organism. In a later period the person advances to a condition where neither ego nor astral enter the physical or etheric bodies. Still later, (Plate I, 3) the person enters a condition where the physical body separates from the other bodies. (Plate II) The person only goes through this sequence if the first condition, perhaps in childhood, which is still normal, already shows a tendency to lose the balance of the four members of the organism. If the physician comes upon such a person destined to go through all these four stages—the first very slightly abnormal, the others as I have pictured them—the physician will find there is tremendous instability and something must be done about it. Usually nothing can be done. Sometimes the physician prescribes intensive treatment; it accomplishes nothing. Perhaps later the physician is again in contact with this person and finds that the first unstable condition has advanced to the next, as I described it with the sense impressions becoming vague and the thoughts highly colored. Eventually the physician finds the excessively strong consciousness of sin; naturally a physician does not want to take any notice of that, for now the symptoms are beginning to play over into the soul realm. Usually it is at this time that the person finally gets in touch with a priest, particularly when the fourth stage becomes apparent.

Individuals who go through these stages—it is connected with their karma, their repeated earth lives—have purely out of their deep intuition developed a wonderful terminology for all this. Especially if they have gone through the stages in sequence, with the first stage almost normal, they are able to speak in a wonderful way about what they experience. They say, for instance, when they are still quite young, if the labile condition starts between seventeen and nineteen years: human beings must know themselves. And they demand complete knowledge of themselves. Now with their ego organization separated, they come of their own initiative to an active meditative life. Very often they call this “active prayer,” “active meditation,” and they are grateful when some well-schooled priest gives them instruction about prayer. Then they are entirely absorbed in prayer, and they are experiencing in it what they now begin to describe by a wonderful terminology. They look back at their first stage and call what they perceive “the first dwelling place of God,” because their ego has not entirely penetrated the other members of their organism, so to a certain extent they are seeing themselves from within, not merely from without. This perception from within increases; it becomes, as it were, a larger space: “the first dwelling place of God.”

What next appears, what I have described from another point of view, is richer; it is more inwardly detailed. They see much more from within: “the second dwelling place of God.” When the third stage is reached, the inner vision is extraordinarily beautiful, and such a person says, “I see the third dwelling place of God; it is tremendously magnificent, with spiritual beings moving within it.” This is inner vision, a powerful, glorious vision of a world woven by spirit: “the third dwelling place of God,” or “the House of God.” There are variations in the words used. When they reach the fourth stage, they no longer want advice about active meditation, for usually they have reached the view that everything will be given them through grace and they must wait. They talk about passive prayer, passive meditation, that they must not pray out of their own initiative, for it will come to them if God wants to give it to them. Here the priest must have a fine instinct for recognizing when this stage passes over into the next. For now these people speak of “rest-prayer,” during which they do nothing at all; they let God hold sway in them. That is how they experience “the fourth dwelling place of God.”

Sometimes from the descriptions they give at this stage, from what—if we speak medically—such “patients” say, priests can really learn a tremendous amount of esoteric theology. If they are good interpreters, the theological detail becomes clear to them—if they listen very carefully to what such “patients” tell them, to what they know. Much of what is taught in theology, particularly Catholic pastoral theology, is founded on what various enlightened, trained confessors have heard from certain penitents who have undergone this sequence of development.

At this point ordinary conceptions of health and illness cease to have any meaning. If such a man is hidden away in an office, or if such a woman becomes an housewife who must spend her days in the kitchen or something similar in bourgeois everyday life, these people become really insane, and behave outwardly in such a way that they can only be regarded as insane. If a priest notices at the right moment how things are developing and arranges for them to live in appropriate surroundings, they can develop the four stages in proper order. Through such patients, the enlightened confessor is able to look into the spiritual world in a modern way but similarly to the Greek priests, who learned about the spiritual world from the Pythians, who imparted all kinds of revelations concerning the spiritual world through earthly smoke and vapor.³ What sense would there be today in writing a thesis on the pathological aspect of the Greek Pythians? It could certainly be done and it would even be correct, but it would have no meaning in a higher sense. For as a matter of fact, very much of what flowed in a magnificent way from Greek theology into the entire cultural life of Greece originated in the revelations of the Pythians. As a rule, the Pythians were individuals who had come either to this third stage or even to the fourth stage.

But we can think of a personality in a later epoch who went through these stages under the wise direction of her confessors, so that she could devote herself undisturbed to her inner visions. Something very wonderful developed for her, which indeed also remained to a certain degree pathological. Her life was not just a concern of the physician or of the priest but a concern of the entire Church. The Church pronounced her a saint after her death. This was St. Teresa.⁴ This was approximately her path.

You see, one must examine such things as this if one wants to discover what will give medicine and theology a real insight into human nature. One must be prepared to go far beyond the usual category of ideas, for they lose their value. Otherwise one can no longer differentiate between a saint and a fool, between a madman and a genius, and can no longer distinguish any of the others except a normal dyed-in-the-wool average citizen.

This is a view of the human being that must first be met with understanding; then it can really lead to fundamental esoteric knowledge. But it can also be tremendously enlightening in regard to psychological abnormalities as well as to physical abnormalities and physical illnesses. Certain conditions are necessary for these stages to appear. There has to be a certain consistency of the person's ego so that it does not completely penetrate the organism. Also there must be a certain consistency of the astral body: if it is not fine, as it was in St. Teresa, if it is coarse, the result will be different. With St. Teresa, because of the delicacy of her ego organization and astral body, certain physical organs in the lower body had been formed with the same fragile quality.

But it can happen that the ego organization and astral body are quite coarse and yet they have the same characteristic as above. Such an individual can be comparatively normal and show only the physical correlation: then it is only a physical illness. One could say, on the one hand there can be a St. Teresa constitution with its visions and poetic beauty, and on the other hand its physical counterimage in diseased abdominal organs, which in the course of this second person's life is not reflected in the ego and astral organization.

All these things must be spoken about and examined. For those who hold responsibility as physicians or priests are confronted by these things, and they must be equal to the challenge. Theological activity only begins to be effective if theologians are prepared to cope with such phenomena. And physicians only begin to be healers if they also are prepared to deal with such symptoms.

• 1 . Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Italian anthropologist. Wrote Genius and Insanity (1864) and The Criminal: Anthropological, Medical and Legal Aspects (1876).
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
• 3 . Pythians: priestesses of Apollo who delivered the oracles at Delphi.
• 4 . Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Carmelite nun. Reformed the Carmelite Order in association with John of the Cross. Canonized by the Catholic Church.

Dear friends,

We will obtain a deeper view of the total human being if we go a little further into the matters we have been considering. In particular, we should see from such symptoms how important the transition is from health to illness. I therefore would like to speak further about something that lies between certain pathological trends that are developing in human evolution and a kind of natural initiation that constitutes another stream in human evolution. This phenomenon lies midway between the pathological tendencies of human nature and the stream of initiation; it relates as much to one as to the other.

Typical of such a path of development are such personalities as St. Teresa. One can observe much more than I described if one makes a study of some of these individuals. With them there is a kind of appearance of the spiritual world at the threshold of perception. Naturally this is difficult to describe, because the words one has to use to characterize these abnormal conditions do not have such meanings in our everyday speech. What appears at the threshold of perception is the first stage for such people and is called by them “entrance into the first dwelling place of God.” In the first stage this is perceived only as “a presence.” These people experience the presence of some spiritual being, but they have no precise vision of the being. If the experience comes to a definite conclusion, they have a clear feeling that the being was there with them. That is the first experience: an indefinite experience of a presence, of being together with some spiritual being. As long as they are in this stage of development, these people are even annoyed when someone else tells them of a vision, because these people think their own experience is much more inward, much more intimate, more genuine. This has been such a moving experience for them that they have the feeling: human beings are not allowed to see the super-sensible world, but I have been given this vague experience of its reality.

Then these people reach a second stage. They tell of actual, shaped perceptions of the spiritual beings that were present. First they tell of the feeling of being touched, of having spiritual hands laid upon them, even of their forehead being touched or something similar, without yet having any visual experience. Then the condition is raised to vision that is like optical perception. It can be so enhanced that they see Jesus, for instance, standing before them as a real person. That is the usual second stage. It is a peculiar fact that those advancing from the first to the second stage have only the vaguest feeling that earlier they had become angry when others told them of their own experiences in this second stage. Memory does not clearly connect the two stages. These people live very intensely in the respective single stages.

The third stage they experience is remarkable. Their description of it is highly colored in every detail. They tell how when it comes upon them they are seized by tremendous pain. And indeed it is obviously intense, for at these moments they can be heard groaning; other reactions can be observed such as occur with pain originating in the physical and etheric bodies. But the strange thing is that they want this pain. They want it because they regard it as natural that they should have it; they feel that they will only reach the subsequent experience properly if first they suffer this pain.

Then they reach the stage where they transform the pain within themselves. This is extraordinarily interesting, for actually the pain remains exactly the same, but now it is enhanced into a feeling of joy, of bliss. The pain comes, its objective condition is still there, but now the spiritual awareness goes further. If one were suddenly to pull such people out of their spiritual state, they would feel the pain as sick people feel pain—and indeed do so when they return from this highest stage of the experience. At this highest stage they no longer have the feeling that spiritual beings come to them, but that they themselves have risen into the spiritual world. At this stage the pain is transformed—one might say subjectively, but the expression is not quite exact—into a feeling of bliss. Then begins a symbolic objectifying of the pain. When they come out of this experience and have a memory of it (and in most cases there is a very clear memory of it afterward), then they describe how a seraph or a cherub stood beside them, and the seraph or cherub had a sword that he plunged into the their intestines, which caused excruciating pain. When the spiritual being pulled out the sword he pulled the intestines out too, and then there came immediately an experience of profound bliss in the presence of God.

As a rule these three stages follow in succession. We can understand them clearly through our anthroposophical knowledge. After the preparatory condition I have described, the first stage consists of the ego organization drawing the astral body to itself, so that they are united without penetrating the physical and etheric bodies as deeply as they normally would. Something, therefore, is happening for such persons that can never happen in ordinary consciousness: in half-waking or quarter-waking or three-quarters waking condition they have conscious experience in their ego organization and astral body, while at the same time experience in their etheric and physical bodies continues with a certain independence. Thus parallel experiences are there: a spiritual experience in the ego organization and astral body, and at the same time a separate experience of the etheric and physical bodies. This is never the case in normal consciousness: there, all four members of the human being are bound closely together. In normal consciousness there is no such thing as experiences of consciousness running parallel. In this experience I am describing, such people feel themselves, know themselves in the most eminent sense to be entirely united with what they are experiencing. They know this first of all, the inherent being-one-with the happening. When the astral body is drawn to the ego organization and experiences spiritual beings, these people experience them as simply a presence, as something that is there. They experience this as one experiences one's own body. One does not differentiate in the latter experience. One does not feel one's body as something outside: one feels it as part of oneself. That is the first stage: the experience of “a presence.”

Now let us go to the second stage. First, these people have all kinds of feelings of being touched. Naturally these can be confused very easily by ordinary pathology with familiar psychiatric symptoms, but they are not the same. Then they advance to actual visions. This is the stage where the ego organization and astral organization draw the etheric body out to be united with them. So again there is a parallel experience: the ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body are all raised somewhat out of the physical body; at the same time the physical body carries on its processes separately. Something special comes about through this situation. In ordinary life, when we see, we are stimulated by light from without and we receive the stimulus into ourselves. It goes as far as the etheric body, and the etheric body creates the conscious experience. That is how it is, for example, with the eyes. When you see, the external stimulation occurs first in the ego; then it penetrates the astral body and penetrates the etheric body. It is then the etheric body that communicates the whole conscious experience to you by pushing in every direction, in a certain sense, against the physical organization. The conscious experience lies in this pushing. That is the exact process. If presented in a diagram, it would look like the drawing below.

A stimulus is exerted. First it affects the ego, then it goes to the astral body, then to the etheric body; in the etheric body it pushes into the physical body in every direction, to all sides. The physical body pushes back, and the pushing back, the repulsion by the physical body, is your actual eye experience. It is a constant play between the etheric body and the choroid and retina. What the etheric body does in the choroid and in the retina is what appears to ordinary consciousness as optical experience. This happens similarly with every other sense perception. To anyone who understands these things, the entire explanation in today's psychology textbooks, or even in epistemology, is terribly childish.

But now, with such people as I am describing, the etheric body is seized directly in this experience. The experience sits in the ego, astral body, etheric body, and does not push out to the senses, but pushes from within to what is the nerve-sense system—pushes first, actually, into the glandular system, then into the nervous system, and finally from there streams into the senses. So the senses are taken hold of in a way that is just the opposite of the way it happens in ordinary life. Instead of the experience of consciousness being stimulated through the senses, it is colored, intensified, made vivid by the fact that it streams from within to the senses. That is how the feeling of being touched comes about in a sensation of the nerves: by the streaming from within outward. This is then raised to vision. Now you know the whole inner process.

If there is a further development, it proceeds in the following way: the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body take hold of the physical body from quite another direction than would normally be the case. The physical body is accustomed to being taken hold of from without, but now it is taken hold of from within. Now it is taken hold of in the midst of life—the very process that otherwise only happens when the human soul-spiritual entity comes down out of the soul-spiritual world into the physical body, three weeks after conception. This event cannot otherwise happen in ordinary life, because normally the etheric body is connected with the physical body. But in this case the etheric body has been raised out by the ego organization and taken hold of by the astral body. It is like birth, when the human being takes possession of a physical body, but now the procedure is more complicated, possessing this physical body from quite another direction. And that causes pain. For as a matter of fact, all pain—in cases of illness, too—consists of the fact that the body is grasped hold of from some other direction than the usual one. That is what happens at the moment when the third stage is reached.

Now you need not be surprised that this third stage is objectified. It penetrates the physical body and the physical body repels it. A physical body cannot be so seized except in regular initiation; in any other situation the physical body exerts opposition, and this causes pain. It pushes away in pain what it is experiencing. That is the first part of the experience of the third stage. The physical body exerts resistance and the resistance is experienced as pain. And what enters through the pain? The real spiritual world. It comes through the pain. The spiritual world comes from the other direction. Ordinary sense perception and ordinary thinking grasp hold of the physical world. The spiritual world is grasped in the opposite way. The way to it is through pain. The moment the physical body exerts resistance, intense pain is there. But the moment the pain is taken hold of by the spiritual world, the moment the spiritual world enters, the pain is transformed into ecstasy. It is really so. First there is pain in the organism; then the spiritual world penetrates the pain, streams through the pain: a cherub or seraph appears (this is what the imagination presents), the cherub plunges his sword in, draws it out, and draws the intestines out with it. This means that the person becomes independent of the physical body, of the ordinary connection to it. The person has no experience in the lower organs and is led beyond it to an experience of the spiritual world. The physical pain is transformed to bliss. Such people speak of the presence of God, or if they make distinctions, of the presence of the spiritual world.

This last stage is experienced by individuals who are strong enough in their etheric body to endure the entire happening. They have the foundation for it in their karma. For instance, think of St. Teresa. She had an earlier incarnation in which her soul became especially strong. She incarnates as St. Teresa. But before she incarnates in the physical body, she takes possession of her etheric body very forcefully, and this etheric body becomes inwardly stronger than is the case with the usual human being. She has brought it with her into this life, this etheric body that is inwardly strong. Then this strong etheric body leaves the physical body and unites itself firmly with the astral body and ego, which are also especially strong from an earlier incarnation. And that is why illnesses then appear, at least a certain variety of illness: because the etheric body is not staying in the physical organs and providing them with its nourishing, vitalizing forces. With the individuals I am describing, the moment they enter the third stage they become really ill. At the same time their strong etheric body enables them to overcome the illness as it is developing. The illness begins to develop and immediately an automatic therapy arises within them from the strong etheric body. The entire process is a latent illness and healing. This is one of the most interesting phenomena in the realm of human evolution.

Precisely in the case of St. Teresa you see in the final stage of her development a continual status nascendi of illness and the continual cure. This alternation, this wonderful swing of a pendulum between the beginning of illness and the caring of it, is not a natural happening in the physical world, for it is not brought about in the physical world: it takes place in the spiritual world. We know that the etheric body is formed before the earthly incarnation. And it is into that pre-earthly moment that such a person as St. Teresa returns. When the pathological condition starts, when it is in statu nascendi, she “swings” into the world where she was before birth, into the spiritual world. The pendulum swings between the physical body and the spiritual world. Spiritual world—physical world—spiritual world—physical world, but experiencing the physical world as an exact opposite—such as normally human beings only experience when they are just incarnating into it. This inner process of healing, this therapy coming from the cosmos, is so intense that its effect can spread to sick people who are in the neighborhood of such people, if their illness lies somewhat in the same direction. In fact, the most wonderful cures can take place around such a person.

Indeed the influence can extend much further. In the former, better days of the church, these things were used in a careful, esoteric way. Later this degenerated to a superstitious worship of relics and belief in magic. But it is a fact that in better times of religious evolution, vivid biographies of such individuals, including their own imaginative descriptions, were given to the faithful, so that they could live through the experiences of such people in their own imagination. And it could then happen that when thoughtful pastors had the opportunity, they would simply put such a biography into the hands of someone in ordinary life whose illness was going in a certain direction. Perhaps also they strengthened the effect by their own words, and this was able to start curative processes. Directing the sick individual's mind to the life of such a saint could have a therapeutic effect.

You can see that studies that go so deeply into the human being will always lead from health to illness, but also to states of super-sensible experience. If therefore you advise someone in some connection or other to do exercises to gain entrance into the super-sensible world, the exercises must be so oriented that they strengthen the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. Such a path as I described, given to individuals simply through their karma, will in fact take its course properly. What takes place in initiation itself can be learned by studying these processes, which border so closely on the pathological. Therefore it is not unimportant for physicians to take the time to study the lives of such people. Physicians will find in them what can only be called a paradox: the healthy counterpart of a complex of pathological symptoms that they are accustomed to meet here and there in everyday life. And for physicians, that is the most beneficial thing possible: to see the healthy counterpart of a pathological condition. That, more than anything else, will help physicians to make thoughtful, conscientious decisions about their therapy. Moreover if physicians have some knowledge of the substance that can be used as a remedy because of its affinity to certain etheric forces—forces that automatically become active in the self-healing of these abnormal individuals—they will know how St. Teresa's etheric body developed its forces when her illnesses appeared in statu nascendi. And if physicians learn to know the healing power to be found in the piercing activity of antimony, then they will have learned the right therapy from Nature herself.

I would like to point out that in examining such experiences as these, one encounters a remarkable paradox: one sees illness from another side. One sees illness being treated not by human beings but by spiritual beings. One kind of treatment is the kind human beings evolve: that is, treatment from the aspect of the earth. It consists of restoring the previous condition through some therapy that breaks up the illness. The spiritual beings that have to do with humanity treat illness differently. They weave an illness into the fabric of karma. That is their task—a task that doesn't pile things together as they are piled together here on earth by pathology. Here a seventeen-year-old who is ill is not always cured by forty-five. But with the way karma is formed, an illness in some incarnation, whether it is cured or not, may be woven into the human being's karma three thousand years later. Time is measured quite differently in the spiritual world. But one learns very much from those developments in which, from a spiritual point of view, something can happen in the spiritual world and then can also stream down into the physical world.

Take, for example, such a form of karma as I have been describing. Perhaps it is completely in the ordinary course of evolution in three thousand years. Let me show by this line (see drawing above) that something that happens to a person today is so shaped by spiritual beings that the other part belonging to it, the balance, the compensation, appears in three thousand years' time. That is the normal course. You see, in ordinary life people don't have a true knowledge of time. How do they think of it ordinarily? As a line running from past infinity through the present into the future. That is approximately how time is imagined—and indeed, the line has to be thick—perhaps not even a line, but a thick rope, because it contains everything that is perceived at any given moment in the whole world. That's the way people think of it if they think of it at all—and most people don't think of it at all. From a spiritual point of view time is not like that. And one finds little understanding for spiritual development—which, after all, is present in all physical evolution—when time is thought of in that conventional way. In reality, time is different. The line I drew on the board can be tangled up into a ball (see drawing). The entire line of time is in that ball. Three thousand years are in that ball. Time can be all tangled up; and if it is tangled up for some development or other in evolution, then the tangle can be found in the life of some individual. In the case of St. Teresa, a tangled ball of time was present in her earthly life. We come upon a true mystery—that things that in someone's karma would seem to be widely separate for some reason become entangled.

You see from such an example how a study of the inner spiritual, karmic development must link up with the external pathological and therapeutic inquiry. You can see how the pastoral care of some person by priests, who are basing their view of the person on the karmic connections, the spiritual aspects, can relate to what is seen from a medical view alone. For a comprehension of these things requires not only theoretical knowledge but really living into the things. Physicians must live into them on the pathological, physiological side that opens up for them. Priests must live into them in the theological and karmic views that open up for them. And the harmony will come from their working together out of these two different fields, not from interfering in each other's field in a dilettantish fashion. This must be stressed again and again.

You must still see something else that is connected with these things, particularly in our epoch. You know how distasteful it is to some people to accept the idea of free will even though it is perfectly obvious to an unbiased person. The philosophers deny its reality because their intellect can't make a connection with it. I said just now in regard to sense perceptions that the explanations in physiology and psychology textbooks are absolutely childish to someone who understands these things. But the chatter over free will is far worse. For you must remember: a decision of free will is at every moment an act of the whole human being—the whole human being—no matter how they appear in this impulse: healthy or ill or half ill or abnormally healthy. The whole human being is involved in an impulse of free will—and, all that can be known of the whole human being, all the complications. One only learns to know human nature when one learns to know it with all its complications. And please notice, something that in an abnormal person shows too strong a color in one or another direction is neutralized, harmonized in the ordinary human being. There's a trivial expression, but it's true: A cherub can make friends with you, but the devil can too. And those processes where the devil can squeeze in—we're going to study them too! This is all to be found in the ordinary human being, but opposing forces are neutralized, because they develop equally strongly in every direction. If there's an angel in every human, there's also a devil. But when the angel and the devil are equally strong, they neutralize each other.

Now take a look at these scales (see drawing). There is one spot, one point right here. You can lay weights there or there and then you have put the scales into movement. But this spot always remains still. It has a name: the hypomochlion. It is not affected by what you lay on the scale at the left, or what you lay on the scale at the right. Of course, the scales must be built so that this spot will not need to be disturbed. Now in the human being a similar spiritual hypomochlion is created by the opposing forces. Therefore you can study human nature and you will never be able to call human beings free, for by their very nature they are causally conditioned in all respects.

If you study the nature of human beings from the viewpoint of materialism, you do not come to the idea of freedom. You come to causal conditioning. If you study human beings from a spiritual viewpoint, you come to the determination of the will by God or by spiritual beings; you do not come to free will. You can be a blockhead of a materialist and deny freedom and do research on the natural causality of the will. Or you can be a sophisticated person like Leibnitz and gaze out at a spiritual universe—and you come to determinism. Naturally, as long as you are considering the scale at this left end of the beam, you have to reckon with movement; so long as you are considering the scale at this right end of the beam, again you have to reckon with movement. And it is the same with human beings: whether you consider them from the point of view of nature or from the point of view of spirit, you do not come to freedom. Freedom lies in the middle at the point of balance between them.

That's theory, of course! In practice you have to decide when people come to you with difficult life situations whether you can make them responsible for their actions. Now this becomes a practical question: whether they can or cannot exercise free will. How are you going to decide this? You decide by judging whether their spiritual and physical constitutions are in balance. And in this the physicians and the priests are equally involved. Therefore both physicians and priests must be trained to understand the conditions under which a person is either in balance or not in balance between spirit and nature.

Whether an individual has this sense of responsibility can only be decided out of a deep knowledge of human nature. The problem of freedom in connection with responsibility is one of the deepest problems imaginable.

Let us continue tomorrow. We will see what from one side leads to health and from the other side leads to pathological conditions.