The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] When the work of Michael at the present time is approached through spiritual experience, it becomes possible, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to obtain light on the cosmic nature of Freedom.

[ 2 ] This does not refer to my Philosophy of Freedom (or ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’) which is based on the purely human faculties of cognition, where these are operative in the field of the spirit. In order to follow the thought of this book, it is not yet necessary to join company with the beings of other worlds. But it may be said that the Philosophy of Freedom prepares the way for the understanding of the freedom which, in spiritual connection with Michael, can then be experienced. [ 3 ] And this is as follows.

[ 4 ] If freedom is to be a living reality in human action, then that which is accomplished in the light of it must be completely independent of man's physical and etheric organisation. There can be no freedom except through the ‘I,’ and the astral body must be able to vibrate in harmony with the free activity of the ‘I,’ so that it may be able to transmit it to the physical and etheric bodies. But this is only one side of the matter. The other side becomes clear in connection with the mission of Michael. For it is also true that what man experiences in freedom must not in any way affect his physical or etheric body. Were this to happen, he would have to lose entirely what he had gained during his evolution under the influence of Divine-Spiritual Being, and Divine-Spiritual Manifestation.

[ 5 ] What man experiences through this his environment which is but the accomplished Work of the Divine and Spiritual, must take effect on his spiritual nature (i.e. his Ego) only. His physical and etheric Organisation must only be affected by that which flows on, in the stream of evolution, not in his outer environment, but within his own being, and which had its origin in the Being and Manifestation of the Divine-Spiritual. But this must not work together with that in the human being which lives in the element of freedom.

[ 6 ] All this is only made possible because Michael carries over from the far past of evolution something that brings man into connection with that Divine-Spiritual reality which in the present day no longer penetrates the physical and etheric Organisation. Through this the foundation is being laid, within the mission of Michael, for a human intercourse with the spiritual world which does not interfere at all with the working of Nature.

[ 7 ] It is inspiring to see how the human being is raised by Michael into the spiritual sphere, whereas the unconscious and subconscious elements which develop beneath the sphere of freedom are uniting ever more strongly with the world of matter.

[ 8 ] Man's position with respect to the world will in the future become more and more incomprehensible to him if he is not prepared to recognise, in addition to his relations to the beings and processes of Nature, such relations as this to the Michael Mission. Our relations to Nature are recognised by looking at them from without; our relations to the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with Beings to whom we have opened up the way by adopting a spiritual view of the world.

[ 9 ] In order, therefore, for man to realise the impulse of freedom, he must be able to hold at a distance certain influences of Nature which affect his being from the Cosmos. This ‘holding at a distance’ is taking place in the sub-consciousness, when in the consciousness there are the forces which represent the life of the Ego in freedom. For the inward perception of man himself there is the consciousness of his activity in freedom, but for the spiritual Beings connected with man from other spheres of the Universe it is different. The Being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, who leads human existence from one earthly life to another, sees at once how the matter stands regarding human action in freedom; he sees how man thrusts away from himself cosmic forces which want to form and mould him further—which want to give to his Ego-organisation the necessary physical supports, as they did before the age of Michael.

[ 10 ] Michael, who is a member of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions with the aid of the Beings of the Angeloi-hierarchy. He devotes himself, in the manner here described, to the task of bringing to man from the spiritual part of the Cosmos forces which can replace those from the realm of Nature which have been suppressed.

[ 11 ] He accomplishes this by bringing his activity into the most perfect accord with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] The forces which man requires for the compensation of suppressed impulses of Nature when he acts through freedom, are contained in the activity of Christ within earthly evolution. But man must then really bring his soul into that inner life in union with Christ, of which we have already spoken in these articles on the Michael Mission.

[ 13 ] When a man faces the physical Sun and receives from it warmth and light he knows that he is living in a reality. [ 14 ] In the same way he must live in the presence of Christ, the spiritual Sun, who has joined His life to that of the Earth, and receive actively from Him into his soul that which in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light.

[ 15 ] He will feel himself permeated by ‘spiritual warmth’ when he experiences the ‘Christ in me.’ Feeling himself thus permeated he will say to himself: ‘This warmth liberates my human being from bonds of the Cosmos in which it may not remain. For me to gain my freedom the Divine-Spiritual Being of primeval times had to lead me into regions where it could not remain with me, where, however, it gave me Christ, that His forces might bestow upon me as a free human being what the Divine-Spiritual primeval Being once gave me by way of Nature, which was then also the Spirit-way. This warmth leads me back again to the divine sources, whence I came.’

[ 16 ] And in this feeling there will grow together in man, in inner warmth of soul, the experience in and with Christ and the experience of real and true humanity. ‘Christ gives me my humanity’—that will be the fundamental feeling which will well up in the soul and pervade it. When this feeling is once there, another comes: man feels raised by Christ beyond mere earthly existence, he feels one with the starry firmament around the Earth and with all that can be recognised in this firmament as Spiritual and Divine.

[ 17 ] It is the same with the spiritual Light. Man can feel himself fully in his true human nature by becoming aware of himself as a free individual. A certain darkening is however connected with this. The Divine-Spiritual of primeval times no longer shines. The primeval Light appears again in the Light brought by Christ to the human ego. In the life in union with Christ this blissful thought may shine like a sun through the whole soul: ‘The glorious primal Divine Light is here again; it shines, although its light comes not from Nature.’ And man unites himself, while in the present, with the spiritual, cosmic forces of Light belonging to that past when he was not yet a free individual. And in this Light he can find the paths which lead him aright as a human being, when in his soul he unites himself, with understanding, with the Michael Mission.

[ 18 ] Then in the Spirit-warmth man will feel the impulse which so carries him over into his cosmic future, that in this future he will be able to remain true to the original gifts of Divine Spiritual Beings, albeit he has evolved in their worlds to free individuality. And in the Spirit-light he will feel the power which leads him with open eyes and ever higher and wider consciousness to the world in which as a free human being he will find himself again with the Gods of his origin.

[ 19 ] If man wishes to continue in the original existence and keep the primal naive Divine Goodness which held sway in him, and shrinks from the full use of freedom—it leads him, in this present world in which everything tends to develop his freedom, to Lucifer, who wishes the present world to be denied.

[ 20 ] If man devotes himself to present existence and wishes the natural world alone to hold sway (the natural world which is accessible to the present intellect and which is neutral with respect to Goodness), if he wishes to experience the use of freedom in the intellect alone, then in this present world where evolution needs to be continued in deeper regions of the soul, while freedom rules in the upper regions—he will after all be led to Ahriman, who wishes to see the present world transformed into a Cosmos of pure intellectuality.

[ 21 ] Certainty of soul and spirit flourishes in those regions where man feels that in the direction of the outer world his gaze rests spiritually on Michael, and in the direction towards the inner being of the soul on Christ. It is that certainty through which he will be able to traverse the cosmic path upon which he will, without losing his origin, in the future find his true perfection.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 22 ] 118. That action alone can be free in which no process of Nature, either within man or without him, plays an active part.

[ 23 ] 119. But there is also the other pole, the opposite aspect of this truth. Whenever the individuality of man works freely, a Nature-process is suppressed in him. In an unfree action this process of Nature would indeed be present, giving to the human being his cosmically predestined character.

[ 24 ] 120. To the man who with his own life and being really partakes in the present and future stages of World-evolution, this character is not vouchsafed by way of Nature. But it comes to him by way of the Spirit when he unites himself with Michael, whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

[ 1 ] When one considers the relation of Michael to Ahriman, one may well feel impelled to ask: How are these spiritual Powers related to one another in the cosmic sense, seeing that both of them are active in the unfolding of the forces of Intellectuality?

[ 2 ] In the past Michael unfolded the Intellectuality throughout the Cosmos. He did this as the servant of the Divine Spiritual Powers, to whom both he himself and man owed their origin. And he wishes not to depart from this relationship to Intellectuality. When Intellectuality was loosened from the Divine-Spiritual Powers in order to find its way into the inner being of man, Michael resolved thenceforth to assume his true relationship to mankind in order that in mankind he might find his relationship to the Intellectuality. But he wanted to do all this only in the sense of the Divine Spiritual Powers and as their servant still. For with these Powers he has been united ever since his own origin and that of men. Therefore it is his intention that Intellectuality shall flow in future through the hearts of men, but that it shall flow there as the self-same force which it was in the beginning when it poured forth from the Divine-Spiritual Powers.

[ 3 ] It is altogether different with Ahriman. He is a Being who long, long ago severed himself from the stream of evolution to which those Divine-Spiritual Powers belong of whom we are speaking. In an age of primal antiquity he set himself up beside them as an independent power in the Cosmos. This Being, though in the present day he is there in the world of space to which man belongs, evolves no relationship of inner forces with the Beings rightly belonging to this world. It is only through the Intellectuality, loosened from the Divine Spiritual Beings, which comes into this world, that Ahriman—finding himself akin to it—is able in his own way to unite himself with mankind. For in an ancient and primeval past he already united with himself this Intellectuality which man receives in the present as a gift from the Cosmos. Ahriman, if he succeeded in his intentions, would make the intellect, given to mankind, similar to his own.

[ 4 ] Now Ahriman appropriated Intellectuality to himself in an age when he could not make it an inner reality within him. It has remained in his being as a force, utterly detached from anything of heart or soul. Intellectuality pours forth from Ahriman as a cold and freezing, soulless cosmic impulse. Those human beings who are taken hold of by this impulse bring forth that logic which seems to speak for itself alone, void of compassion and of love, which bears no evidence of a right, heartfelt, inner relationship of soul between the human being and what he thinks and speaks and does. In real truth it is Ahriman who speaks in this kind of logic.

[ 5 ] But Michael has never appropriated Intellectuality to himself. He rules it as a Divine-Spiritual force while feeling himself united with the Divine-Spiritual Powers. And when he pervades the intellect it becomes manifest that the intellect can equally well be an expression of the heart and soul as an expression of the head and mind. For Michael has within him all the original forces of his Gods as well as those of man. Consequently he does not convey to the intellect anything that is soulless, cold, frosty, but he stands by it in a manner that is full of soul and inwardly warm.

[ 6 ] Herein, too, lies the reason why Michael moves through the Cosmos with earnest mien and gesture. To be inwardly united in this way with intelligence means at the same time to be obliged to fulfil the requirement that into it shall be brought no subjective caprice, wish or desire. Otherwise logic becomes the arbitrary activity of one being, instead of the expression of the Cosmos. Michael considers that his special virtue consists in strictly maintaining his being as the expression of the World-Being, keeping within himself all that would make itself felt as his own being. His aims are directed towards the great purposes of the Cosmos; this is expressed in his mien. His will, as it approaches man, must reflect what he sees in the Cosmos; and this is shown in his attitude, his gesture. Michael is earnest in all things, for earnestness, as the manifestation of a being, is a reflection of the Cosmos from this being; smiling is the expression of that which proceeds and radiates from a being into the world.

[ 7 ] One of the Imaginations of Michael is the following: he rules through the passage of time; bearing the light from the Cosmos really as his own being; giving form to the warmth from the Cosmos as the revealer of his own being; as a being he keeps steadily on his course like a world, affirming himself only by affirming the world, as if leading forces down to the Earth from all parts of the Universe.

[ 8 ] Contrast this with an Imagination of Ahriman: As he goes along he would like to capture space from time; he has darkness around him into which he shoots the rays of his own light; the more he achieves his aims the severer is the frost around him; he moves as a world which contracts entirely into one being, viz., his own, in which he affirms himself only by denying the world; he moves as if he carried with him the sinister forces of dark caves in the Earth.

[ 9 ] When man seeks freedom without inclining towards egoism—when freedom becomes for him pure love for the action which is to be performed—then it is possible for him to approach Michael. But if he desires to act freely and at the same time develops egoism—if freedom becomes for him the proud feeling of manifesting himself in the action—then he is in danger of falling into Ahriman's sphere.

[ 10 ] The Imaginations we have just described shine forth from a man's pure love for the action (Michael), or from his own self-love in acting (Ahriman).

[ 11 ] When man feels himself as a free being in proximity to Michael he is on the way to carry the intellectual power into his ‘whole man’; he thinks indeed with his head, but his heart feels the brightness of the thought or its shade; the will radiates forth the essential being of man by allowing thoughts, to stream into it as intentions and aims. Man becomes more and more man by becoming the expression of the world; he finds himself, not by seeking himself, but by uniting himself voluntarily with the world.

[ 12 ] If, when man unfolds his freedom, he succumbs to Ahriman's temptations, he is drawn into intellectuality as if into a spiritual automatic process in which he is a part; he is no longer himself. All his thinking becomes an experience of the head; but this separates it from the experience of his own heart and the life of his own will, and blots out his own being. Man loses more and more of the true inner human expression by becoming the expression of his own separate existence; he loses himself by seeking himself, he withdraws himself from the world which he refuses to love. It is only when he loves the world that a man truly experiences himself.

[ 13 ] From the above description it may be evident that Michael is the Guide to Christ. Michael goes with love on his way through the world, with all the earnestness of his nature, attitude and action. The man who attaches himself to him cultivates love in relation to the outer world. And love must be unfolded first of all in relation to the outer world, otherwise it becomes self-love.

[ 14 ] If this love in the spirit of Michael is there, then one's love of another being will shine back into one's own self. The self will be able to love without loving itself. And on the paths of this love Christ can be found by the human soul.

[ 15 ] One who holds fast to Michael cultivates love in relation to the outer world, and he thereby finds that relation to the inner world of his soul which brings him in touch with Christ.

[ 16 ] The age now dawning requires that humanity should turn its attention to a world immediately bordering upon the world perceived as physical—one in which can be found what we have here described as the Being and the Mission of Michael. For the world which man pictures as Nature when he sees this physical world, is also not the one in which he is immediately living, but one which lies as far below the truly human world as the world of Michael lies above it. It is only that man fails to notice that unconsciously, when he makes for himself a picture of his world, the image of another world really arises. When he paints this picture he at the same time excludes himself and succumbs to the spiritual automatic process. Man can only preserve his humanity by placing over against this picture, in which he loses himself in the picture of Nature, the other, in which Michael rules—in which Michael leads the way to Christ.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing account of the World-Thoughts in the Working of Michael and in the Working of Ahriman)

[ 17 ] 121. We have not fully understood the significance or the Universe of something that is working there—for instance, of the Cosmic Thoughts—so long as we stop short at the thing itself. We must also look to recognise the Beings from whom it proceeds. Thus for the Cosmic Thoughts we must see whether it is Michael or Ahriman who bears them out into the world and through the world.

[ 18 ] 122. Proceeding from the one Being—by virtue of his relation to the world—the same thing will work creatively and wholesomely; proceeding from another, it will prove fatal and destructive. The Cosmic Thoughts carry man into the future when he receives them from Michael; they lead him away from the future of his salvation when Ahriman has power to give them to him.

[ 19 ] 123. Such reflections lead us ever more to overcome the idea of an undefined Spirituality, pantheistically conceived as holding sway at the root of all things. We are led to a conception that is definite and real, capable of clear ideas about the spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies. For the reality is everywhere a reality of Being. Whatsoever in it is not Being, is the activity that proceeds in the relation of one Being to another. This too can only be understood if we can turn our gaze to the active Beings.

[ 3 ] Before this time a complete change is taking place in the spiritual life of mankind. It is evident on looking back, that Imaginations still play a large part in human perception. Single individuals, it is true, have already associated themselves in their soul-life with pure ‘concepts’; but the soul-life of the greater number of people consists in a struggle between Imaginations on the one hand, and ideas born from the purely physical world on the other. This is true, not only as regards ideas concerning events in the world of Nature, but also those concerning the developments of history.

[ 4 ] What spiritual observation is able to discover in this direction is confirmed throughout by external evidence. Let us now look at some instances of this.

[ 5 ] The way in which people in previous centuries had thought and spoken about historical events had found its way into writing just before the age of the Spiritual Soul set in. Thus we have preserved to us out of this time ‘sagas’ and the like, in which a true picture is given of how ‘history’ was represented in past times.

[ 6 ] A fine example is the story of ‘Gerhard the Good,’ contained in a poem by Rudolf of Ems, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century. ‘Gerhard the Good’ is a rich merchant of Cologne. He undertakes a journey to Russia, Livonia and Prussia, to buy sables, and then travels farther to Damascus and Nineveh to get silk-stuffs and similar merchandise.

[ 7 ] On the homeward journey he is driven out of his course by a storm. In the strange country in which he finds himself he becomes acquainted with a man, who is keeping a number of English knights, and the betrothed of the King of England, in captivity. Gerhard sacrifices all that he has acquired on his journey by trading, and receives the prisoners in exchange. When the ships arrive at the point where the ways of the travellers part, Gerhard sends the knights home, but the King's betrothed he detains, in the hope that the bridegroom, King William, will come to fetch her himself, as soon as he receives news of her release, and of the place of her abode. The King's bride and the maidens who accompany her are entertained by Gerhard in the best way imaginable. She lives, like a much loved daughter, in the house of her deliverer from captivity. A long time passes without the King coming to take her away. Then, in order to ensure his foster daughter's future, Gerhard decides to marry her to his son. For the supposition is possible that William is dead. The wedding of Gerhard's son is being celebrated, when an unknown pilgrim arrives. It is William. He has wandered about for a long time, searching for his betrothed. Gerhard's son unselfishly resigns her and she is given back to William. Both remain for a time with Gerhard; then the latter fits out a ship to convey them to England. When Gerhard's prisoners—who have been restored to honour—are first able to greet him in England they wish to make him king. But he is able to reply that he is bringing to them their lawful king and queen. They, too, had thought William dead and wished to choose another king to rule their country, which during William's wanderings had fallen into a chaotic state. The Cologne merchant renounces all the honours and riches offered to him and returns to Cologne, there to be again the simple merchant he had been before. The story goes on to relate how Otto I, King of Saxony, journeys to Cologne to make the acquaintance of Gerhard the Good. For the powerful king has succumbed to the temptation to count upon ‘earthly recompense’ for much that he has done. Through becoming acquainted with Gerhard he learns from his example how a simple man does an unspeakable amount of good—sacrificing all the goods he had acquired in order to liberate captives; restoring to William his son's affianced bride; then taking the trouble to convey William to England again, etc.—without desiring any earthly reward whatever for it, but leaving all reward to the ruling of Divine Providence. The man is universally known as ‘Gerhard the Good’; the king feels that he himself receives a strong moral and religious impulse through becoming acquainted with Gerhard's mind and character.

[ 8 ] The story which I have briefly outlined above—in order not merely to indicate by name something that is little known—shows quite clearly from one aspect the mental attitude of the age before the coming of the Spiritual Soul in the evolution of humanity.

[ 9 ] Those who enter into the spirit of the story, as told by Rudolf of Ems, will be able to feel how the experience of the earthly world has changed since the time of King Otto (the tenth century).

[ 10 ] Notice how, during the age of the Spiritual Soul, the world has in a certain way become ‘clear’ to the mental eye of man, as regards the comprehension of physical existence and its development. Gerhard travels with his ships as if in a mist. He only knows the small portion of the world with which he wishes to come in contact. In Cologne you hear nothing of what is taking place in England, and you have to search for years for a person who is in Cologne. You get to know about the life and property of another man such as the one on whose shore Gerhard is cast on his homeward journey, only when you have been brought directly by destiny to the place. The present-day grasp of circumstances in the world is related to that of those earlier times as the looking into a broad, sunlit landscape is to the groping about in a dense fog.

[ 11 ] What is related in connection with Gerhard the Good has nothing to do with what we call ‘historical’ now-a-days, but it is all the more concerned with the character and mood of soul and with the whole spiritual situation of the time. It is these, and not the single events in the physical world, which are depicted in Imaginations.

[ 12 ] In the picture before us, we see a reflection of how man not only feels himself as a being who lives and is active as a member in the chain of events in the physical world, but also feels spiritual, supersensible Beings working into his earthly existence and having connection with his will.

[ 13 ] The tale of Gerhard the Good shows how the twilight dimness, which, in respect of the penetration of the physical world, preceded the period of the Spiritual Soul, turned man's gaze to the vision of the spiritual world. Man did not see the breadth of the physical world, but he saw all the more into the depth of the spiritual.

[ 14 ] Yet in the period that we describe, it was no longer the same as it once had been when a twilight clairvoyance showed to mankind the spiritual world. The Imaginations were there; but when they appeared within the human soul, it was already in its apprehension of things strongly disposed in the direction of thought. The result of this was that men no longer knew how the world that revealed itself in Imaginations was related to the world of physical existence. Hence, to people who were already holding more strongly to the thought element, these Imaginations seemed to be fictions, invented at will and having no reality.

[ 15 ] Men no longer knew that through the Imaginations they saw into a world in which man stands with a quite different part of his being than in the physical world. Thus in the picture before us, two worlds stand side by side; and in the way the story is told, both worlds bear a character that would make one believe the spiritual events to have taken place in among the physical events, and just as perceptibly as these.

[ 16 ] In addition to this, the physical events in many of these tales are in utter confusion. People whose lives are centuries apart appear as contemporaries; events are transferred to another place or period.

[ 17 ] Facts of the physical world are viewed by the human soul in such a way as one can really only view what is spiritual, for which Time and Space have a different significance. The physical world is depicted in Imaginations instead of in thoughts. On the other hand, the spiritual world is woven into the narrative as if one were dealing, not with a different form of existence, but with something that was a continuation of physical facts.

[ 18 ] A historical conception that keeps to the physical only, thinks that the old Imaginations of the East, of Greece, etc., have been taken over and interwoven poetically with the historical subjects that were occupying men's minds at the time. The writings of Isidor of Seville of the seventh century are said to contain a regular collection of old legendary ‘motifs.’

[ 19 ] Yet this is merely an external point of view, and has significance only for those who have no understanding of that condition of soul which still knows itself to be in direct connection with the spiritual world, and which feels itself impelled to express this knowledge in Imaginations. Whether a writer makes use of his own Imagination, or whether he applies, in an understanding and living way, one that has been handed down through history, is not the essential point. The essential point is that the soul is orientated towards the spiritual world and sees both its own actions and the events in the course of Nature as forming a part of that world.

[ 20 ] It is however true that in the way stories and legends were told in the time before the dawn of the epoch of the Spiritual Soul, a certain tendency to error is noticeable.

[ 21 ] Spiritual observation sees in this tendency the working of the Luciferic powers.

[ 22 ] That which urges the soul to receive the Imaginations into its experience is the result not so much of faculties possessed by the soul in ancient times—through a dreamlike clairvoyance—but rather of faculties present in the periods between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries AD. These faculties were already pressing more strongly towards an understanding, in terms of thought, of what was perceived by the senses. Both kinds of faculties were present simultaneously during the transition period. The soul was placed between the old orientation, which penetrates to the spiritual world and sees the physical only as in a mist, and the new orientation, which is centred on physical happenings and in which the spiritual vision fades.

[ 23 ] The Luciferic power works into this wavering balance of the human soul. It wants to prevent man from attaining to complete orientation in the physical world. It wants to keep him, with his consciousness, in spiritual realms that were adapted for him in ancient times. It wants to prevent pure thinking, directed towards the understanding of physical existence, from flowing into Ms dreamlike, imaginative conception of the world. It is able to hold back, in a wrong way, man's power of perception from the physical world. It is not however, able to maintain in the right way the experience of the old Imaginations, and so it makes man reflect imaginatively, and yet at the same time he is not able to transplant his soul completely into the world in which the Imaginations have their full value.

[ 24 ] At the dawn of the Spiritual Soul epoch, Lucifer is active in such a manner that, through him, man is transplanted to the supersensible region immediately bordering on the physical in a way not in keeping with his nature.

[ 25 ] We can see this quite clearly in the legend of Duke Ernst (Herzog Ernst), which was one of the favourite legends of the Middle Ages and was related in wide circles.

[ 26 ] Duke Ernst has a disagreement with the Emperor, who is determined to make war upon him unjustly and bring him to ruin. The Duke feels impelled to escape from this untenable relation with the head of the State by taking part in the Crusade to the East. In the experiences which he goes through before he reaches his destination, the physical and spiritual are woven together in saga form in the manner indicated. For instance, the Duke, in the course of his wanderings, encounters a people with heads shaped like those of cranes. He is driven ashore on the Magnet Mountain, which draws ships with magnetic power, so that people who come into the vicinity of the mountain cannot escape, but are doomed to a miserable end. Duke Ernst and his followers effect their escape by sewing themselves up in skins, and letting themselves be carried on to a hill by griffins, who are accustomed to capture those driven on to the Magnet Mountain; thence, after cutting the skins, they escape in the absence of the griffins. The continuation of the journey leads them to a people whose ears are so long that they can fling them round them like a cloak; and to yet another people whose feet are so large that when it rains, they can lie on the ground and spread their feet over them like umbrellas.

He comes from a race of dwarfs to a race of giants, etc. Many similar things are related in connection with the Duke Ernst's journey to the Crusades. The ‘Legend’ does not let one feel in the right way how, whenever Imaginations enter into the story, an orientation is set up towards a spiritual world, and how events are then related through pictures which are enacted in the astral world, and which are connected with the Will and Fate of earthly man.

[ 27 ] This is also the case with the beautiful ‘Story of Roland,’ in which Charles the Great's crusade against the heathen in Spain is commemorated. It is related there (as if in confirmation of the Bible) that in order that Charles the Great could attain the end he was striving for, the sun stopped in its course, so that one day became as long as two.

[ 28 ] In the case of the ‘Nibelung Saga,’ one can see how in, Northern lands it has kept a form that maintains more purely and directly the perception of the Spiritual, whereas in Central Europe the Imaginations are brought nearer to physical life. In the Northern form of the story the Imaginations are referred to an ‘astral world’; in the Central European form of the Lay of the Nibelungs, the Imaginations glide over into the perception of the physical world.

[ 29 ] The Imaginations appearing in the Legend of Duke Ernst refer in reality to what is experienced between the experiences in the physical sphere, in an ‘astral world,’ to which man belongs just as much as to the physical.

[ 30 ] If one applies spiritual vision to all this, then one sees how the entrance into the Age of Consciousness signifies outgrowing a phase of evolution in which the Luciferic powers would have prevailed over mankind, had not a new evolutionary impulse come into the human being through the Spiritual Soul with its force of intellectuality. That orientation towards the spiritual world which would lead into the paths of error is hindered through the Spiritual Soul; the gaze of man is drawn away and turned upon the physical world. Everything that happens in this direction withdraws humanity from the Luciferic powers that are misleading it.

[ 31 ] Michael is already at this time active for humanity from the spiritual world. He is preparing his later work from out of the supersensible. He is giving humanity impulses which preserve the former relation to the Divine-Spiritual world, without this preservation adopting a Luciferic character.

[ 32 ] Then in the last third of the nineteenth century Michael himself presses forward into the physical earthly world with the activities which he has exercised in preparation from out of the Supersensible, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

[ 33 ] Humanity had to undergo a period of spiritual evolution for the purpose of freeing itself from that relation to the spiritual world which threatened to become an impossible one. Then the evolution was guided, through the Michael Mission, into paths which brought the progress of Earth humanity once more into a good and healthy relation to the spiritual world.

[ 34 ] Thus Michael stands in his activity between the Luciferic World-picture, and the Ahrimanic World-intellect. The World-picture becomes through him a World-revelation full of wisdom, which reveals the World-intellect as Divine World-activity. And in this World-activity lives the care of Christ for humanity—even in the World-activity which can thus reveal itself to the heart of man out of Michael's World-revelation.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the above study of Michael's supersensible preparation for his earthly mission)

[ 35 ] 124. The dawn of the age of Consciousness (the age of the Spiritual Soul) in the fifteenth century was preceded, in the twilight of the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, by a heightened Luciferian activity, which continued for a certain time even into the new epoch.

[ 36 ] 125. This Luciferian influence tried to preserve ancient forms of pictorial conception of the world in a wrong way. Thus it tried to prevent man from understanding with Intellectuality and entering with fullness of life into the physical existence of the World.

[ 37 ] 126. Michael unites his being with the activity of mankind so that the independent Intellectuality may remain—not in a Luciferian, but in a righteous way—with the Divine and Spiritual from which it is inherited.

[ 1 ] At the time when the Spiritual Soul was entering the evolution of mankind on Earth, it was difficult for the Beings of the spiritual world next to this earthly existence to approach mankind. The form assumed by earthly events at that time proves that very peculiar conditions were necessary in order to enable the Spirit to find its way into the physical life of mankind. But it shows another thing as well, and in a way that is often most illuminating. It shows how, at a point when the Powers of the past are still at work and those of the future already beginning their activity, one spiritual influence tries to find its way into the earthly life of mankind in vigorous opposition to another.

[ 2 ] Between 1339 and 1453 a chaotic, devastating war begins between France and England. It lasts for more than a hundred years. In the chaos of this war, which was due to a certain spiritual current unfavourable to the evolution of mankind, events which would otherwise have brought the Spiritual Soul into humanity more quickly were definitely hindered. Chaucer, who died in 1400, laid the foundations of English literature. We need only remember the great spiritual consequences which took their start in Europe from the founding of this literature, and we shall see the importance of the fact that such an event was not able to work itself out freely, but fell into the midst of the confusions of a prolonged war. Moreover, already in 1215 that way of political thought which can receive its true stamp and character through the Spiritual Soul had begun in England. The further evolution of this fact, too, fell into all the hindrances of war.

[ 3 ] This was a time when the spiritual forces, seeking to evolve man according to the potentialities laid in him from the very beginning by yet loftier Divine-Spiritual Powers, encountered their strong adversaries. These adversaries wish to divert man into channels other than those appointed for him from the beginning. If they were to succeed, man would not be able to apply the forces of his origin to his further evolution. His cosmic childhood would remain unfruitful for him. It would become a dying, withering part within his being. The consequence would be that man could then fall a prey to the Luciferic or Ahrimanic Powers and lose his own true and proper development. If the adversaries of mankind had succeeded in their efforts—if they had not only put hindrances in the way, but achieved complete success—the entry of the Spiritual Soul could have been prevented.

[ 4 ] An event which reveals the inpouring of the Spiritual into the earthly events in a most clear and radiant way is the appearance and subsequent history of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans (1412–1431). The impulses for what she does lie in the deep, subconscious foundations of her soul. She follows dim inspirations from the spiritual world. On the Earth there is confusion and disorder, through which the age of the Spiritual Soul is to be hindered. Michael has to prepare from the spiritual world his later mission; this he is able to do where his impulses are received into human souls. Such a soul lives in the Maid of Orleans. And Michael also worked through many other souls, although this was possible only in a minor degree and is less apparent in outer historical life. In events such as the war between England and France he met with opposition from his Ahrimanic adversary.

[ 5 ] In our last number we spoke of the Luciferic adversary Michael found at the same time. And indeed, this adversary is particularly apparent in the course of events following upon the appearance of the Maid of Orleans. From these events it may be seen that mankind no longer knew how to deal with an intervention of the spiritual world in the destiny of humanity, which could be understood and also received by men into the will as long as Imaginative understanding existed. The earlier attitude towards such intervention became impossible when the Intellectual Soul ceased to act; the attitude corresponding to the Spiritual Soul had not at that time been discovered; nor has it yet been achieved.

[ 6 ] Thus it came about that Europe was moulded from the spiritual world without men understanding what was happening, and without that which they were able to do having any appreciable influence on this process.

[ 7 ] The significance of this event, the determining causes of which lay in the spiritual world, will be perceived if one tries to imagine what would have happened in the fifteenth century had there been no Maid of Orleans. There are some who wish to explain this phenomenon materialistically. It is impossible to come to an understanding with such people because they arbitrarily interpret in the materialistic sense something that is obviously spiritual.

[ 8 ] In certain directions of spiritual striving, too, it may now be clearly seen that humanity can no longer find the way to the Divine-Spiritual without difficulty, even though men search with resolution. There are difficulties which did not exist in the age when insight could still be gained with the aid of Imaginations. In order to judge correctly what is here meant, all that is necessary is to see in a clear light those individuals who come forward as philosophical thinkers. A philosopher cannot be judged by his effect on his age alone, nor by observing how many people have accepted his ideas. He is rather the expression, the manifestation in person for his age. The philosopher presents in his ideas that which the greater part of humanity bears within it as its frame of mind, unconscious feelings and impulses of life. Like a thermometer which registers the degree of the surrounding warmth, he registers the mental condition of his age. The philosophers are no more the causes of the psychology of their age than the thermometer is the cause of the surrounding temperature.

[ 9 ] Consider, from this point of view, the philosopher René Descartes, who worked when the age of the Spiritual Soul had already commenced. (He lived from 1596 to 1650.) The slender support for his connection with the spirit-world (the world of true being) is the experience ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In the centre of self-consciousness, in the ‘I,’ he tries to feel reality; and indeed, only so much as the Spiritual Soul can tell him.

[ 10 ] And he endeavours intellectually to understand the rest of the Spiritual by inquiring what guarantee the certainty of his own self-consciousness gives for the certainty of anything else. Regarding the truths handed on to him historically he always inquires: Are they as clear as the ‘I think, therefore I am’? And if he can answer this in the affirmative he accepts them.

[ 11 ] In this kind of human thought is not the Spirit eliminated from all observation that is directed towards the things in the world? The manifestation of the Spirit has withdrawn to the pin-point support in self-consciousness; all else, as it shows itself directly, is void of any revelation of the Spirit. Only indirectly, by the intellect in the Spiritual Soul, can the light of this spirit-revelation be thrown on that which lies outside self-consciousness. [ 12 ] The man of this age allows the content of his Spiritual Soul, which is as yet almost empty, to stream towards the spiritual world with intense longing. A tiny ray goes thither.

[ 13 ] The beings in the Spirit-world immediately bordering upon the Earth-world, and the human souls on Earth, come to one another with difficulty. Michael's supersensible preparation for his later Mission is also experienced by the human soul only under the greatest hindrances.

[ 14 ] In order to grasp the essential nature of the frame of mind expressed in Descartes, compare this philosopher with St. Augustine, who, in the outer formulation of it, sets up for the experience of the spiritual world the same support as Descartes. But in St. Augustine it takes place out of the full force of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. St. Augustine (354 - 430) is justly found to be related to Descartes, but his intellect is still the remnant of what is cosmic, whereas that of Descartes is the intellect that is already entering the individual human soul. In the progress of spiritual striving from St. Augustine to Descartes it may be seen how the cosmic character of the power of thought is lost and how it then reappears in the human soul. But it can also be seen at the same time with what difficulty Michael and the human soul come together so that Michael may lead in man what he once led in the Cosmos.

[ 15 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work to prevent this union. The Luciferic forces want man to unfold only that which was proper to him during his cosmic childhood; the Ahrimanic forces, which are opposed to the Luciferic and yet co-operate with them, would like to develop only those forces which were gained in later ages of the world, and so let the cosmic childhood of man wither away.

[ 16 ] Under increased resistances such as these, the human souls in Europe digested the spiritual impulses contained in old world-conceptions which had streamed from the East to the West through the Crusades. The Michael-forces lived very strongly in these conceptions. The Cosmic Intelligence, the rulership of which was the ancient spiritual heritage of Michael, was dominant in these old world-conceptions.

[ 17 ] How could they be received, seeing that there was a chasm between the forces of the spirit-world and the human souls? These forces came to the Spiritual Soul which was only just beginning to evolve. On one side they met with the hindrance given in the Spiritual Soul itself which was still but little developed. And on the other they no longer found a consciousness supported by Imagination. The human soul could not with full insight unite them with itself. They were accepted either quite superficially or superstitiously.

[ 18 ] We have to pay attention to this frame of mind if we wish to understand the movements of thought connected on the one hand with the names of Wycliffe, Huss and others, and on the other with the name of ‘Rosicrucianism.’

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing Second Study of the Michael Forces in the earliest Unfolding of the Spiritual Soul)

[ 19 ] 127. At the beginning of the Age of Consciousness, man evolved the intellectual forces of his soul only to a small extent as yet. Hence there arose a gap between what the soul of man in unconscious depths was longing for, and what the forces from the region of Michael's abode could give him.

[ 20 ] 128. Owing to this gap, there was a greater possibility for the Luciferic powers to hold man back in the forces of cosmic childhood, thus bringing about his further evolution, not on the paths of the Divine-Spiritual Powers with whom he was united from the beginning, but on the paths of Lucifer.

[ 21 ] 129. Moreover there was a greater possibility for the powers of Ahriman to wrest man away from the forces of his cosmic childhood, thus dragging him down, for his further evolution, into their own domain.

[ 22 ] 130. Neither of these dangers was realised, for the forces of Michael were after all at work. But the spiritual evolution of mankind had to take place under the resulting hindrances, and it was thus that it became what it has, in fact, hitherto become.

[ 1 ] Throughout Europe, the incorporation of the Spiritual Soul brought about a disturbance in the experiences of religious faith and ritual. A clear sign of the coming disturbance may be seen about the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the arising of the ‘Proofs of God’ (especially in the work of Anselm of Canterbury). The existence of God now had to be proved by intellectual reasoning. The desire to do such a thing could only arise when the old way of experiencing ‘God’ with the forces of the inner soul was vanishing. For we never set out to prove by logic what we experience in such a way.

[ 2 ] The old way was to perceive with one's inner soul the Beings or Intelligences, up to the Godhead. The new way, arising at this time, was to evolve intellectual thoughts about the Prime Foundations of the Universe. The former way was supported by the forces of Michael in the spiritual realm of Earth. Behind the thought-forces directed to the things of outer sense, the forces of Michael equipped the soul with faculties to perceive divine Being and Intelligence in the Universe. On the other hand, for the second way to find its fulfilment, the inner union of the soul with the forces of Michael must first be developed and accomplished.

[ 3 ] In the sphere of religious ritual, even the central doctrine of the Holy Communion began to totter. We find this happening in far-spread regions of the religious experience of man, from Wycliffe in England (fifteenth century) to Huss in Bohemia.

In Holy Communion man was able to find his union with the spiritual world which was opened up to him through Christ. For he was able to unite his being with Christ in such a way that the fact of the outer sense-union was at the same time a spiritual fact.

[ 4 ] The consciousness of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was able to form an idea of this union. For the Mind-Soul still possessed ideas, both of Spirit and of Matter, near to one another—so that it was possible for it to conceive the one (Matter) passing over into the other (Spirit). Ideas of this kind, however, cannot possibly be so intellectualistic as to require at the same time proofs of God's existence. Such ideas must still contain something of the living Imagination which enables man to feel, in Matter, the Spirit that is active in it; and in the Spirit, the striving towards Matter. Ideas of this kind have the cosmic forces of Michael behind them.

[ 5 ] Think only how much was beginning to totter for the human soul at that time: how much of what was connected with the innermost and holiest experience of men! Personalities arose—Huss, Wycliffe and others—in whom the existence of the Spiritual Soul shone out most radiantly. Their inner state of soul was such as to unite them with the Michael forces with an intensity that would not come for others till centuries afterwards. From the voice of Michael in their hearts, they proclaimed the worthiness of the Spiritual Soul to rise to the conception of the deepest religious mysteries. They felt that the Intellectuality which was coming with the Spiritual Soul must be able to include in the realm of its ideas that which had been attainable, in older times, by Imagination.

[ 6 ] On the other hand, the historical and traditional attitude of the human soul to these things had in very wide circles lost all its inner force and strength. What history refers to as the evils and abuses of religious life which were dealt with by the great Councils of Reform in the age when the Spiritual Soul was beginning its activity—all this is connected with the life of those human souls who, not yet feeling the Spiritual Soul within them, were on the other hand no longer able to find in the old Intellectual or Mind-Soul a sufficient source of inner strength or certainty.

[ 7 ] Historical experiences of men, such as were laid bare at the Councils of Constance and Basle, may be said to reveal:—in the spiritual world above the down-pouring of the Intellectuality seeking to find its way to men, and in the earthly realm below, the working of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, no longer in accordance with the time. The Michael forces are hovering between, looking back to their own past union with the Divine-Spiritual, and down upon the human realm. The human realm likewise enjoyed the same union in the past, but it must now pass into a sphere in which Michael will help it from the Spirit, though he may not unite his own inner being with this realm. Absolutely necessary as it is in cosmic evolution—yet signifying, to begin with, a disturbance in the balance of the Cosmos—this striving of Michael underlies that which mankind had to experience in that age even with respect to the most sacred truths.

[ 8 ] We gaze deeply into the characteristic features of that age when we turn our thoughts to Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. (One may read what I have said about him in the book Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life ...¹) His personality is like an outstanding monument of time. He wants the affairs of the world directed by points of view, which—instead of fighting the abuses and evils of the physical world by revolutionary tendencies—meet them with healthy common-sense, seeking to restore to the proper channel those things which have become diverted from it. We recognise this tendency in the influence he brought to bear at the Council of Basle, and generally within his ecclesiastical community.

[ 9 ] Thus Nicholas of Cusa is fully inclined towards the great change in evolution which comes with the unfolding of the Spiritual Soul. On the other hand he brings forth thoughts and ideas which reveal in a most radiant way the working of Michael's forces within them. Into the midst of his age he places the good old ideas which, in the epoch when Michael still ruled the Cosmic Intellectuality, led the human soul to the unfolding of faculties to perceive the Beings and Intelligences in the Cosmos. The ‘Learned Ignorance’ of which he speaks is a perception over and above that which is directed to the outer world of sense—a perception which leads man's thinking beyond the intellectuality of ordinary knowledge into a region where, in ignorance or emptiness of knowledge, the Spiritual is taken hold of by a pure, inner experience of seership.

[ 10 ] Thus Nicholas of Cusa is a personality who, feeling in his own soul-life the disturbance of the cosmic balance by Michael, would like intuitively to contribute as much as possible towards the turning of this disturbance to the welfare of humanity.

[ 11 ] Between the things of the spiritual life that came to light in this way there lived something else which remained hidden. Certain individuals who perceived and understood the position of the Michael-forces in the Universe, wished to prepare the forces of their own souls in such a way that they might consciously enter the spirit-realm bordering upon the earthly sphere—the realm in which Michael makes his efforts on behalf of humanity.

[ 12 ] They sought justification for this spiritual enterprise by conducting themselves outwardly in life, in their calling and in other circumstances, in such a way that their life could not be distinguished from that of other men. By lovingly performing their earthly duties in the ordinary sense they were able to turn their inner manhood freely towards the Spiritual which we have described. What they did in this direction was something between themselves and that with which they united themselves ‘in secret.’ As regards what took place in the physical realm, the world was at first apparently quite unaffected by this spiritual striving. And yet all this was needed in order to bring souls into the necessary union with the Michael-world. It was not a question of ‘Secret Societies’ in any bad sense, nor of anything that tried to hide because it feared the light of day, but rather of persons coming together, and in so doing convincing themselves that each one in their circle possessed the true consciousness of the Michael Mission. Those who thus worked together did not speak of their work before others who through lack of understanding could only have disturbed the aims they had set themselves. These aims consisted primarily in working in spiritual streams which flow, not within earthly life, but in the spirit-world next to it, but which nevertheless cast their impulses into earthly life.

[ 13 ] This gives an indication of the spirit-work of human beings who indeed live in the physical world but co-operate with Beings who belong to the spirit-world—Beings who do not themselves enter the physical world or incarnate in it. We are here speaking of those who, with very little reference to the real facts, are named in the world as the ‘Rosicrucians.’ True Rosicrucianism lies absolutely in the line of activity of the Michael Mission. It helped Michael to prepare on Earth the spirit-work which he wished to prepare for a later age.

[ 14 ] We shall be able to estimate what could be achieved thereby if we consider the following.

[ 15 ] The above-described difficulties, nay, impossibilities, for Michael to work into human souls, are connected with the fact that Michael himself, in his essential being, does not wish to come in contact in any way with the physical present of earthly life. He wishes to remain in the nexus of forces which existed for Spirits of his kind, and for human beings, in the past. Any contact with that with which, in present earthly life, man is obliged to come in contact—this Michael could only consider as a pollution of his being. Now in ordinary human life the spiritual experience of the soul works into the physical earthly life, and conversely the latter reacts upon the former. It is a reaction which expresses itself especially in man's frame of mind and in the direction of his soul towards some earthly thing. An interaction of this kind is as a rule the case—though not invariably—especially in persons engaged in public life. Hence the hindrances to Michael's work in many of the Reformers were very great.

[ 16 ] The Rosicrucians overcame the difficulty in this direction by keeping their external life—which consisted in their earthly duties—quite apart from their work with Michael. When Michael, together with his impulses, came in contact with what a Rosicrucian prepared in his soul for him, he found himself in no way exposed to the danger of meeting what was earthly. For, through the state of soul which he purposely cultivated, anything earthly was kept away from that which united the Rosicrucian with Michael.

[ 17 ] In this way the true Rosicrucian striving formed for Michael the path here on the Earth towards his coming earthly Mission.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the above Study of the Hindrances and Helps to the Michael Forces in the Dawn of the Age of the Spiritual Soul)

[ 18 ] 131. In the beginning of the Age of the Spiritual Soul, the Intellectuality now emancipated in man wanted to occupy itself with the truths of religious faith and ritual. The life of the human soul was thereby brought into uncertainty and doubt. Men tried to prove by logic spiritual realities that were formerly a direct experience within the soul. They tried to understand, nay even to determine by logical deduction, the contents of sacred ritual which can only be taken hold of in spiritual Imaginations.

[ 19 ] 132. All this is connected with the fact that while Michael is determined to avoid any kind of contact with the present earthly world, which man must enter; yet at the same time it is still his task to guide in man the cosmic Intellectuality which he administered in ages past. Thus there arises through the Michael-forces a disturbance in the cosmic balance albeit, a disturbance necessary for the further progress of world-evolution.

[ 20 ] 133. Michael's mission was made easier for him by certain personalities—the genuine Rosicrucians—who arranged their outward life on Earth so that it in no way interfered ,with their inner life of soul. They could thus develop forces within them, whereby they worked together in spiritual realms with Michael, without the danger of entangling him in present earthly happenings, which would have been impossible for him.

• 1. Mysticism and Modern Thought

[ 1 ] As the new Age of Consciousness proceeds, it grows less and less possible for Michael to connect himself with the existence of mankind in general. Intellectuality has become human and is now entering humanity. From it the Imaginative conceptions, which could reveal to man the Divine Being and Intelligence in the Cosmos, are vanishing. The possibility for Michael himself to approach man begins only with the last third of the nineteenth century. Before that time it was only possible by those paths which were sought for in the true Rosicrucian sense.

[ 2 ] With his own budding intellectuality, man looks out into Nature. He sees there a physical and etheric world, in which he himself is not contained. Through the great ideas of men such as Copernicus and Galileo, he attains a picture of the world external to man. But he loses the picture of himself. When he gazes on himself he has no possibility of reaching any insight as to what he truly is.

[ 3 ] In the depths of his being, that which is destined to bear and sustain his intelligence is being awakened in him. With this, his Ego becomes united. Thus man now bears a threefold nature within him: first, in his spirit-and-soul being, manifesting as physical-etheric, that which originated once upon a time, in the old Saturn and Sun epochs, and then ever and again placed him within the kingdom of the Divine-Spiritual. It is here that the Human Being and the Michael Being go together. Secondly, man bears within him his later physical and etheric nature, that which evolved in him during the Moon and Earth epochs. All this is the work and active working of the Divine-Spiritual. But the Divine-Spiritual itself is no longer living and present within it. [ 4 ] It only becomes fully living and present once more when Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha. In that which is at work spiritually in the physical and etheric body of man, Christ can indeed be found.

Thirdly, man has within him that part of his soul and spirit which received new being in the Moon and Earth epochs. Here Michael has remained active (whereas in the part of man that is inclined towards the Moon and Earth, he has become more and more inactive.) In the former Michael has preserved, for man, his picture of Man and the Gods together.

[ 5 ] He was able to do this until the dawn of the new age of Consciousness—the age of the Spiritual Soul. Then the spirit and soul of man sank down, as it were, entirely in the physical-etheric nature, in order to draw forth from there the Spiritual Soul.

[ 6 ] Radiantly there arose in the consciousness of man what his physical and his etheric body could tell him about the physical and etheric in the world of Nature. And what his astral body and Ego had been able to tell him about himself vanished away from his vision.

[ 7 ] In the age which now began, there arose in man the feeling that with his own insight he could no longer reach himself. Thus there began a search for knowledge of the human being. Man could no longer find satisfaction for this quest in what the present was able to provide. He went back to earlier ages of history. Humanism arose in the evolution of the spiritual life. Humanism became the object of men's striving, not because they had grasped Man in his essential nature, but because they had lost him. As long as they possessed this knowledge, Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worked from a trend of soul quite different from anything that Humanism could give them.

[ 8 ] In Faust, Goethe discovered at a later time a figure representative of the man who had completely lost hold of his essential being.

[ 9 ] This quest of the human being grows more and more intense as time goes on. For man has now no other alternative: he must either make himself blunt and insensitive as regards his own being, or else the longing for it must come forth as an essential element in his soul's life.

[ 10 ] Right into the nineteenth century, the best minds in the spiritual life of Europe evolve ideas in the most varied fields and in the most different ways—ideas historical, scientific, philosophical, mystical, all of which represent the striving to find, in what has now become an intellectualistic world-conception, the human being himself.

[ 11 ] Renaissance, spiritual re-birth, humanism, are striving restlessly—even tempestuously—for a spiritual element in a direction in which it is not to be found. And, in the direction in which it should be sought, there is impotence, illusion, bewilderment of consciousness. And yet everywhere—in Art, in Knowledge—the Michael-forces are breaking through into the human being, though not as yet into the newly-growing forces of the Spiritual Soul. It is a critical time for the spiritual life. Michael turns all his forces towards the past in cosmic evolution so that he may gain the power to hold the ‘Dragon’ balanced and constrained beneath his feet. It is under these mighty exertions of Michael that the great creations of the Renaissance are born. Yet they still only represent a renewal by Michael of Intellectual or Mind-Soul forces. They are not yet a working of the new soul-forces.

[ 12 ] We can behold Michael filled with anxiety. Will he really be able to master the ‘Dragon’ in the long run? He perceives human beings in one region trying to gain a picture of Man out of the newly-acquired picture of Nature. He sees how they observe Nature and then seek to form a picture of Man from what they call the ‘Laws of Nature.’ He sees them forming their conceptions:—‘This animal quality becomes more perfect, that system of organs more harmonious, and man “arises”!’ But before the spirit-gaze of Michael man does not arise. For in effect, what is thus thought of as being harmonised, perfected, is there only in thought. No one can see it evolving in reality, for nowhere does this happen in actual fact.

[ 13 ] And so, with these their conceptions about Man, men live in empty pictures, in illusions. They are forever running after a picture of Man which they only imagine that they have, while in real truth there is nothing in their field of vision. ‘The power of the spiritual Sun shines upon their souls. Christ Himself is working; but they are not yet able to perceive His presence. The power of the Spiritual Soul holds sway in the body; but it still will not enter into their souls.’ That is approximately the inspiration one can hear of what Michael says in great anxiety. Is it possible that the forces of illusion in man will give the ‘Dragon’ so much power that it will be impossible for Michael to maintain the balance?

[ 14 ] Other persons try with more inward artistic power to feel Nature at one with man. Mighty are the words in which Goethe described Winkelmann's work in a beautiful book: ‘When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, majestic and worthy whole, when harmonious case gives him pure, free delight; then would the Universe, if it were conscious of itself, shout aloud for joy, as having reached its goal, and marvel at the climax of its own development and being.’ That which stimulated Lessing with fiery spirit and ensouled Herder's wide outlook on the world, rings out in these words of Goethe. And the whole of Goethe's own work is like a many-sided revelation of these his own words. In his ‘Aesthetic Letters’, Schiller has described an ideal human being who, in the sense described in the above words, bears the Universe within himself and realises it in social intercourse with other human beings. But whence comes this picture of Man? It shines like the morning sun over the Earth in spring. But it has entered into human feeling from study of the ancient Greeks. It arose in men with a strong inward Michael-impulse; but they could give form to this impulse only by turning the mind's eye to days of yore. When Goethe wished to experience ‘Man,’ he felt himself in the greatest conflict with the Spiritual Soul. He sought for Man in Spinoza's philosophy; but only during his tour in Italy, when he studied the nature of Greek art, did he feel that he had a glimpse of him. He went away finally from the Spiritual Soul, which is striving upwards in Spinoza, to the Intellectual Soul or Mind-Soul which was gradually dying out. However, with his far-reaching conception of Nature he was able to carry over an infinite amount from the Intellectual Soul into the Spiritual Soul.

[ 15 ] Michael also looks with earnestness upon this search for Man. What is in accordance with his idea is indeed entering here into the spiritual evolution of man:—it is that human being who once beheld the Divine Being and Intelligence when Michael still ruled it from the Cosmos. But if this were not laid hold of by the spiritualised force of the Spiritual Soul it would in the end inevitably slip away from Michael's control and come under the sway of Lucifer. The other great anxiety in Michael's life is, lest in the oscillation of the cosmic spiritual state of balance Lucifer might gain the upper hand.

[ 16 ] Michael's preparation of his Mission for the end of the nineteenth century flows on in cosmic tragedy. Below, on the Earth, there is often the greatest satisfaction in the working out of the new picture of Nature; whereas in the region where Michael works there is a tragic feeling regarding the hindrances to the coming of the picture of Man.

[ 17 ] Formerly Michael's austere, spiritualised love lived in the sun's rays, in the shimmering dawn, in the sparkling of the stars; this love had now acquired most strongly the note of looking down at humanity with awakening sorrow.

[ 18 ] Michael's situation in the Cosmos became tragically difficult, but it also pressed for a solution just at the period of time which preceded his earthly mission. Men were able to keep intellectuality only in the sphere of the body and there only in the sphere of the senses. On one hand, therefore, they received into their views nothing that the senses did not tell them; Nature became the field of the revelations of the senses, considered quite materially. The forms of Nature were no longer perceived as the work of the Divine-Spiritual but as something devoid of spirit, and yet something of which it is affirmed that it brings forth that spiritual element in which man lives. On the other hand, as regards a Spirit-world, men would now accept only what the historical accounts narrated. Direct vision of the Spirit working in the past was discredited, as was the vision of the Spirit in the present.

[ 19 ] In the soul of man there now lived only that which came from the sphere of the present, which Michael does not enter. Man was glad to stand on ‘sure’ ground. He believed he possessed this because in ‘Nature’ he sought no thoughts, in which he might have had to fear the presence of arbitrary fancies. But Michael was not glad. In his own sphere, beyond man, he had to wage war with Lucifer and Ahriman. This resulted in tragic difficulty, because Lucifer is able to approach man the more easily, the more Michael—who indeed also preserves the past—is obliged to keep himself away from man. And thus a severe battle for man took place between Michael and Ahriman and Lucifer in the spiritual world immediately bordering upon the Earth, while on the Earth itself man kept his soul in action against what was beneficial to his evolution.

[ 20 ] All this applies of course to the spiritual life of Europe and America. We should have to speak differently with respect to that of Asia.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the above Third Study: Michael's suffering over Human Evolution before the Time of his earthly Activity)

[ 21 ] 134. In the very earliest time of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, man began to feel that he had lost the picture of Humanity—the picture of his own Being—which had formerly been given to him in Imagination. Powerless as yet to find it in the Spiritual Soul, he sought for it by way of Natural Science or of History. He wanted the ancient picture of Humanity to arise in him again.

[ 22 ] 135. Man reaches no fulfilment in this way. Far from becoming filled with the true being of Humanity, he is only led into illusions. But he is unaware that they are so; he thinks they have real power to sustain Humanity.

[ 23 ] 136. Thus, in the time that went before his working upon Earth, Michael had to witness with anxiety and suffering the evolution of mankind. For in this time men eschewed any real contemplation of the Spirit, and thus they severed all the links that connected them with Michael.

[ 1 ] Our study of the Michael Mystery was irradiated by thoughts of the Mystery of Golgotha. For, in effect, Michael is the Power who leads man towards the Christ along the true way of man's salvation.

[ 2 ] But the Michael Mission is one of those that are repeated again and again in rhythmical succession in the cosmic evolution of mankind. In its beneficial influence on earthly mankind it was repeated before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was connected in that time with all the active revelations which the Christ-Force—as yet external to the Earth—had to pour down to the Earth for the unfolding of mankind. After the Mystery of Golgotha, the Michael Mission enters the service of what must now be achieved in earthly humanity through Christ Himself. In its repetitions, the Michael Mission now appears in a changed and ever-progressing form. The point is that it appears in repetitions.

[ 3 ] The Mystery of Golgotha, on the other hand, is an all embracing World-event, taking place once only in the whole course of the cosmic evolution of mankind.

[ 4 ] It was only when humanity had reached the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul that the ever-continued danger which was there potentially from the beginning—the danger lest humanity's existence should become severed from the existence of the Divine-Spiritual—made itself fully felt.

[ 5 ] And in the same manner in which the soul of man loses the conscious experience in and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings, there emerges around him that which we today call ‘Nature.’ [ 6 ] Man no longer sees the essence and being of Humanity in the Divine-Spiritual Cosmos; he sees the accomplished work of the Divine-Spiritual in this earthly realm. To begin with, however, he sees it not in the abstract form in which it is seen today—not as physically sensible events and entities held together by those abstract ideal contents which we call ‘Natural Laws.’ To begin with, he sees it still as Divine-Spiritual Being—Divine-Spiritual Being surging up and down in all that he perceives around him, in the birth and decay of living animals, in the springing and sprouting of the plant-world, in the activity of water-wells and rivers, in cloud and wind and weather. All these processes of being around him represent to him the gestures, deeds and speech of the Divine Being at the foundation of ‘Nature.’

[ 7 ] Once upon a time, man had seen in the constellations and movements of the stars the deeds and gestures of the Divine Beings of the Cosmos, whose words he was thus able to read in the heavens. In like manner, the ‘facts of Nature’ now became for him an expression of the Goddess of the Earth. For the Divinity at work in Nature was conceived as feminine.

[ 8 ] Far down into the Middle Ages, the relics of this mode of conception were still at work in the souls of men, filling the Intellectual or Mind-Soul with an Imaginative content.

[ 9 ] When men of knowledge wanted to bring the ‘processes of Nature’ to the understanding of their pupils, they spoke of the deeds of the ‘Goddess.’ It was only with the gradual dawn of the Spiritual Soul that this living study of Nature, filled as it was with inner soul, grew unintelligible to mankind.

[ 10 ] The way in which men looked in this direction in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul is reminiscent of the Myth of Persephone and of the mystery that underlies it.

[ 11 ] Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is compelled by the God of the Underworld to follow him into his kingdom. Eventually it is achieved that she spends one-half of the year only in the Nether world and dwells for the remainder of the year in the Upper world.

[ 12 ] This Myth of Persephone was still a great and wonderful expression of the way in which Man, in an age of immemorial antiquity, had perceived and known the evolutionary process of the Earth in dream-like clairvoyance.

[ 13 ] In primeval times all the world-creative activity had proceeded from the surroundings of the Earth. The Earth itself was only in process of becoming, and moulded its existence in cosmic evolution from out of the activities of the surrounding world. The Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Cosmos were the creators and moulders of the Earth's existence. But when the Earth was far enough advanced to become an independent heavenly body, Divine-Spiritual Being descended from the great Cosmos to the Earth and became the Earth-Divinity. This cosmic fact the dream-like clairvoyance of primeval mankind had seen and known; and of such knowledge the Myth of Persephone remained—but not only this. For indeed, far down even into the Middle Ages, the way in which men sought to know and penetrate into ‘Nature’ was still a relic of the same ancient knowledge. It was not yet as in these later times, when men only see according to their sense-impressions, i.e., according to that which appears on the surface of the Earth. They still saw according to the forces that work upwards to the surface from the depths of the Earth. And these ‘forces of the depths’—the ‘forces of the Nether world’—they saw in mutual interplay with the influences of the stars and elements working from the Earth's environment.

[ 14 ] The plants in their varied forms grow forth, revealing themselves in many-coloured glory. Therein are at work the forces of Sun and Moon and Stars, together with the forces of the Earth's depths. The ground and foundation for this is given in the minerals, whose existence is entirely conditioned by that part of the cosmic Beings which has become earthly. Through those heavenly forces alone, which have become earthly, rock and stone shoot forth out of the Nether world. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, has not assumed the forces of the earthly depths. It comes into being through those world-forces alone which are at work from the surroundings of the Earth. It owes its growth, development and surging life, its powers of nutrition, its possibilities of movement, to the Sun-forces streaming down to the Earth. And under the influence of the Moon-forces streaming down to the Earth it has the power to reproduce itself It appears in manifold forms and species because the starry constellations are working in manifold ways from the Cosmos, shaping and moulding this animal life. The animals are, as it were, only placed down here on Earth from out the Cosmos. It is only with their dim life of consciousness that they partake in the earthly realm; with their origin, development and growth, with all that they are in order to be able to perceive and move about, they are no earthly creatures.

[ 15 ] This mightily conceived idea of the evolution of the Earth lived once upon a time in mankind. The greatness of the conception is scarcely recognisable any longer in the relics of it which came down to the Middle Ages. To attain this knowledge one must go back, with the true vision of the seer, into very ancient times. For even the physical documents that are extant do not reveal what was really present there in the souls of men, save to those who are able to penetrate to it by a spiritual path.

[ 16 ] Now man is not in a position to hold himself so much aloof from the Earth as do the animals. In saying this, we are approaching the Mystery of Humanity as well as the Mystery of the Animal Kingdom. These Mysteries were reflected in the animal cults of the ancient peoples, and above all in that of the Egyptians. They saw the animals as beings who are but guests upon the Earth, and in whom one may perceive the nature and activity of the spiritual world immediately adjoining this earthly realm. And when in pictures they portrayed the human figure in connection with the animal, they were representing to themselves the forms of those elementary, intermediate beings who, though they are indeed in cosmic evolution on the way to humanity, yet purposely refrain from entering the earthly realm, in order not to become human. For there are such elementary, intermediate beings and in picturing them the Egyptians were but reproducing what they saw. Such beings, however, have not the full self-consciousness of man, to attain to which man had to enter this earthly world so completely as to receive something of this earthly nature into his very own.

[ 17 ] Man had to be exposed to the fact that in this earthly world, though the work of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom he is connected is indeed present here, yet it is only their accomplished work. And just because only the accomplished work, severed from its Divine origin, is present here, therefore the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings have access to it. Thus it becomes necessary for man to make this realm of the Divine-accomplished work, permeated as it is by Lucifer and Ahriman, the field of action for one part—namely, the earthly part—of his life's development.

[ 18 ] So long as man had not progressed to the unfolding of his Intellectual or Mind-Soul, this was possible, without man's nature becoming permanently severed from its original Divine-Spiritual foundation. But when this point was reached, a corruption took place in man—a corruption of the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies. To an ancient science, this corruption was known as something that was living in man's nature. It was known as a thing that was necessary in order that consciousness might advance to self-consciousness in man. In the stream of knowledge that was cultivated in the centres of learning founded by Alexander the Great, there lived an Aristotelianism which, rightly understood, contained this ‘corruption’ as an essential element in its psychology. It was only in a later time that these ideas were no longer penetrated in their inward essence.

[ 19 ] In the ages before the evolution of his Intellectual or Mind Soul, man was, however, interwoven still with the forces of his Divine-Spiritual origin, so much so that from their cosmic field of action these forces were able to balance and hold in check the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers that reach out to man on Earth. And from the human side enough was done by way of co-operation to maintain the balance, in those actions of Ritual and of the Mysteries, wherein the picture was unfolded of the Divine-Spiritual Being diving down into the realm of Lucifer and Ahriman and coming forth again triumphant. Hence in times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we find in the religious rites of different peoples pictorial representations of that which afterwards, in the Mystery of Golgotha, became reality.

[ 20 ] When the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was unfolded, it was through the reality alone that man could continue to be preserved from being severed from the Divine-Spiritual Beings who belonged to him. The Divine had to enter inwardly as Being, even in the earthly life, into the Organisation of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul which, during earthly existence, has its life from what is earthly. This took place through the Divine-Spiritual Logos, Christ, uniting His cosmic destiny with the Earth for the sake of mankind.

[ 21 ] Persephone came down to the Earth in order to save the plant kingdom from being obliged to form itself from what belongs only to Earth. That is the descent of a Divine Spiritual Being into the Nature of the Earth. Persephone, too, has a kind of ‘resurrection.’ but this takes place annually, in rhythmical succession.

[ 22 ] Over against this event—which is also a cosmic event occurring on the Earth—we have for Humanity the descent of the Logos. Persephone descends to bring Nature into its original direction. In this case there must be rhythm at the foundation; for the events in Nature take place rhythmically. The Logos descends into humanity. This occurs once during human evolution. For the evolution of humanity is but one part in a gigantic cosmic rhythm, in which, before the stage of man's existence, humanity was something altogether different, and in which, after this stage is passed, it will be something altogether different again; whereas the plant life repeats itself as such in shorter rhythms.

[ 23 ] From the age of the Spiritual Soul onwards it is necessary for humanity to see the Mystery of Golgotha in this light. For already in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul there would have been a danger of man being separated, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. In the age of the Spiritual Soul a complete darkening of the Spirit-world would needs come about for human consciousness, if the Spiritual Soul could not strengthen itself sufficiently to look back in inward vision to its Divine-Spiritual origin. If, however, it is able to do this, it finds the cosmic Logos, as the Being Who can lead it back. It fills itself with the mighty picture which reveals what took place on Golgotha.

[ 24 ] The beginning of this understanding is the loving comprehension of the cosmic Christmas, the cosmic Initiation-Night, the festive remembrance of which is celebrated each year. For the Spiritual Soul, which first receives the element of Intellectuality, is strengthened by allowing true love to enter into this, the coldest element of soul. And the warmth of true love is there in its highest form when it goes out to the Jesus child who appears on Earth during the cosmic Initiation-Night. In this way man has allowed the highest earthly Spirit-fact, which was at the same time a physical event, to work upon his soul; he has entered upon the path by which he receives Christ into himself.

[ 25 ] Nature must be recognised in such a way that in Persephone—or the Being who was still seen in the early Middle Ages when they spoke of ‘Nature’—it reveals the Divine Spiritual, original and eternal Force out of which it originated and continually originates, as the foundation of earthly human existence.

[ 26 ] The world of Man must be so recognised that in Christ it reveals the original and eternal Logos who works for the unfolding of the Spirit-being of man in the sphere of the Divine Spiritual Being bound up with man from the Beginning.

[ 27 ] To turn the human heart in love to these great cosmic facts: this is the true content of the festival of remembrance which approaches man each year when he contemplates the cosmic Initiation-Night of Christmas. If love such as this lives in human hearts, it permeates the cold light-element of the Spiritual Soul with warmth. Were the Spiritual Soul obliged to remain without such permeation, man would never become filled with the Spirit. He would die in the cold of the intellectual consciousness; or he would have to remain in a mental life that did not progress to the unfolding of the conscious Spiritual Soul. He would then come to a stop with the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

[ 28 ] But in its essential nature the Spiritual Soul is not cold. It seems to be so only at the commencement of its unfolding, because at that stage it can only reveal the light-element in its nature, and not as yet the cosmic warmth in which it has indeed its origin.

[ 29 ] To feel and experience Christmas in this way will enable the soul to realise how the glory of the Divine-Spiritual Beings, whose images are revealed in the Stars, announces itself to man, and how man's liberation takes place, within the precincts of the Earth, from the Powers which wish to alienate him from his origin.

(Christmas, 1924)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing Christmas Study)

[ 30 ] 137. The activity in the evolution of the World and Mankind which comes about through the forces of Michael, repeats itself rhythmically, though in ever-changing and progressing forms, before the Mystery of Golgotha and after.

[ 31 ] 138. The Mystery of Golgotha is the greatest event, occurring once and for all in the evolution of mankind. Here there can be no question of a rhythmic repetition. For while the evolution of mankind also stands within a mighty cosmic rhythm, still it is one—one vast member in a cosmic rhythm. Before it became this One, mankind was something altogether different from mankind; afterwards it will again be altogether different. Thus there are many Michael events in the evolution of mankind, but there is only one event of Golgotha.

[ 32 ] 139. In the quick rhythmic repetition of the seasons of the year, the Divine-Spiritual Being which descended into the depths of Earth to permeate Nature's process with the Spirit, accomplishes this process. It is the ensouling of Nature with the Forces of the Beginning and of Eternity which must remain at work; even as Christ's descent is the ensouling of Mankind with the Logos of the Beginning and of Eternity, whose working for the salvation of mankind shall never cease.

[ 1 ] In the spatial Cosmos we have the contrast of the Universal spaces and the Earthly centre. In the Universal spaces the stars, as it were, are scattered wide, while from the Earthly centre forces are streaming out in all directions into the far spread Universe.

[ 2 ] To man as he stands in the world in the present cosmic epoch, it is only as a great totality that the glory of the stars and the working of the earthly forces can represent the finished work of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom he in his inner being is connected.

[ 3 ] But there was once a cosmic epoch when the glory of the stars and the forces of the Earth were still a direct spiritual revelation of the Divine-Spiritual Beings. At that time, man in his dim consciousness felt the Divine-Spiritual Beings actively working in his own nature.

[ 4 ] Another epoch of time ensued. The starry heavens became severed, as a corporeal existence, from the Divine-Spiritual working. There originated what we may call the ‘World-spirit’ and the ‘World-body.’ The World-spirit is a multitude of Divine-Spiritual Beings. In the former epoch these Beings had worked from the starry places inward to the Earth. All that had shone forth from universal space, all that had radiated by way of forces from the earthly centre, was in reality Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings, who were working creatively upon the Earth and Earth humanity.

[ 5 ] In the later cosmic epochs—after the Saturn and Sun evolutions—the working of the Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings became more and more spiritually inward. That in which They had been actively present in the beginning became the ‘World-body’: the harmonious arrangement of stars in universal space. Looking back on these matters with a spiritual world-conception, we may express it thus: From the original spirit-body of the World-creative Beings, the World-spirit and the World-body were evolved. And in the ordering and movement of the stars, the World-body now shows what the Intelligent and Will-imbued working of the Gods once upon a time was like. For the cosmic present however, what was once the Divine Intelligence and Will living and moving freely in the stars, has become fastened in the fixed Laws of the starry universe.

[ 6 ] Today, therefore, that which shines inward from the starry worlds to man on Earth is no longer an immediate expression of Divine Will and Divine Intelligence, but it is a sign that has come to stand:—a sign of what the Divine Will and Intelligence was, once upon a time, even in the very stars. Potent as it is to call forth wonder in the human soul, we must recognise in the sublime formation of the starry heavens a revelation of the Gods which is of the past; we cannot perceive in it their present revelation.

[ 7 ] That, however, which in the shining of the stars is ‘of the past,’ is ‘present’ in the Spirit-world. And in this ‘present’ Spirit-world, man with his own true being dwells.

[ 8 ] Studying the formation of the world, we must look back to an ancient cosmic epoch when the World-spirit and the World-body still worked as an undivided unity. Then we must envisage the middle epoch, in which they unfold as a duality. And at length we must think into the future—into the third epoch when the World-spirit will once again take up the World-body into its active working.

[ 9 ] For the old epoch, it would have been impossible to ‘calculate’ the constellations and the courses of the stars; for these were then the expression of the free Intelligence and free Will of Divine-Spiritual Beings. Moreover, in the future they will once again become ‘incalculable.’

[ 10 ] ‘Calculation’ has a meaning only for the middle cosmic epoch.

[ 11 ] And this holds good, not only of the constellations and the movements of the stars, but of the working of the forces which radiate from the earthly centre to the far-spread Universe. That which works ‘out of the depths’ also becomes ‘calculable.’

[ 12 ] Everything strives from the older cosmic epoch towards the middle epoch, when the Spatial and Temporal becomes ‘calculable,’ and the Divine-Spiritual as manifestation of Intelligence and Will must be sought for ‘behind’ this ‘calculable’ world.

[ 13 ] Only in this middle epoch are the conditions given for man to progress from a dim state of consciousness to one of free and bright self-conscious being, with a free Intelligence and a free Will of his own.

[ 14 ] Thus there had to come the time when Copernicus and Kepler could ‘calculate’ the body of the world. For it was through the cosmic forces with which this moment was connected, that the self-consciousness of man had to take shape. The seed of man's self-consciousness had been laid in an older time; and now the time was come when it was far enough advanced to ‘calculate’ the far-spread Universe.

[ 15 ] On the Earth, ‘History’ takes place. What we call ‘History’ would never have come about if the far spaces of the Universe had not evolved into the ‘hard and fast’ constellations and starry courses. In ‘historic evolution’ on the Earth we have an image—albeit thoroughly transformed—of what was once upon a time ‘heavenly History.’ [ 16 ] Earlier peoples still had this ‘heavenly History’ in their consciousness, and were indeed far more aware of it than of the Earthly.

[ 17 ] In earthly History there lives the intelligence and will of men—in connection, to begin with, with the cosmic Will and Intelligence of the Gods; then, independent of them.

[ 18 ] In heavenly History, on the other hand, there lived the Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings who are connected with mankind.

[ 19 ] When we look back into the spiritual life of nations, we come to an age of far-distant antiquity when there was present in man a consciousness of being and willing in communion with the Divine-Spiritual Beings—so much so that ,the History of men was heavenly History. The man of that age, when he came to speak of ‘origins,’ did not relate earthly events but cosmic. And even in relation to his own present time, that which was going on in his earthly environment seemed to him so insignificant beside the cosmic processes that he gave his attention to the latter only, not to the former.

[ 20 ] There was an epoch when humanity was conscious of beholding the history of the heavens in mighty and impressive revelations, wherein the Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves stood before the soul of man. They spoke, and man in Dream Inspiration hearkened to their speech; they revealed their forms, and in Dream-Imagination man saw them.

[ 21 ] This heavenly History, which for a long time filled the souls of men, was followed by the mythical History, generally regarded in our time as a poetic creation of the ancients. Mythical History combines heavenly events with earthly. ‘Heroes,’ for instance,—super-human beings—appear on the scene. They are beings at a higher stage in evolution than the human being. In a given epoch, for example, man had developed the members of human nature only so far as to the Sentient Soul, but the ‘Hero’ had already evolved what will one day appear in man as Spirit-Self. In the existing conditions of the Earth, the ‘Hero’ could not incarnate directly, but he could do so indirectly by diving down into the body of a human being, and thus becoming able to work as a man among men. Such beings are to be seen in the ‘Initiates’ of an earlier time.

[ 22 ] To understand the true position of the facts in this world process, we must not imagine that in the successive epochs mankind ‘conceived’ of the processes and events in just this way. But that which actually took place, as between the more spiritual, ‘incalculable’ and the corporeal, ‘calculable’ world, underwent a change. Long after the world-relationships had actually changed, human consciousness in this or that nation still held fast to a world-conception corresponding to a far earlier reality. To begin with, this was due to the fact that the consciousness of men, which does not keep pace exactly with the cosmic process, really continued to behold the old condition. Afterwards there came a time in which the vision faded, but men still held fast to the old by tradition. Thus in the Middle Ages an in-playing of the heavenly world into the earthly was still conceived out of tradition, but it was no longer seen, for the force of Imaginative picture-seeing was no longer present.

[ 23 ] In the earthly realm, the different peoples evolved in such a way as to hold fast to the content of one or other world conception for varying periods of time. Thus, world conceptions which by their nature follow one upon the other are found living side by side. Albeit, the variety of world conceptions is due not to this alone, but also to the fact that the different nations, according to their inner talents, did really see different spiritual things. Thus the Egyptians beheld the world in which beings dwell who have come to a premature standstill on the path of human evolution and have not become earthly Man. The Egyptians too saw man himself, after his earthly life, in the midst of all that he had to do with beings such as these. The Chaldaean peoples, on the other hand, saw more the way in which extra-earthly spiritual Beings, both good and evil, entered into the earthly life to work there.

[ 24 ] The ancient ‘Heavenly History’ properly speaking, which belonged to a very long epoch of time, was followed by the epoch of Mythological History, shorter, but, in comparison to the subsequent period of ‘History’ in the accepted sense, none the less very long.

[ 25 ] It is, as I explained above, only with difficulty that man in his consciousness takes leave of the old conceptions wherein the Gods and men are thought of in living interplay and co-operation. Thus the period of Earthly History in the proper sense has long been present; it has in fact been present since the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-soul. Nevertheless for a long time men continued to ‘think’ in the sense of what had been before. It was only when the first germs of the Spiritual Soul evolved, that they began therewith to pay attention to what is now called ‘History in the proper sense.’ And in this Human-Spiritual element, which, loosed from the Divine-Spiritual, becomes ‘History,’ the free Intelligence and the free Will can be experienced consciously by men.

[ 26 ] Thus the World-process in which man is interwoven, runs its course between the fully calculable and the working of the free Intelligence and the free Will. This World-process manifests itself in all conceivable intermediate shades of co-operation between these two.

[ 27 ] Man lives his life between birth and death in such a manner that in the ‘calculable’ the bodily foundation is created for the unfolding of his inner soul-and-spirit nature, which is free and incalculable. He goes through his life between death and new birth in the incalculable, but in such a way that the calculable there unfolds, in thought, ‘within’ his existence of soul and spirit. Out of this calculable element he thereby becomes the builder of his coming life on Earth.

[ 28 ] That which cannot be calculated is manifested forth on Earth in ‘History,’ but into it the calculable is incorporated, though only to a slight extent.

[ 29 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings oppose themselves to the order which is established between the incalculable and the calculable by the Divine-Spiritual Beings who have been united with man from the very beginning; they oppose the harmonising of the Cosmos by the Divine-Spiritual Beings through ‘measure, number and weight.’ Lucifer cannot unite anything calculable with the nature that he has given to his being. His ideal is a cosmic and unconditioned activity of Intelligence and Will.

[ 30 ] This Luciferic tendency is in keeping with the cosmic order in the realms in which there should be happenings that are free. And Lucifer is there the competent spiritual helper of the unfolding of humanity. Without his assistance freedom could not enter into the human life of spirit and soul which is built on the foundation of the calculable bodily nature. But Lucifer would like to extend this tendency to the whole Cosmos. And in this, his activity becomes a conflict against the Divine-Spiritual order to which man originally belongs.

[ 31 ] At this point Michael steps in. With his own being he stands within the incalculable; but he balances the incalculable with the calculable, which he bears within him as the cosmic Thought that he has received from his Gods.

[ 32 ] The position of the Ahrimanic Powers in the world is different. They are the exact opposite of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom man is originally united. At the present time these latter are purely spiritual Powers who possess absolutely free Intelligence and absolutely free Will, but in this Intelligence and Will they create the wise insight of the necessity of the calculable and the unfree—the cosmic Thought out of whose lap man is to unfold as a free being. And in the Cosmos they are united in love with all that is calculable—with the cosmic Thought. This love streams from them through the Universe.

[ 33 ] In complete contrast with this, there lives, in the greedy desire of the Ahrimanic powers, cold hatred against all that unfolds in freedom. Ahriman's efforts are directed towards making a cosmic machine out of that which he allows to stream forth from the Earth into universal space. His ideal is ‘measure, number and weight’ and nothing else than these. He was called into the Cosmos that serves the evolution of humanity, because ‘measure, number and weight,’ which is his sphere, had to be unfolded.

[ 34 ] The world is truly understood only by one who comprehends it everywhere with respect to spirit and body. This must be carried right into Nature, with respect to such Powers as the Divine-Spiritual who work in love and the Ahrimanic who work in hatred. In Nature's cosmic warmth which comes in spring and works more strongly towards summer, we must perceive the love of the Divine-Spiritual Beings working through Nature; in the icy blast of winter we must become aware of Ahriman's working.

[ 35 ] At midsummer, Lucifer's power weaves itself into the love that works in Nature:—into the warmth. At Christmas the power of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom man is originally united is directed against the frost-hatred of Ahriman. And towards spring the Divine Love working in Nature continually softens down the Ahriman-hatred there.

[ 36 ] The appearance of this Divine Love which comes each year is a time of remembrance, for with Christ the free element of God entered into the calculable element of Earth. Christ works in absolute freedom in the calculable element, and in this way He renders innocuous the Ahrimanic which craves for the calculable alone.

[ 37 ] The Event of Golgotha is the free cosmic deed of love within Earthly History, and it can only be grasped by the love which man develops for its comprehension.

(About Christmas, 1924)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing on the subject of Heavenly History, Mythological History, Earthly History, the Mystery of Golgotha)

[ 38 ] 140. The cosmic process in which the evolution of mankind is interwoven—reflected, in the consciousness of man, as ‘History’ in the widest sense—reveals the following successive epochs: a long epoch of ‘Heavenly History’; a shorter epoch of ‘Mythological History’; and the epoch, relatively very short, of ‘Earthly History.’

[ 39 ] 141. Today, this cosmic process is divided, into the working of Divine-Spiritual Beings in free Intelligence and Will which none can calculate, and the ‘calculable’ process of the World-body.

[ 40 ] 142. Against the calculable order of the World-body the Luciferian Powers stand opposed; against all that creates in free Intelligence and Will, the Ahrimanic.

[ 41 ] 143. The Event of Golgotha is a cosmic deed, and free. Springing from the Universal love, it is intelligible only by the love in Man.

[ 1 ] When we are able to look back with spiritual knowledge into the former Earth-lives of a human being, we find that there are a number of such lives in which man was already a ‘person.’ His outward form was similar to what it is today, and he had an inner life of individual stamp and character. Earthly lives emerge, revealing that the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was present in them, but not as yet the Spiritual Soul; others appear, in which only the Sentient Soul was developed—and so forth.

[ 2 ] We find it so in the epochs of Earthly History, and indeed it was so long before these epochs.

[ 3 ] But as we look back still farther, we come into ages of time when it was not yet so—ages in which we find Man interwoven still, both in his inner life and in his outer formation, with the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings. Man is already there as earthly man, but he is not yet detached from Divine Spiritual Being, Thinking and Willing.

[ 4 ] And in yet earlier epochs man as a separate being disappears altogether; there are present only the Divine Spiritual Beings, bearing man within them.

[ 5 ] Man has undergone these three stages of evolution during his earthly time. The transition from the first to the second took place in the latest epoch of Lemuria; that from the second to the third in Atlantean times.

[ 6 ] Now just as in his present earthly life man bears his experiences within him in the shape of memory, so does he bear within him as a cosmic memory all that he has undergone in the way above described.

What is the earthly life of the soul? It is the world of our memories, ready at every moment to have fresh perceptions. In this interplay of memory and fresh experience, man lives, his inner life on Earth.

[ 7 ] But this inner life on Earth could not unfold at all if there were not present still in man, as a cosmic memory, what we see when we look back with spiritual vision into the first stage of his becoming Earthly Man—the stage in which he was not yet detached from Divine-Spiritual Being.

[ 8 ] Of all that took place in the world at that time, there is livingly present on the Earth today, that alone which is unfolded within the human system of nerves and senses. In outer Nature, all the forces that were then at work have died and can now only be seen in their dead forms.

[ 9 ] Thus in the human world of Thought there lives as a present manifestation something which, in order to have earthly existence, requires as its basis the very thing that was already evolved in man before he attained individual, earthly being.

[ 10 ] Every time he passes through the life between death and a new birth, man experiences this stage anew. But into the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings, which receives him again even as it once entirely contained him—into this world he now carries his full individual existence which has taken shape during his lives on Earth. Between death and a new birth, man is indeed in the present, but he is living also in all the time that he has undergone through repeated lives on Earth and lives between death and a new birth.

[ 11 ] It is different with that which lives in the Feeling-world of man. This is related to those experiences of the past which came immediately after the ones in which man was yet unmanifest as such. It is related, that is to say, to experiences which man already underwent as man but when he was not yet separated from Divine-Spiritual Being, Thinking and Willing. Man in the present could not unfold the world of Feeling if it did not arise on the foundation of his rhythmic system. And in his rhythmic system we have the cosmic memory of the above-described second stage of his evolution.

[ 12 ] Thus in the world of Feeling the ‘present’ in the human soul is working together with that which works on in him from an ancient time.

[ 13 ] In the life between death and a new birth, man experiences the contents of the epoch of which we are here speaking as the boundary of his Cosmos. What the starry heavens are to man in the physical life on Earth, his existence between his full union with the Divine-Spiritual world and his severance from it, is to him spiritually in the life between death and a new birth. In that life, there appear to him at the ‘world-boundary’, not the physical heavenly bodies, but in the place of each star the sum-total of Divine-Spiritual Beings, who, as we know, are in reality the star.

[ 14 ] Connected with the Will alone and not with Feeling or with Thought, there lives in man that which is manifested by those earthly lives which, when we look back on them, reveal already the personal, individual character. That which from cosmic sources gives to man his outer form, is preserved in this outer form as a cosmic memory. This cosmic memory lives in the human form as a totality of forces. But these are not the immediate forces of the Will; they represent that in the human organism which is the foundation of the forces of the Will.

[ 15 ] In the life between death and a new birth, this region of the human being lies beyond the ‘world-boundary.’ Man there conceives of it as of something that will belong to him once more in his new life on Earth.

[ 16 ] In his system of nerves and senses, man is today still united with the Cosmos in the way he was when he was manifest only germinally within the Divine-Spiritual womb.

[ 17 ] In his rhythmic system, man is today still living in the Cosmos in the way he lived when he was already there as man, but not yet detached from the Divine-Spiritual.

[ 18 ] In his system of metabolism and limbs—the foundation for the unfolding of his Will—man lives in such a way that all that he has undergone in his personal individual lives on Earth, ever since these began, and in his lives between death and a new birth, works on within this system.

[ 19 ] From the forces of the Earth, man receives that alone which gives him consciousness of self. The physical bodily foundation of self-consciousness is due also to what the Earth brings about. But everything else in the human being has a cosmic origin, external to the Earth.

The sentient and thought-bearing astral body with its etheric-physical foundation, all the moving life in the etheric body, and even that which works physico-chemically in the physical body, is of extra-earthly origin. Strange as this may seem, the physico-chemical which is at work within the human being is not derived from the Earth.

[ 20 ] The fact that man evolves this extra-earthly, cosmic life within him, is due to the working of the planets and other stars. All that he thus unfolds, the Sun with its forces carries to the Earth. By the Sun, the human-cosmic element is transplanted into the earthly realms. By the Sun, man lives as a heavenly being on the Earth. And that alone, whereby he transcends his own human formation—namely, his power to bring forth his kind—is a gift of the Moon.

[ 21 ] Needless to say these are not the only influences of Sun and Moon. Lofty spiritual influences also proceed from them.

[ 22 ] When about Christmas-time the Sun increases more and more in power for the Earth, it is the yearly influence—manifesting rhythmically in the physical-earthly realm—which is an expression of the Spirit in Nature. The evolution of mankind is a single member in what we may describe as a gigantic cosmic year, as will be evident from our preceding studies. And in this cosmic year the cosmic Christmas is at the point where the Sun not only works towards the Earth out of the Spirit of Nature, but where the Christ-Spirit, the Soul of the Sun, descends on to the Earth.

[ 23 ] As in the single human being what he experiences individually is connected with the cosmic memory, so will the human soul have a right feeling of the yearly Christmas when he conceives the heavenly and cosmic Christ-Event as working on and on, comprehending it as a memory not only human but cosmic. For at Christmas-time not only man remembers in celebration the descent of Christ, but the Cosmos does so too.

(about New Year, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with respect to the preceding study: ‘What is revealed when one looks back into repeated Lives on Earth’)

[ 24 ] 144. Looking back into a human being's repeated lives on Earth, we find three distinct stages. In a remote past, man did not exist with individuality of being, but as a germ in the Divine and Spiritual. As we look back into this stage we find not yet a human being but Divine-Spiritual Beings: the Primal Forces, Principalities or Archai.

[ 25 ] 145. This was followed by an intermediate stage. Man existed already with individuality of being, but he was not yet detached from the Thinking and Willing and Being of the Divine-Spiritual World. At this stage he had not yet his present personality, with which he appears on Earth as a being completely self-possessed, detached from the Divine Spiritual World.

[ 26 ] 146. The present condition is the third and latest. Here man experiences himself in human form and figure, detached from the Divine-Spiritual World; and he experiences the world as an environment with which he stands face to face, individually and personally. This stage began in Atlantean time.

[ 1 ] In our last study we followed human life as a whole by turning our attention to the successive lives on Earth. The second point of view, which can throw still more light upon what was revealed by the first, is yielded when we consider the successive lives between death and new birth.

[ 2 ] Here also we see that the content of these lives, such as they are at the present time, goes back only to a certain point of time in earthly evolution. Their content is determined by the circumstance that man carries with him through the gate of death the inward power of self-consciousness gained in earthly life. This also enables him to confront as an individual the Divine-Spiritual Beings into whose presence he comes.

[ 3 ] This was not the case in a preceding period. At that time man had not yet progressed very far in the unfolding of his self-consciousness. The power gained on Earth was insufficient to detach him from the Divine-Spiritual Beings and so give him individual existence between death and new birth. Not that man was then within the Divine-Spiritual Beings, but he was within their sphere of influence, so that his will was essentially their will, not his own.

[ 4 ] Before this period there lies another in which, as we look back, we do not meet with man in his present constitution of soul and spirit at all, but we find a world of Divine Spiritual Beings within whom man only exists germinally. These Beings are the Primal Forces, the Archai.

[ 5 ] And indeed, if we trace back the life of one human being, we find not one Divine-Spiritual Being but all the Beings that belong to this Hierarchy.

[ 6 ] In these Divine-Spiritual Beings lives the will that man shall be. The will of all these Beings plays a part in the ‘becoming’ of each single human being. The cosmic aim of their harmonious co-operation is the production of the human form; for man is still without form in the Divine-Spiritual World.

[ 7 ] It may seem strange that the whole choir of Divine Spiritual Beings should work for a single human being. But the Hierarchies of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim also worked in this way at a still earlier stage throughout the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolutions, in order that man might come into being.

[ 8 ] What had previously originated as a kind of pre-human being on Saturn, Sun and Moon, had no uniform shape. Some of these pre-human beings were chiefly organised with respect to the limbs-system, others with respect to the breast system, others again with respect to the head-system. These were actual human beings; we describe them here as pre-human only in order to distinguish them from the later stage, when the union of all these systems appears in the human form. The differentiation among them goes even further, for we may speak of heart-men, lung-men, etc.

[ 9 ] The Hierarchy of the Primal Forces considered it their task to lead into the general human form all these pre-human beings, whose soul-life also corresponded to their one-sided formation. [ 10 ] They took over Man from the hands of the Exusiai. The latter had already in thought created unity out of the human multiplicity; but among the Exusiai this unity was still an ideal form, a World-thought-form. Out of this the Archai moulded the etheric form, and this form already contained the forces which made it possible for the physical shape to originate.

[ 11 ] When we observe these things a stupendous fact is revealed, viz., that man is the ideal and aim of Gods. But this vision cannot be for man the source of vanity and pride; for he may only reckon, as coming from himself, what he has with full self-consciousness made out of himself during earthly life. And, expressed in cosmic proportions, this is little as compared with that foundation for his individual being which the Gods have created out of the macrocosm which they themselves are, as the microcosm, which he is. The Divine Spiritual Beings confront one another in the Cosmos. The visible expression of this fact is the form of the starry heavens. They wished to create in a unity as Man all that they themselves are as a choir.

[ 12 ] In order really to understand what the whole choir of the Hierarchy of the Archai accomplished when they created the human form, we must remember that there is a very great difference between this form and the physical body of man. The physical body is made up of the physical and chemical processes in man. These processes take place in the present human being within the human form. But this form itself is something that is altogether spiritual. It ought to fill us with solemn feelings when, on looking at the human form, we realise that with physical senses we are perceiving in the physical world something that is spiritual. For one who is able to see spiritually it is really the case that in the human form he sees a true Imagination which has descended into the physical world. If we wish to see Imaginations we must pass from the physical world to the neighbouring spiritual world, and then we realise how the human form is related to these Imaginations.

[ 13 ] When with the inner vision of the soul man looks back over the lives between death and a new birth he finds a first period during which this human form originated. And at the same time the deeper relation that exists between man and the Hierarchy of the Archai is revealed.

[ 14 ] During this period there is just an indication of the difference between earthly life and the life between death and new birth. For the Hierarchy of the Archai works in rhythmical epochs at the development of the human form. In one period of their work the Archai direct the thoughts which guide their several wills more towards the Cosmos beyond the Earth; at another time they look down to the Earth. And out of the co-operation of what is aroused from the Cosmos and from the Earth the human form is developed, which is thus the expression of the fact that man is an Earth-being and at the same time an extra-earthly, cosmic being.

[ 15 ] But the human form, here described as the creation of the Hierarchy of the Archai, comprises not merely the external outline of man and the formation of the surface as it is determined by the limit of the skin, but also the formation of the forces contained in his carriage, in his power of movement, which is adapted to the conditions on the Earth, and in the capacity to use his body as a means whereby to express his inner being.

[ 16 ] It is owing to this creative work of the Hierarchy of the Archai that man is able to assume his upright position within the earthly conditions of gravity, that within these conditions he can maintain his balance while moving freely, that he can liberate his arms and hands from the force of gravity and use them freely—all this he owes to the Archai, in addition to much more that lies within him and yet has form. All this is prepared during the life which may also for this period be called the life between death and a new birth. It is here prepared in such a manner that, in the third period, at the present time, man is himself able, during his life between death and a new birth, to work at this form for his earthly existence.

(New Year, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing study: What is revealed when one looks back into former lives between death and a new birth?)

[ 17 ] 147. Man's lives between death and a new birth also show three distinct periods. In the first of these, he lived entirely within the Hierarchy of the Archai, who prepared, for the physical world, the human form and figure which he was afterwards to bear.

[ 18 ] 148. Thus the Archai prepared the human being subsequently to unfold the free Self-consciousness. For this Self-consciousness can only evolve in beings who can show it forth, in the form and figure which was here created, out of an inner impulse of the soul.

[ 19 ] 149. In this we see how qualities and powers of Mankind, becoming manifest in the present cosmic age, were laid down in germ in ages long gone by. We see how the Microcosm grows out of the Macrocosm.