The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, Gentlemen!

Today I shall continue the subject dealt with last time in answer to Herr Dollinger's question. Should anything else arise, we can consider this also.

In my answer to this question of Herr Dollinger, I spoke of the ants, and how these creatures, bees, wasps and ants are related to one another, though their modes of life are totally different. Taking our starting point from this fact, we can really learn a very great deal about the whole household of Nature, for the more one learns to understand these small creatures and their ways, the more one realises how wisely regulated their work is, and all they are able to accomplish in the realm of Nature.

Last time, I told you how the ants make their nests, how they either build up mounds of the soil itself, or gather together minute particles of decaying wood, or of wood which has become quite hard, and is no longer living; also from various other substances which they mix together. Within these ant-hills are innumerable passages, along which the ants move in procession, whole hosts of them. One sees them coming out at the entrances, searching their surroundings, and collecting what they need. Sometimes however, it happens that these creatures do nct first build up a mound, but make use of something suitable they find there already. Perhaps, for instance, a tree has been cut down and the stump has been left standing; an ant colony comes along and makes a little chamber inside it, hollows it out, and makes all kind of passages with their exits. Then perhaps, they heap up a little earth, make one passage, then another, then a third and so on, and within these passages are all inter-connected.

You see, to say of all this that it is due to the instinct of the creatures may be all very well, but nothing very much has then been said, for when the creature cannot make use of a tree stump, it builds up a sand heap; when it finds a suitable tree stump, then it so arranges the matter that it saves the labour that would be needed to heap up a hillock. The small creature adjusts itself to the individual situation, and it becomes very difficult to state that this is due to instinct. This would only enable the creature to do everything in accordance with instinct; but it actually adjusts itself to the external circumstances. That is the important point.

Here, in our country, it does not frequently happen, but the further one goes south the greater nuisance do the ants become. Imagine a house, and in one corner of it, without the owner having noticed anything, the ants have gathered; they have carried in all sorts of things, particles of earth, minute fragments of wood, and in some corner that has been overlooked in cleaning, have made a small dwelling place which no one notices. From here they make passages into the kitchen, into the pantry, following the most complicated ways, and bring back all they require for food or other purposes, from the kitchen or pantry. This can happen in southern countries, and the house may be quite pervaded by a colony of ants without anyone living there knowing they are mere fellow inhabitants of the ants, until they discover by chance, or by sight, that something in the store cupboard has been nibbled, and the real source only comes to light when the passages are traced. Here again, one cannot get very far by speaking of mere instinct, for you would then have to say that Nature has given these creatures an instinct to take up their abode precisely in this very house; what they build there must be so constructed that it is adapted to this particular house.

But you see, these creatures do not work out of mere instinct; there is wisdom in what they do. If you test some individual ant, you would certainly not arrive at the conclusion that it was especially wise, for what it does when separated from the colony, or what it may be forced to do, does not reveal any special wisdom. One then begins to realise that it is not the individual ant that can reason, but the entire colony of ants as a unity; the colony of bees, for example, is wise in this sense. The separate ants of the colony have no individual intelligence, and for this reason the work is carried on by the whole colony in an extremely interesting way. There are, moreover, many other more interesting happenings within these ant-hills. There is, for instance, a kind of ant which does as follows: somewhere or other it builds on the ground a kind of wall (drawing on the board); here it is raised; here, it forms a circle on the surrounding earth, there, digs a hole. Within are the ants. Sometimes the hole is at the top, like the crater of a volcano; within are the many passages with their outlets.

Now these ants do something very peculiar. They destroy all the grasses and plants which grow round about, with the exception of one particular kind of grass. All other grasses are destroyed, even at times, all other plants. Thus, in the centre we have a kind of hillock, and all round it looks as though the ground had been very finely paved. Through the ants biting away everything, the soil has become very compact, and is very firm. There is the ant-hill, and all round it a smooth pavement, almost like asphalt, but rather lighter in colour.

The ants then search all round about and collect a certain kind of grass which they then begin to cultivate. As soon as the wind brings other seeds, they bite off the new plants the moment they begin to grow; they will not have them in the place they have made so smooth, and in all the surrounding area nothing else is permitted to grow but just this one special kind of grass. The ants have established a little property of their own, as it were, and regularly cultivate the kind of grass that best suits them; nothing else is allowed to grow there; all other plants are bitten away. The grass which is allowed to grow becomes quite different in character from the same grass where it grows further away, where, for instance, it is growing in loose soil. In the hardened soil made by the ants, the cultivated grass has quite hard seeds, as hard as stone. One can find these ant-hills. Round about them there is a regular little farm, 'and the ants are engaged in agriculture. Darwin, who especially observed these things, calls it so. One finds in the soil very hard seeds somewhat like small grains of maize, and when all is ready, the ants come out, bite off the tops, and carry them into their dwelling. For a while they stay inside; one does not see them, but they are very busy inside there. Whatever they have no use for, like the little stalks that were still attached to the hard seeds, they bite off, and after a time they come out again and run all about, and throw away all they do not want, keeping in their ant-hill only the hard silica-like seeds. These they partly use as food, biting them with their very hard teeth, or they use them for their building. Everything they cannot make use of they throw out. After all, we men do very much the same. These farming ants manage to provide themselves with all they need in a very fine way!

One has really to ask oneself: what is actually happening here? Actually, an entirely new kind of grass is brought into existence. These silica-hard seeds cannot be found anywhere else. They are only produced by the ants, and the ants work further upon them. What then is really happening here?

Before considering this, we will approach the question from another side. Let us go back to the wasps, among which I told you, we find creatures that deposit their eggs on the leaves, and in the bark of trees; gall-nuts are then formed out of which the young wasps emerge. But quite other things can also happen. There are certain caterpillars which look like this (drawing on the blackboard). You all know them; these caterpillars are covered with woolly hairs, with quite prickly-woolly hairs. The following can happen to these caterpillars. One or more wasps of a special kind simply insert their eggs into the caterpillar, and when the eggs mature the grubs creep out of them. Bees, and other insects of this kind, all make their first appearance as grubs, also the ants. You know how, when one clears away an ant-heap, one finds the white, so-called ants' eggs, which are given to caged birds. They are however, not eggs, but the larvae that have crept out of the eggs. It is not correct to call them eggs.

Now when the wasp lays its eggs into the caterpillar, it is really very remarkable. As I have already told you, these grubs when they first emerge are very hungry, and there are a great number of them in the caterpillar. It is really remarkable, for if one of these grubs were to begin to eat the caterpillar's stomach, the whole affair of the wasp's development would come to an end, for the caterpillar could not live if any organ, an eye, or to do with the heart or with the digestion, were eaten into. The thing would then come to an end. But these minute wasp grubs show their intelligence by not biting into, or feeding upon any vital organ, but by eating only those organs which can be injured for quite a long time. The caterpillar does not die, it is ill; but the wasp grubs can still go on devouring it. It is most wisely arranged that the wasp grubs do not bite into anything that would fatally injure the caterpillar. Possibly, you may have seen how these larvæ emerge from inside the caterpillar when they are mature? The caterpillar has been their foster-mother, nourishing the whole brood with her own body. Now they creep out, develop further, and seek their food from the plants. When they are fully developed, the eggs are once more deposited in a similar caterpillar,

You might well say that there is something extremely clever in all this, and indeed, as I have already said, the more one observes such things, the more do they arouse one's deepest admiration. It cannot be otherwise; wonder is kindled, and one asks oneself the meaning of such things.

If one would discover their meaning, one must first say; we have the plants growing out of the earth; we have the caterpillars. Then these insects appear, and eat their fill from the flowers, and caterpillars, and then reproduce themselves. So it goes on, over and over again. To us men it seems as though the whole insect world might just as well not exist at all. Naturally, as human beings, when we see the bee, we say; the bees give us honey, therefore bee-keeping is of use to us. Very good; but this is from the point of view of man. If the bees are robbers, and merely take away the nectar from the flowers, and we men then use the honey for our food, or as a remedy, then this is all to our advantage. But from the point of view of the flowers, it looks like a mere robbery in which we, as men, take part. The question therefore, is whether from the point of view of the flowers they would say, as it were; out there are those robbers, the bees, wasps and ants who rob us of our saps; we should thrive much better if they did not take away our saps.

You see, gentlemen, this is a point of view that a man usually takes as regards the flowers. But it is not so; it is absolutely not so. The matter is entirely different. When one is looking at some flower, and an insect, let us say a bee, is sucking the juices of the flower, or from the willow blossom, one must say to oneself: how would it be for the plant if the bee, or the wasp or some other insect, did not come to suck out this nectar? Now would it be then?

This is naturally a question far more difficult to answer than that of a mere robbery, for one must look deeply into the whole household of Nature. It is not possible to reach the right conclusion unless one is able to look back into the earlier stages of the earth's evolution. You see, the earth was not always the same as it is today. If the earth had always been as it is today, when we find the dead lime-stone, the dead quartz or gneiss, or mica-schist, and so on; when we find growing out of the present-day seeds, the plants, when we find the animals. If the earth had always been like this, the whole of what we see today could not exist, could not be there at all! Those who begin their science only at the point of what exists today, give themselves up to complete illusion.

He who would seek all the mysteries, all the laws of the earth in that alone wherein modern science seeks them, is as if a dweller in Mars should come down to the earth, who had no idea of living men, who only went to a mortuary and saw there the dead men. The dead could not be there at all if they had not first been living men. The inhabitant of Mars who had never seen living men, and saw only the dead, would first have to be guided to living men; then he would be able to say—“Yes, now I understand why the dead have these forms; before I did not understand this, because I did not know the living form that preceded the dead one.” Thus, one must go back to earlier conditions if one would know the laws of the earth evolution. The earth had long ago a very different form; I have spoken of it as the Moon-condition, and in my book, “An Outline of Occult Science,” it is also called the Moon-condition, because the present Moon is a remnant of this ancient earth. Other stages of evolution in their turn preceded this one of the Moon. The earth has transformed itself; it was originally altogether different.

Now the earth was once at such a stage that plants and insects such as we have today, did not exist at all. The matter, gentlemen, was thus; there was, let us say, something that can be compared with the earth of today. Out of this grew plant-like forms, but plant-like forms that were continually changing, that continually assumed different forms, as the clouds do, for instance. There were then such clouds in the environment of the earth, but they were not clouds like the clouds we see today, which are dead, or at least seem to be dead; they were living clouds, as living as the flowers of today. If you can imagine to yourselves that our clouds could become alive and turn a greenish colour, then you would have a picture of the plant kingdom of that time.

The scientific gentlemen of today have very strange ideas on such matters. There was recently a most ludicrous article in the newspaper. Once more a new scientific discovery had been made, quite in the modern way. It was really absurd! It was stated that if prepared in a certain way, milk was a good remedy for scurvy, a very ugly disease. Well, gentlemen, what does the scientist of today do? I have already referred to this. He analyses the milk. Then he finds that milk contains such and such chemical components. But I have also told you that one can feed mice with the chemical substances in the milk, but if one gives them these only, the mice die within a few days. Bunge's pupils confirmed this, (see previously mentioned article in the “Schweizerische Bienenzeitung”) and merely said; “Well, yes, there is a life-substance in the milk, as also in honey, Vitamin.” You remember, as I said before, one might just as well say “poverty comes from being poor,” as say what is said here, “there is Vitamin in it.”

Well gentlemen, an important discovery has been made, there are various substances in milk, that have very complicated names and milk when prepared in a special way, is a remedy for scurvy. Then in a truly learned way investigations were made to see whether the scurvy could be cured if one gave the scurvy patients only all the things with the learned names that were contained in the milk. They were not in the least cured by any of the component substances. But when all of these were present (in the specially prepared milk) then the scurvy was cured. No single component by itself cured, only the whole together. Well says the scientist to himself; what remains over when one subtracts all the components? What then remains over? For now he eliminates them all. He does not admit that these components have an etheric body, he reckons them all out, and what remains?

The “Vitamin!” The vitamin which must be what cures the scurvy is not to be found among the component parts. Where then is it? So now they make this fine tale—it must be in the water of the milk! Therefore, the remedy for scurvy is the water! This is really absurd, but it is a learned affair today. For if water is to contain vitamin, then with our learning we should arrive up there in the clouds. We should have to look around us and say: “Water is everywhere and vitamin is in the water.” But then we would be at the stage at which the earth once was. Only today, it is no longer so. Plant-life was there, a living plant covering, and this living covering of plants was fertilised from all directions from the environment. There were then no separate animals, no wasps for instance, but from the surrounding regions there came a substance which had an animal-like nature. Our earth was once in a condition of which one could say that it was surrounded by clouds that had plant-life within them; from the periphery, other clouds approached and fertilised them; these clouds had an animal nature. From cosmic spaces came the animal nature; from the earth the essence of plant-being rose upwards.

All this has changed. The plants have become our clearly outlined flowers which grow out of the earth, no longer forming great clouds. But within the plants there remains a longing to receive an influence from without. Here we have a rose growing out of the earth; here a rose petal, here another, then a third and so on. Now comes a wasp. This wasp immediately bites a piece out of the rose petal, carries it off to its nest, and uses it for building, or gives it as food to its young. A piece of the rose petal is simply bitten out by the wasp, and carried there, Well, as I said before, our rose bushes are no longer clouds: they have become sharply defined things. But what once lived within them, what was once united with all that entered in as the essence of animal life, this has remained behind within the rose leaves and blossoms. It is there within them. In every rose leaf is something which must of necessity be in some way fertilised from without, from the whole environment.

You see, gentlemen, what the flowers need, what they actually need, is a substance that also plays an important part in the human body. When you study the human body the most diverse substances are found in it. But everywhere within the human body these substances are transformed into something which, in certain quantities, is always present within the human body which has need of it. This substance is formic acid.

If you go to an ant-hillock, and collect some ants and squeeze them, you get a juice. This juice contains formic acid and a little alcohol. It is inside the ants. But this juice is also very finely distributed over your body. Whatever you eat during your life time is always transformed into formic acid, not of course, exclusively, for there are other substances also, but in small quantities. This formic acid permeates your whole body. When you are ill, and have not sufficient formic acid within you, it is a serious matter for your body, for it then has a tendency, just because you have not enough formic acid within you, (and here I come once more to Herr Müller's question, in answer to it) your body has a tendency to become gouty, or rheumatic. It develops too much uric acid, and too little formic acid. The ants also have in their bodies this substance that the human body needs. This formic acid, gentlemen, is indeed something that is made use of throughout nature, You actually cannot find any bark of any tree that does not contain some formic acid. Formic acid is everywhere in the tree, just as it is in the human body. In every leaf, everywhere there must be formic acid.

But not only formic acid must be there, but also what is closely akin to it, and later becomes the bee poison. All these insects contain a certain substance within them which is poisonous. If one is stung by a bee, one gets inflammation; if one is stung by a wasp, it is sometimes even worse. This business of wasp stings can be pretty bad. Brehm describes how these insects can play bad tricks on men and animals.

It happened that a young cow-herd had taken a large number of cows out to graze, and the pasture was full of wasp nests. The cow-herd's dog ran about; suddenly the cow-herd's dog goes mad, rushes round like a mad dog, and no one knows what has happened. As fast into it can the dog rushes to a neighbouring stream, flings itself into the water, and shakes and shakes itself. The lad was much disturbed by this, and goes to the rescue of the dog. He does not jump into the water, but tries to help it from the bank. Most unluckily he steps on a nest, as the dog had probably done before, and the wasps sting him too, and he begins to rush about like a madman, and finally jumps into the water. And now, because the dog has vanished, and the cow-herd has vanished, confusion arises in the herd of cows. The cows which tread on nests also get stung, and behave as though mad. Finally, most of the herd are in the stream also—as if they were all mad.

You see, insect stings can do one a very bad turn. All these creatures have poisons in them; even an ant stings one, and causes a little inflammation because it injects some formic acid into the wound. This formic acid, moreover, is present in all living things in a right dilution. If there were no ants, bees and wasps, which are the preparers of these poisons, what would happen?

Truly, gentleman, the same thing would happen that would also come to pass in the propagation of the human race if all the men were beheaded, and only women were left on the earth. Humanity could not then continue to exist, for the male semen would no longer be there. Well, these creatures all have the semen in addition, but they none-the-less need what comes from these poisons for their existence, for these poisons have remained over from what was once in the whole environment. In the finest state of dilution, bee poison, wasp poison, ant poison, once descended upon the plants from cosmic spaces, and the remnants are still present today. So when you see a bee sitting on some willow-tree or on some flower, you must not say: the insect only wants to rob the flower of something; rather must you say: when the little bee sits there and sucks, the flower is so content that it lets its sap flow to the spot where the bee sucks. While the bee is taking something from the flower, bee or wasp poison flows from the bee to the flower. From the wasp, the wasp poison flows, and more especially when the ant attacks the tree stump which no longer has life, formic acid flows in. If the ant visits a flower, then the sap of the flower unites with the formic acid. This is necessary.

If these things did not happen, if bees, wasps and ants did not exist and continually attack the plants and bite into them, then the necessary formic acid, the necessary poisons, would not flow into the flowers, and the plants would in time die out.

You see, substances such as are usually called life-substances, are highly valued by man; yet it is precisely only these substances that are truly life-substances. If one has deadly nightshade, within it is a poison, a very powerful one. But what is the deadly nightshade? It collects spirituality from the world's environment. Poisons are gatherers of what is spiritual; for this reason they are healing remedies. Fundamentally speaking, the flowers sicken through the life-substances, and the little bees, and wasps and ants, work continually as small physicians bringing to the flowers the formic acid they need, and at the same moment, healing their sickness. Thus all is once more healed.

The bees, wasps and ants are not mere robbers, for in the same moment they bring life to the plants.

It is even the same with the caterpillars which would also die out, and none would remain after a time. You will probably say no great harm would be done if all the caterpillars were to disappear; but in their turn the birds feed on them. Throughout the whole of Nature there are these inner relationships. When we see, for example, how the ants permeate everything with their formic acid, we look into the whole household of Nature and its splendour. Everywhere things happen that are essential for the maintenance of life, and of the world.

You see, here is a tree, and the tree has bark. The bark decays when I cut down the tree; then it moulders. People say: “Well, let it rot away.” Just try to imagine all that moulders away in the forests, fallen leaves and so on, within the course of the year! Men are willing to let it all rot away, but Nature orders it otherwise. Everywhere there are ant-heaps, and from these ant-heaps formic acid enters into the soil of the forest. When you have both forest soil and an ant-heap, it is the same as if you take a glass of water and add a drop of something else to it; the whole contents are at once affected. If you put in salt, all the water is at once made salty. If you have an ant-heap then the formic acid goes in the same moment into the forest soil, and all the soil which is already decaying is saturated with this formic acid.

It is not only into the inner parts of the living plants, and into the still living caterpillars that formic acid penetrates when the bee sits on the flower, and the flower absorbs what it receives from the bee. All these things can only be learned by means of spiritual science; the other kind of science is only concerned with what the bee takes away from the flowers. But the bees would never have been able to sit for thousands of years on the flowers had they not fostered them in the act of biting into them.

So it is also with the lifeless substances of the woods. Even physical science as it is today, concludes that the earth will one day be quite dead. It would indeed be so, for a state of things would eventually come about when decay would prevail, when the earth would be dead. That this will not be so, is because wherever the earth decays it is in the same moment penetrated by all that is yielded up by the bees, wasps and ants. The bees, it is true, give it only to the living flowers, the wasps for the most part also to the living plants. But the ants give what they hand over in the formic acid directly to what is mouldering and dead; in a certain degree they rouse it to life, in this way doing their part that the earth in its decaying substances shall still retain life. Well may one say that wonder is awakened at the activity of the spirit in all things, but when one can approach it more nearly, then one realises it has immense significance.

Let us look once more at those farming ants which cultivate their little field, and change the character of the plants they grow there. Truly, gentlemen, a man could not nourish himself with what grows there, for if a man were to eat those little rice grains that are as hard as silica, he would first get strange illnesses because he would have too much formic acid inside him, and in addition to this, so injure his teeth that for a time the dentists would be kept busy. At last, he would die wretchedly, because of these silica-hard rice-grains which had been thus developed.

But the ant-heap would say: when we ants go out into nature and suck that out of the plants which is everywhere there, then we get far too little formic acid, and can give far too little formic acid to the earth. Let us therefore, select the plants which we can cultivate so that they get quite hard, stony hard, and then we can get plenty of formic acid from this hardness. So these farming ants do this that they may get the greatest possible amount of formic acid. It is these ants again that give back so much formic acid to the earth. That is the connection. From this you can see that poisons when they cause inflammation, or the like, are also perpetual remedies for the holding back of the processes of death. One can say, it is precisely the bee that is of great importance in this regard, that all may be preserved within the flowers; there is a great affinity between the bees and the flowers.

This preservation actually shows that every time the insects are developing their activities on the earth, the earth is, as it were, quickened by their poison. This is the spiritual relationship. If anyone asks what are the spiritual relationships, I never like merely to say they are so and so; I give the facts, and from the facts you can judge for yourselves whether they have significance or no. The facts are such that one sees significance everywhere. But the people who call themselves scientists today, do not tell one so. In life this has certain effects. In our country this is perhaps less taken into account, but when you go further south, the simple folk, the peasants, will often say out of a kind of instinctive knowledge; one must not destroy these ant-heaps, for they prevent the mould from becoming harmful. Those who are still wiser, will say something quite different if you walk with them through the forest, and especially where trees have been cut down and young trees are growing up. Then these people who are wise in their noses, not in their top-story (one can be wise also in one's nose) when these people go where the trees have been felled and young trees are being cared for, they will say: “Here, it will all go well; it does not smell so mouldy as it often does; there must be an ant-heap near, and it is proving its usefulness.” These people smell this; they are clever with their noses. Much homely and useful knowledge is derived from a clever nose! Unfortunately, modern civilisation only regards the cultivation of the brain, and rejects all that is instinctive; instinct has become merely a word.

Creatures like the bees know all this collectively, as a colony, as an ant-heap; it comes about by a kind of sense of smell. As I said before, much that is instinctive knowledge may come from a cleverness of the nose.

Well, gentlemen, we shall continue the subject next week Today, I wished to say that the bees, wasps and ants do not only rob Nature, but help to make it possible for Nature to live and thrive.

We should perhaps say something further on the subject of Herr Dollinger's question. He asked, on your behalf, for it is probably of interest to you all, what the spiritual relationship is between the hosts of insects which, fluttering about, approaches the plants and what is to be found in the plants. I told you yesterday, for we began to answer this question last time, that all around us there is not only oxygen and nitrogen, but that throughout Nature there is intelligence, truly intelligence. No one is surprised if one says that we breathe in the air, for air is everywhere, and science today is so widely included in all the school books that everyone knows that air is everywhere, and that we breathe it in. All the same I have known country people who thought this a fantastic idea, because they did not know the air is everywhere; in the same way there are people today who do not know that intelligence is everywhere. They consider it fantastic if one says that just as we breathe in the air with our lungs, so do we breathe in intelligence, for example, through our nose, or through our ear. I. have already given instances in which you could see that there is intelligence everywhere.

We have been speaking of an especially interesting chapter of natural science, of the bees, wasps and ants. There is, may be, little in Nature which permits us to look so deeply into Nature herself, as the activities of the insects; the insects are strange creatures, and they have still many a secret to disclose.

It is interesting that we should be discussing the insects just at the time of the centenary of the famous observer of insects, Jean Henri Fabre, who was born on December 23, one hundred years ago, and whose life time coincides with the age of materialism. Fabre therefore interpreted everything materialistically, but he also brought to light an enormous number of facts. It is therefore quite natural that we should remember him today when we speak of the insects.

I should like to begin with, to give you an example of a species of insect which will interest you in connection with the bees. The work of the bees is perfected to a very high degree, but the most remarkable thing about the bee is really not that it produces honey but, that it produces the marvellous structure of the honey-comb entirely out of its own being. The material it makes use of, it must itself bring into the hive, but the bee actually works in such a way that it does not use this material directly, but completely transforms it, completely transforms what it brings into the hive. The bee works from out of its own being.

Now there is a kind of bee which does not work in this way, but shows, precisely in its work, what immense intelligence there is in the whole of Nature. Let us consider this bee; it is commonly called the wood-bee, and is not so valued as the domestic bee, because it is mostly rather a nuisance. We will consider this wood-bee at its work.

It is a tremendously industrious little creature, a creature which in order to live—not the individual bee, but the whole species—must do a terrific amount of work. This bee searches out such wood as is no longer on a living tree, but has been made into something. One finds the wood-bee which I shall presently describe, with its nest in a place where wooden rails, or posts have been driven in and the wood is therefore apparently dead. The nests can usually be found in wooden rails or posts, in garden benches, or garden doors, in fact wherever one has made use of wood. Here the wood-bee makes its nest, but it does so in a very singular way.

Imagine to yourselves a post (Diagram 16.) The wood is no longer part of a tree. The wood-bee comes along and first of all bores a sloping passage from outside. When it has got inside, when it has bored out a kind of passage, it starts boring in quite a new direction. It makes a little ring-like hollow, then flies off and collects all manner of things from round about, and lines out the hollow with these. Having finished the lining, it deposits an egg which will develop into a larva. This is now inside the hollow. When the egg has been placed there, the little bee makes a covering over it, in the centre of which there is a hole. Now it begins to bore again above the cover, and makes a second little hollow for the second bee that is to creep out, and having lined it and left a hole it lays another egg. The wood-bee continues in this way till it has constructed ten or twelve of these superimposed dwellings; in each one there is an egg.

You see, gentlemen, the larva can now mature in this piece of wood. The bee puts some food next to the larva which first eats what has been prepared for it, and grows till it is ready to creep out. First we have the time when the grub becomes a cocoon, then it is transformed into a winged bee which is to fly out. Inside there it is so arranged (see Diagram 16), that the larva now developed can fly out at the right moment. When the time comes that the larva has developed, has turned into a cocoon, and then into a complete insect, then it is so arranged that it is able to fly out through the passage. The skill employed has enabled the fully formed insect to fly out through the passage that was first bored.

Well and good, but the second insect that is a little younger, now emerges, and the third that is still younger; because the mother insect had first to make these dwelling-places, the creatures would not find any outlet, the situation would be fatal to the larvae in the upper chambers, they would slowly die. But the mother insect prevents this by laying the eggs so that when the young larva creeps out, it finds this other hole which I described, and lets itself down there, and flies out. The third creature comes down through the two holes and so on. Because each insect that comes out later is matured later, it does not hinder the one below it which had emerged earlier. The times are never the same, for the earlier has always already flown out.

You see, gentlemen, the whole nest is so wisely planned that one can only wonder at it.

Today when men imitate mechanically, the things they copy are often of this kind, but as a rule they are far less cleverly constructed. Things that exist in Nature are extremely wisely made, and one must really say that there is intelligence in them, real intelligence. One could give hundreds and thousands of examples of the way the insects build, of the way they set about their tasks, and how intelligence lives within these things. Think how much intelligence there is in all I have already told you about the farming ants which establish their own farm, and plan everything with wonderful intelligence.

But in considering these insects, the bees, wasps and ants, we were at the same time dealing with another matter. I told you that these creatures all have a poisonous substance within them, and that this poisonous substance is also, if given in the right dose, an excellent remedy. Bee-poison is an excellent remedy; wasp-poison is the same, and the formic acid secreted by the ants is a most especially good remedy. But as I have already pointed out, this formic acid which we find when we go to an ant-heap and take out a few ants and crush them, these ants have the formic acid inside them; by crushing them we get the formic acid. It is found more especially in the ants.

But gentlemen, if you knew how much, (of course, comparatively speaking,) how much formic acid there is in this hall, you would be greatly astonished. You might say, surely we are not to look for an ant-heap in some corner! But all of you, as many as are sitting here, are really yourselves a kind of ant-heap, for every where in your limbs, muscles and other tissues, in the heart and lung and liver tissues, above all in the tissues of the spleen, everywhere there is formic acid; certainly, it is not so concentrated as in the ant-heap, nevertheless, you are quite filled with formic acid. It is a highly remarkable fact.

Why do we have formic acid in our bodies? One must be able to recognise when a man has too little of it. If someone seems ill, and people are mostly a little ill, he might have one or another of a hundred different illnesses which externally, would seem similar. One must know what is really the matter with him; if he is pale or has no appetite, these are only external symptoms. One must find out what exactly is wrong with him. In many cases, the trouble might well be that he is not enough of an ant-heap in himself, that he is producing too little formic acid. Just as formic acid is produced in the ant-heap, so in the human body, in all its organs, especially in the spleen, formic acid must be vigourously produced. When a man produces too little formic acid, one must give him a preparation, a remedy with which one can help him to produce sufficient formic acid. One must learn to observe what happens to a man who has too little formic acid in him. Such observations can only be made by those who have a true knowledge of human nature. One must make a picture of what is happening in the soul of a man who, to begin with, had enough formic acid, and later, has too little. It is a singular thing, but a man will tell you the correct thing about his illness, if you ask him in the right way. Suppose, for instance, you had a man who tells you: “Why, good gracious, a few months ago I had ever so many good ideas, and I could think them out well. Now I cannot do so any longer; if I want to remember anything, I cannot do so.” This is often a much more important symptom than any external examination can give. What is done today is of course justifiable, one must do these things. Today one can test the urine for albumen, or sugar and so on; one gets quite interesting results. But in certain circumstances, it can be far more important when a man tells you something of the kind I have just told you. When a man tells you something of this kind, one must of course, learn other things about him also, but one can discover that the formic acid in his body has recently become insufficient.

Well, anyone who still thinks only of externals, might say: “This man has too little formic acid, I will squeeze out some formic acid, or get it in some other way, and give him the right dose.” This could be done for a certain time, but the patient would come to you and say it has done him no good at all. What then is the matter? It really has not helped him at all. It was quite correct; the man had too little formic acid, and he has been given formic acid, but it did him no good. What is the reason? You see, when you examine further, you come to this point. In the one case formic acid has done no good, in another case, it has continued to do good. Well presently one learns to see the difference. Those who are helped by formic acid, will usually show mucus in the lungs. Those who got no help from it, will show mucus in the liver, kidneys, or in the spleen.

It is very interesting. It is therefore a very different matter if the lung, for example, lacks formic acid, or the liver. The difference is that the formic acid which is in the ant-heap, can immediately take effect upon the lung. The liver cannot do anything with the formic acid, it can make no use of it at all.

Something further now comes in question. When you discover that a man's liver, or more especially his intestines are not quite in good order, and if one gives him formic acid it does not help him, though he actually has not enough of it, then one must give him oxalic acid. One must take wood-sorrel, or the common-clover that grows in the fields, extract the acid, and give him this.

Thus you see, anyone with lung trouble must be given formic acid, whereas if the trouble is in the liver, or the intestines, he must be given oxalic acid. The remarkable thing is that the man to whom one has given oxalic acid, will before long himself change the oxalic acid into formic acid. The main point therefore is, that one does not simply introduce such things into a man's body, but that one knows what the organism can bring about by means of its own resources. When you introduce formic acid into the organism, it says;—“This is not for me; I want to be active, I cannot work with ready-made formic acid, I cannot take it up into my lungs.” Naturally, the formic acid has gone into the stomach; from there it finally passes into the intestines. Then the human body wants to be active, and say, as it were: “What am I supposed to do now? I am not to make formic acid myself, for formic acid is given me; have I to send this from here up into my lungs? This I shall not do.” The body wants oxalic acid, and from this it produces formic acid.

Yes, gentlemen, life consists of activity, not of substances, and it is most important to recognise that life does not merely consist of eating cabbages and turnips, but of what the human body must do when cabbages and turnips are put into it.

You can see from this what strange relationships exist in Nature. Outside there, are the plants, The clover is merely especially characteristic, for oxalic acid is to be found in all the plants; in clover it is present in greater quantities, that is why it is mentioned. But just as formic acid is everywhere in Nature and everywhere in the human body, so also is there oxalic acid everywhere in Nature and in the human body.

There is something further that is very interesting. Suppose you take a retort, such as are used in chemical laboratories. You make a flame under it, and put into the retort some oxalic acid—it is like salty, crumbly ashes. You then add the same quantity of glycerine, mix the two together, and heat it. The mixture will then distil here, (Diagram 17) and I can condense what I get here (Diagram 17). At the same time I notice air is escaping at this point. Here it escapes. When I now examine this escaping air, I find it is carbonic acid. Thus carbonic acid is escaping here, and here, where I condense (Diagram 17) I get formic acid. In here, I had oxalic acid and glycerine. The glycerine remains, the rest goes over there, the fluid formic acid dropping down and the carbonic acid giving out the air.

Well, gentlemen, when you consider this whole matter thoroughly, you will be able to say: suppose, that instead of the retort we had here the human liver or let us say some human or animal tissue, some animal abdominal organ, liver, spleen or something of this nature. By way of the stomach I introduce oxalic acid. The body already possesses something of the nature of glycerine. I have then in the intestines oxalic acid and glycerine. What happens?

Now look at the human mouth, for there the carbonic acid comes out, and downwards from the lungs formic acid everywhere drops in the human body in the direction of the organs. Thus everything I have drawn here we have also in our own bodies. Within our own bodies we unceasingly transform oxalic acid into formic acid.

And now imagine to yourself the plants spread out over the surface of the earth. Everywhere in the plants is oxalic acid. And now think of the insects; with the insects all this occurs in the strangest way. First think of the ants; they go to the plants, to all that decays in the plants, and everywhere there is oxalic acid, and these creatures make formic acid from it in the same way that a man does. Formic acid is everywhere present.

The materialist looks out into the air and says:—Yes, in the air there is nitrogen and oxygen. But gentlemen, in very, very minute quantities there is also always some formic acid present, because the insects flutter through the air. On the-one hand we have man. Man is a little world; he produces formic acid in himself, and continually fills his breath with formic acid. But in the great world without, in the place of what happens in man, there is the host of insects. The great breath of air that surrounds the whole earth is always permeated with formic acid which is the transformed oxalic acid of the plants. Thus it is.

If one rightly observes and studies the lower part of the human body with its inner organs, the stomach, liver, kidneys and the spleen, and further within, the intestines, it is actually the case that oxalic acid is perpetually being changed into formic acid, this formic acid passes with the inbreathed air into all parts of the body. So it is within man.

On the earth the plants are everywhere, and everywhere the innumerable hosts of insects hover above them. Below is the oxalic acid; the insects flutter towards it, and from their biting into the plants formic acid arises and fills the air. Thus we perpetually inhale this formic acid out of the air. What the wasps have is a poison similar to formic acid, but somewhat different; what the bees have in the poison of their sting, though actually it pervades their whole body, is likewise a transformed, a sublimated formic acid.

Looking at the whole, one has this picture. One says to oneself: we look at the insects, ants, wasps and bees. Externally, they are doing something extremely clever. Why are they doing this? If the ant had no formic acid it would do quite stupidly all that I have described as so beautiful. Only because the ants are so constituted that they can produce formic acid, only because of this, does all that they accomplish appear so intelligent and wise. This also applies to the wasps and the bees.

Have we not every reason to say (for we produce this formic acid in ourselves): In Nature there is intelligence everywhere; it comes through the formic acid. In ourselves also there is intelligence everywhere because we have formic acid within us. This formic acid could not be in existence had not the oxalic acid first been there. The little creatures hovering over the plants see to it that the oxalic acid is changed into formic acid, that it is metamorphosed.

One only fully understands these things when one asks: How is it then with the oxalic acid? Oxalic acid is essential for all that has life. Wherever there is life, there is oxalic acid, an etheric body. The etheric body brings it about that the oxalic acid is renewed. But the oxalic acid never becomes a formic acid that can be used by the human or animal organism unless it is first transformed by an astral body from oxalic into formic acid. The formic acid which I here extracted from the oxalic acid, is of no use at all to the human or animal organism. It is an illusion to think it can be of use; it is dead. The oxalic acid which is produced in man, and through the insects is living, and arises everywhere where sensation, or something of the nature of the soul is present.

Man must produce formic acid in himself if he wishes to bring forth something of the nature of the soul out of the mere life-processes of the lower body where the oxalic acid prevails. Then, in the formic acid of the breath there lives the soul quality that rises up to, and can be active in the head. The soul needs this transformation in man of the oxalic into formic acid.

What then is actually happening when oxalic acid is changed into formic acid? You see, the first thing that I told you can show us this. The wood-bee which I described, is especially interesting for it works in wood that is no longer living. If this wood-bee could not make use of the wood in the right way, it would seek a dwelling place elsewhere. It does not make its nest in a tree, but in decaying wood, and where rails and posts begin to rot away; there it makes a nest and lays its eggs.

If you study the connection of the decaying wood and the wood-bee, wasps, etc., then you find that similar processes of decay constantly take place in the human body. If this process of decay goes too far, the body dies. Man must constantly carry on in himself what happens externally; he must build up cells, and this he can only do by transforming all that is plant-like within him and permeated with oxalic acid; he must change all this into formic acid so that all is permeated with formic acid.

You will say: What significance has all this for Nature?

Let us imagine one of these decaying posts or rails. Should one of these wood bees never discover it, a man would certainly not regret it, for these bees increase quickly, and the post they have hollowed out would fall down the following year. Men may not appreciate this, but Nature finds it good, for if there were none of these creatures all woody substances would gradually crumble into dust, and would become entirely useless. The wood in which the wood-bees have worked does not perish in dust, it is given new life. From all this decaying wood that is quickened a little by the wood-bee, or by other insects, much arises which rescues our earth from complete decay, from being scattered as dust in cosmic space; our earth can live on it because it has been quickened by the insects. As men we breathe in formic acid; in Nature the formic acid is prepared by the insects from the oxalic acid of the plants, and so works that the earth renews its life.

Consider the connection. We have man, and we have the earth. Let us take first a young child, for a young child readily transforms the oxalic acid of the lower organism into formic acid. The organs of a young child are sufficiently supplied with formic acid; the human soul develops in the child. We have the formic acid as the basis for the soul and spirit. But when a man grows old and is unable to develop sufficient formic acid, then the soul and spirit must take leave of the body. Formic acid draws the soul and spirit to the body; otherwise the soul and spirit must leave it. It is deeply interesting.

If for instance you observe a man who has developed a number of independent inner processes, you will find that it Is formic acid that helps him to master these independent inner processes. The right relationship is then brought about between the astral body and the physical body which were hindered by these independent processes in the body. Formic acid is always needed as the right basis for the soul and spirit. When the body has too little it decays, and can no longer retain the soul; the body ages and the soul must leave it.

We have then, man on the one side and Nature on the other side. In Nature formic acid is continually being prepared from oxalic acid, so that the earth may always be surrounded not only by oxygen and nitrogen, but by formic acid also. It is formic acid that prevents the earth from dying every year, gives it each year renewed life. What is beneath the earth longs as seed for the formic acid above, for renewal of its life. Every winter the spirit of the earth actually strives to take leave of the earth. The spirit of the earth benumbs the earth in winter, to quicken it again in spring. This happens because what waits as seed beneath the earth draws near-to the formic acid which has arisen through the whole intercourse of the insect world and the plant world throughout the preceding year. The seeds do not merely grow in oxygen, nitrogen and carbon, but in formic acid; this formic acid stimulates them in their turn to develop oxalic acid, so that once more the formic acid of the succeeding year may come into existence.

Just as in man formic acid can be the basis for his soul and spirit, so the formic acid which is spread out in the cosmos can be the basis for the soul and spirit of the earth. Thus we can say that for the earth also, formic acid is the basis for earth-soul and earth-spirit (see Diagram 18).

You see, it is actually much more difficult to telegraph in a district where there are no ant-heaps, for the electricity and magnetism necessary for telegraphing depend on formic acid. When the telegraph wires go through towns where there are no ant-heaps, it is from the fields outside the town that power must be collected to enable the electric streams to pass through the towns. Naturally, the formic acid is present in the air of the towns also.

Thus we can say: What is within man as production of formic acid, is also outside in external Nature. Man is a little world, and between birth and death he is able to produce formic acid from oxalic acid. When he can no longer do so, his body dies. He must once more take a body which in childhood can develop formic acid from oxalic acid in the right way. In Nature the process is unbroken, winter-summer, winter-summer; ever the oxalic acid is undergoing transformation into formic acid.

If one watches beside a dying man one really has the feeling that in dying, he first tries whether his body is still able to develop formic acid. When he can no longer accomplish this, death takes place. Man passes into the spiritual world, for he can no longer inhabit his body. Hence, we say that a man dies at a given moment. Along time then passes, and he returns to take another body; between whiles, he is in the spiritual worlds.

Well, gentlemen, as I told you, when a young Queen slips out in the hive, something disturbs the bees. Previously they had lived in their twilight world; now they see the young Queen begin to shine. What is connected with this shining? It is connected with the fact that the young Queen robs the old Queen bee of the power of the bee poison. The whole departing swarm feels this fear, this fear that they will no longer possess a sufficiency of poison, will no longer be able to protect, or save themselves. They go away just as the human soul goes away at death when it can no longer find the formic acid it needs: so too, the older bees go away when there is not sufficient formic acid, bee poison, in the hive.

So now, if one watches the swarm, still indeed visible to us, yet it is like the human soul when it must desert the body. It is a majestic picture, this departing swarm. Just as the human soul takes leave of the body, so when the young Queen is there, the old Queen with her company leaves the hive; one can truly see in the flying swarm an image of the departing human soul.

How truly magnificent all this is! But the human soul has not carried the process so far as to develop its forces into actual small creatures; the tendency to do this is nevertheless there. We have something within us that we wish to transform into tiny creatures, into bacilli and bacteria—into minute bees. But we suppress this tendency that we may be wholly men. The swarm of bees is not a whole man. The bees cannot find their way into a spiritual world, it is we who must bring them into a new incarnation as a new colony.

This is, gentlemen, directly an image of re-incarnating man. Anyone who is able to observe this, has an immense respect for these swarming bees with their Queen, for this swarm which behaves as it does because it desires to go into the spiritual world; but for this it has become too physical. Therefore these bees gather themselves together, and become like one body; they wish to be together, they wish to leave the world. Whereas they otherwise fly about, now they settle on some branch or bush, clustering together quietly as though they wish to vanish away, to go into the spiritual world.

If we now bring them back, if we help them by placing them in a new hive, then they can once more become a complete colony.

We must say that the insects teach us the very highest things of Nature. This is why in bygone times men were always enlightened when they looked at the plants; they possessed an instinctive knowledge of these things of which I have been speaking to you, a knowledge completely lost to modern science. These men observed the plants in their own way. When people today bring into their houses a branch of a fir-tree for a Christmas tree, they remind themselves that all that is outside in Nature can also work in our human and social life. This fir branch from which the Christmas tree is made should become for us a symbol of love. It is commonly thought that the Christmas tree is a very old custom, but the fir-tree has only been so used for 150 to 200 years. In earlier times this custom did not exist, but another plant was made use of at Christmas time. When the Christmas plays, for example, were performed in the villages, even in the 15th and 16th Centuries, there was always a man who went round to announce them who carried a kind of Christmas tree in his hand. This was a branch of the juniper that has such wonderful berries; the juniper was the Christmas tree. This was because these juniper berries, so greatly loved by the birds, contain something of that poison which must pervade all that is earthly, so that this earthly may rise again in the spirit. Just as the ants give to the wood, or the wood-bee to the decaying posts, so when the birds eat the juniper berries every morning, a certain acid, though a weaker one, is developed. People in olden days knew this instinctively, and said to themselves: “In winter when the birds come to eat the juniper berries the earth is quickened through the juniper tree.” It was for them a symbol of the quickening of the earth through Christ.

Thus we can say: When we observe things in the right way, we see how the processes of Nature are actually images and symbols of what happens in human life. These men of olden times watched the birds on the juniper trees with the same love with which we look at the little cakes and gifts on the Christmas tree. To them the juniper tree was a kind of Christmas tree which they carried into their houses; the juniper became a kind of Christmas tree.

As you are now all of you especially hard at work, we must close. I did not want today's lecture to end without touching on a subject of real importance. I have therefore spoken of the juniper tree which can truly be regarded as a kind of Christmas tree, and which is the same for the birds as the blossoms for the bees, the wood for the ants, and for the wood-bees and insects in general.

In conclusion, I should like to wish you a happy, cheerful Christmas Festival, and one which may uplift your hearts.

Extract from a Lecture given by Dr. Steiner at Dornach,
November 10, 1923.

... THERE is something that exists in Nature which is like a head without a bony skull; something in which the same forces work from outside that work within the head.

Now a bee-hive is similar to a head which is open on all sides. What the bees do is really the same, only in the outer world, as the head carries out in man's inner organisation, only in the hive it is not cut off and separated, but operates, and is brought about from without. Thus we have in the bee-hive under external spiritual influences, the same that in the head is under inner spiritual influences.

In the hive we have also honey, and when as grown-up human beings we take it and eat it, the honey supplies us with what we need in the way of formative forces, from outside. It is the same force which milk supplies for the head during babyhood. So long as we are little children we strengthen these formative forces in the head when we take milk. At a later age we also need formative forces, and we must therefore eat honey. We do not need to take a large quantity, it is merely a question of absorbing the forces within the honey.

Extract from a Lecture given at Dornach, December 30, 1923.

WE can actually find certain places in Nature where the physical forces of the earth enter into the midst of the etheric forces that stream in from all sides. You may imagine albumen, for instance, as a substance present in the physical earth. So long as sulphur, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are in any way chemically recognisable in it, the albumen is in fact subject to the earthly forces. But the moment it enters the sphere of the reproductive process, it is lifted out of the physical forces. The forces of the circumference of the universe begin to work upon it in its disorganised condition. A new albumen comes into being as an image of the whole universe.

But you see, sometimes the following situation arises. The dis-organisation, the breaking down of the albumen cannot go far enough. You may have albuminous substance of this kind in connection with some animal, for example. For reproduction to take place, it must be possible for it to be broken down completely, so that it may submit itself to the forces of the whole Cosmos. But the animal is somehow prevented from delivering over, for purposes of reproduction, such albuminous substance as would be able straightforwardly to submit itself to the whole macrocosm. To be capable of reproduction, albuminous substance must in fact, submit itself to the whole macrocosm. But the animal is in this case, somehow unable to form albuminous substance capable of reproduction without further assistance. This is the case with the gall-wasp. What then does the gall-wasp do? It lays its egg in some part of a plant. Again and again you may find these galls, in oaks, or in other trees where the gall-wasp or fly lays her eggs. In a leaf, for example, you see these remarkable formations. Within each one is the egg of a gall-wasp. Why is the egg of the gall-fly laid in an oak-leaf so that the oak-apple arises in which the egg is enclosed, and now capable of development? Could it not have developed freely? It is for this reason. The plant-leaf contains within it an etheric body adapted to the whole cosmic ether, which now comes to the aid of the egg of the gall-wasp. By itself, the egg is helpless. Thus the gall-wasp deposits it in a portion of the plant, which already contains an etheric body related to the whole system of the cosmic ether. The gall-wasp comes to the oak in order to bring about a complete breaking down of its albumen, so that the world periphery may be able to work via the oak-leaf, via the oak. The egg of the gall-wasp alone would be doomed to destruction, for it cannot be broken down, it is held together far too strongly.

Here indeed, we gain an insight into the strange workings of Nature, a working present in other places also. Assume for example, that the animal is not only unable to provide a germ substanceable to expose itself to the cosmic ether, but is also not even able to transform any substances within it into inner means of nourishment, that is, to use them for its own inner nourishment. The example of the bees lies near at hand. The bee cannot eat anything and everything; it can only eat what the plant has already prepared for it; and here is the strangest fact of all. The bee goes to the plant, seeks out the nectar, absorbs it, assimilates it within, and then builds up the wonderful cell structure of the honey-comb which we so greatly admire. Here we can observe two of the strangest and most wonderful processes; the bee sitting on the flower and sucking in its juices, and then having returned to the hive, building up from within itself, in connection with the other worker-bees, the cells of wax that they may fill them with honey.

What is actually taking place? You must carefully observe the shape of these cells. They are similar in form to something else we find in Nature, though here the hollowed space is filled up; they are formed like quartz crystals, like the crystals of silicic acid. If you go into the mountains and examine the quartz crystals you will find that you can draw them in the same form, but the cells the bees make are of wax, and the quartz crystals are of silicic acid.

When we follow this up further, we find that long ages ago, at a certain definite point in the evolution of the earth, these quartz crystals were first formed in the mountains. They were formed under the prevailing etheric and astral forces, with the aid of silicic acid. There you have the forces that come from the circumference, working as etheric and astral forces, and forming the quartz crystals in the siliceous substance. Everywhere in the mountains you can find these crystals with their wonderful hexagonal forms. What you find in the solid crystals, you find again as hollow forms, as hollowed spaces, in the waxen cells in the bee-hive.

The bee takes up from the flower that which once upon a time brought the quartz crystal into being. The bee takes it from the flower, and from the substance of her own body makes an image of the quartz crystal. A process takes place between bee and flower that is similar to what took place in past ages in the Cosmos. I tell you these things that you may understand how necessary it is not merely to be aware of the presence of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, of which all analysis is pitiably abstract, but to take into account the marvellous formative processes, the intimate inner conditions that prevail in Nature and her processes.

A QUESTION AND AN ANSWER.

1. At the conclusion of one of the foregoing lectures, (December 10, 1923) a question was asked about the disease of “foul-brood.” Dr. Steiner replied that as he had not yet studied this disease he could not make a definite statement. It might possibly be the result of a deficiency in the balance of the uric acid in the Queen bee. He said further: “The bee has also uric acid in its organism, and the cause of the disease will be found to be a wrong relationship in the uric acid.”

2. In answer to a question as to the development of the bees from wasps, referred to in the same lecture, Dr. Steiner said: “This development occurred during the ancient Atlantean civilisation, when the individual animal forms were not so firmly established as today, when there were no such clearly defined boundaries between the different species. Today, such a thing would no longer be possible.”

Good morning, gentlemen! Have you thought of anything?

Questioner: The doctor once said that the stars, for example the moon, are much larger than we can see them. Could we perhaps hear something more about this?

Dr. Steiner: Today I want to tell you something that makes it possible for us to go into these heavenly bodies in more detail in the next lesson. Of course, firstly, we have to understand what these heavenly bodies are and how they relate to the earth; and on the other hand, we have to understand that there is something spiritual everywhere in these heavenly bodies. Of course, their size, position and so on do not make much of a difference. Therefore, today I will tell you a certain basis from the earth that will show you how to understand the sun and the moon from the earth. It is of course the case that the sun is much larger than the earth and the moon is smaller than the earth. The moon is of course larger than it appears to us, but it is smaller than the earth. And the sun, as it is spread out there, is larger than the earth.

But now, above all, we have to be able to see what these heavenly bodies are made of, what they actually are. We have to ask ourselves what would be encountered if one were to travel there in an airship. In all of this, we must start with the human being. We have discussed time and again how humans depend on their entire environment: you breathe in the air, you breathe out the air. When you breathe in the air, you take into your body what is outside in your environment. The air that is outside consists of oxygen and nitrogen. That itself is an airy, gaseous body. And this oxygen is absolutely necessary for our life. We need oxygen. We need it in such a way that we inhale it in the dark at night, and inhale it during the day in such a way that the sun's rays can pass through. We need all of this. So that we can say: we would not live if we did not have the oxygen in the air. But this oxygen in the air is mixed with another gas: with nitrogen. So in the air we have oxygen and nitrogen. Now you might say: Do we also need the nitrogen?

If there were only nitrogen, we would suffocate. Imagine if, instead of bringing you all into this room where oxygen is mixed with nitrogen, we brought you into a room where there was only nitrogen: You would all suffocate together! So we could say: maybe we could be completely indifferent to whether the nitrogen is there or not, maybe we could have just the oxygen. But then it would be like this: if there were only oxygen, then at most the youngest person sitting there would still be alive – all the rest of us would have died long ago. The youngest would still be alive, but he would have a long beard and white hair and wrinkles, he would be an old man! So we would all live too fast if there was only oxygen. It is only because oxygen is mixed with much more nitrogen – only 21 percent is oxygen, the rest being almost all nitrogen – that we live as long as we can as humans. So if we didn't have nitrogen, we would live too fast. We would only live long enough to be about sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, and then we would already be old.

However, the nitrogen in the air has another very special property. You might say: What if there was a little more or a little less nitrogen in the air? Assume there is less nitrogen in the air than the percentage that is already in it. Gentlemen, that would be a very curious story: You would all start breathing out more nitrogen in the air you breathe out than you would otherwise breathe out, where there is just as much in the air as there is now. So if there were too little nitrogen in it, you would pump the nitrogen out of your body in order to pump as much out of your own body into the air as is in it now. If there were more in the air than is now in the air, you would start to retain the nitrogen you breathe in and exhale less than you do now, so that there is less nitrogen in the air again. This is very strange: man not only needs nitrogen mixed with oxygen to breathe properly, but he also needs a certain amount of nitrogen in his environment. It must be there. So it is not important that we have enough nitrogen and oxygen inside us, but that the right amount is in our environment. And if it is not enough, we add it ourselves.

This is something that today's science does not know at all. Today's science completely excludes the human being from the world, not knowing that the human being can in fact be the master of the world if he is only aware of it. If, for example, it were necessary to found a colony somewhere where there is too little nitrogen, then it would be possible to produce enough nitrogen by simply recommending food to people that would enable them to exhale a lot of nitrogen themselves. So you see how a real science can be put into practice immediately.

But now something else comes into play. Let us first consider the nitrogen that we do not just let out, but that we also continually inhale and exhale. If we had only that nitrogen, we would suffocate. In our lungs, we suffocate from the nitrogen. But our kidneys, our digestive organs, our hands and feet need the nitrogen; it is transported there by the blood and is necessary there. So that we can say: When a person is standing (see diagram $. 36), nitrogen, which I have marked in red here, is constantly going into his arms and hands, into his abdomen, into his legs and feet. That is where the nitrogen has to be. Nitrogen must not remain in the lungs, it must only pass through and have oxygen for the lungs. The lungs can only live when they have oxygen; but the nitrogen goes further, into arms and hands. So everywhere I have marked in red, the nitrogen must go in. And in the heart, too, it must still be deposited, the nitrogen. There must be nitrogen everywhere inside.

This nitrogen, which is inside, goes, I would say, all the time in brotherhood with the carbon. Carbon is in coal, in diamond, is in graphite. But carbon is also in us. Only in us it is liquid, floating around. So in there (see drawing) is the nitrogen, which I have drawn in red; now I want to draw in the carbon in blue. It is also everywhere inside, so that the red is everywhere with the blue, the carbon. This is something very strange: you carry carbon and nitrogen together in your insides, in your legs, your feet, your arms and hands, in your stomach, in your liver, in your kidneys, in your spleen, in your heart – nitrogen as it is in the air and completely liquid carbon, as if you were dissolving coal and this black stuff were floating in the water. You have that inside you.

But that is actually a dangerous story when carbon and nitrogen are next to each other. If carbon and nitrogen are present next to each other, there is always the danger, if the right conditions are present, that they form prussic acid, cyanic acid; because prussic acid consists of what I have marked red and blue in the diagram. So you walk around and while you walk around, there is always the danger that prussic acid is formed in you. So everywhere where I have marked in blue, there is always the danger that prussic acid is formed throughout the whole human being. And because the bones have lime, the prussic acid can also combine with the lime; then a cyanide-calcium compound is formed. And then potassium cyanide is formed. You know that potassium cyanide is the most technically perfect way to poison yourself. Of course, there is no better means than potassium cyanide for this purpose; it is immediately right. But now there is a constant danger in man that he will form prussic acid and potassium cyanide. This must be so. Because if you did not have this ability to form potassium cyanide within you, then you could not walk and you could not move your arms. The power to move, to move your arms and legs, comes from the fact that you are constantly exposed to the danger of forming prussic acid.

Now there is something very subtle: this prussic acid wants to form in us all the time and we constantly prevent it! That is what our life as a moving human being consists of. Even the movement of blood depends on our preventing the formation of prussic acid. Our movements arise from this resistance to the formation of prussic acid. And our will actually arises from the fact that it is constantly compelled to prevent the formation of prussic acid and prussic acid in us.

Now, gentlemen, prussic acid does not form; because if it did form, we would be poisoned. But at every moment we have the possibility of prussic acid forming in us and we have to prevent it. Of course, it is not much prussic acid that wants to form, but it would add up to something over a lifetime if it were to form. And the power that lives in the prussic acid that wants to form, this power that lives there, connects the human being on earth with the sun. So that what lives in the prussic acid flows continuously from man into the sun. So you can say when you look up at the sun: I have a connection with the sun; and the power that lives in me to break down the prussic acid that constantly wants to form in my body, this power goes from the earth up to the sun. If you have the earth here and the sun here – I have to draw it large now – then such currents of Zyankali are constantly flowing from the person to the sun, and currents flow back from the sun. This dissolved Zyankali flows from the person to the sun, and from the sun flows back what the sun makes out of this dissolved Zyankali. And this distance is twenty million miles – one mile is calculated as seven and a half kilometers. If a light is now lit on the sun, we see it first because the light takes so long to get here, much later. So we are connected to a world body that is so far away from us simply by the fact that we radiate this power, which is constantly striving to form potassium cyanide. In particular, there is always something like a cyanide center in our bones, like a source of cyanide.

If that were not the case, then we would be very peculiar people on earth. If we did not have this connection with the sun, then we would also stare up at the sun and say: Yes, that is a world body that has nothing to do with us. - We would see that plants grow; but these plants could not grow either if this potassium cyanide did not go back and forth. So we would stare at the sun and we would not know what relation it has to man. Of course, people today also do not know this connection that I have told you about, but they feel that they belong to the sun. And they feel this very strongly. Because when the sun goes down – especially in ancient times, when people still lived healthier lives, slept at night and watched during the day, it was still like that – then people feel that they do not absorb the sun in the same way. Then potassium cyanide is only in him, albeit only in small quantities; then he falls asleep. It is indeed the sun that always wakes people up and puts them to sleep. Only because man withholds something can he commit the folly of continuing to work at night or not working but continuing to enjoy himself. But the forces that we summon up during the night also come through the connection of these forces with the sun. And I would like to say: when hydrocyanic acid is formed somewhere on the earth itself - for example, hydrocyanic acid is formed in certain plants - when hydrocyanic acid is formed on the earth itself, then this solar force is applied to the plant, so to speak, in such a way that it brings about what actually wants to be done in the human being.

You see, gentlemen, in order for this to be formed – and it has to be formed because the nitrogen is in the prussic acid – you need the nitrogen in the environment. And the sun needs the nitrogen to be able to work on us in the right way. We could not stand on earth as human beings if the sun did not have the nitrogen through which it can act on our limbs, on our digestive organs and so on. But with the head it is quite different, with the human head, quite different. You see, in the lungs, the nitrogen is no good there; it has to go through the lungs. In the lungs, only the oxygen is of any use. And when the oxygen passes through the lungs, the part that then goes to the head must not go so fraternally to the nitrogen. The oxygen that goes to the head must go to the carbon instead. And instead of hydrocyanic acid being formed towards the feet, carbonic acid is now continuously formed towards the head — I want to emphasize this. So, towards the feet, humans produce prussic acid, towards the head, they produce carbonic acid. If we had to breathe carbonic acid, we would suffocate; but we need it in our heads. You see, gentlemen, that is a very interesting thing: our head needs the carbonic acid.

Now, you all know carbonic acid, of course. You have probably all had a fizzy soft drink or sparkling water: it contains bubbles, these gas bubbles. This is often carbonic acid, because in carbonated water, the carbonic acid is inside and rises in small bubbles. Gentlemen, you would not think that you have your head to anything at all if it were not for the fact that you are constantly producing little bubbles in your own body through the blood. Just as the bubbles shoot up in the bottle in the fizzy lemonade, tiny little bubbles are constantly going up in you towards your head. You could use your head for nothing if you were not a bottle like that yourself. One thirteenth to one fourteenth of the weight of your own body is taken up by blood. So you can imagine: you are actually such a bottle, filled with blood instead of fizzy water, and these bubbles swim upwards, striving upwards, just like in the fizzy water bottle, only much smaller, like in the lemonade bottle. Your head would not be able to think if these bubbles did not constantly rise up in you.

But now this carbonic acid must not be inactive in your head. You can well imagine that, with regard to your blood, you are like a bottle of fizzy pop, with bubbles rising up to your head. Now you have the same carbonic acid in your head, these bubbles, as in the bottle of fizzy lemonade. If you have too little in your head, you fall asleep; so you need it in your head. But this carbonic acid comes into contact with something in your head – nowhere else – but in your head it comes into contact with the iron in your blood. The iron is everywhere in the blood. But the iron that is in the blood in the hands cannot do anything with the carbonic acid; only in the head does the carbonic acid come together with the iron. And I would like to say: they kiss in the head, become very intimate with each other, the iron and the carbonic acid; and from there, through the veins, the iron passes into the whole blood. The carbonic acid then carries the iron into the whole blood when it has come into contact with it in the head. Iron and carbonic acid can only have a rendezvous in the head; but afterwards, when they have had their rendezvous, they can stroll around in the whole blood. Therefore, if a young girl becomes anemic, if she has too little iron in her blood, it means that there are too few rendezvous in her head, too few trysts between iron and carbonic acid. The girl does not have the strength to let enough iron and carbonic acid come together in her head.

But now you have probably already heard of such carbonic acid waters and even drunk some yourself. These carbonic acid waters, which are called ferruginous waters, are particularly healthy. You see, wherever there are ferruginous springs – and there are a great many carbonated waters in the earth – that is where nature exercises in the earth that which the human being exercises in his head. Large ferruginous springs are to be found here and there in the earth. And people are sent there when their own minds have become too weak. For every human mind is such an iron-containing source; even a ferruginous acid is still constantly forming in there, carbonic acid iron. There are as many sources in you as there are people sitting here. It is only when someone has been muddling through the winter that his mind becomes weak, and then the carbonic acid iron content in his mind becomes weak. He feels something that many people feel in spring: he feels as if something is wrong with his blood – of course, if he has been drinking! – he feels weak in the head, and must be sent to a carbonic acid bath, so that he gets through the stomach and from there through the head what he should actually produce himself through a more solid life. The ferruginous springs are not so rare: there are as many as there are people on earth! So we have what we need in iron in our blood through this carbonic acid iron.

We must, however, constantly produce it ourselves in our heads. But just as we must prevent it at the moment when it wants to arise, just as we must prevent the prussic acid. It may only just begin to form. You know, today chemists only talk about: well, we can put iron and carbon and oxygen together, and get iron carbonate. That must then be there, this iron carbonate. But that is not how it happens in life! Just as there is a difference between a stone and a piece of your liver, there is a difference between what the chemist does in the laboratory with iron carbonate and what exists in your mind as iron, as iron carbonate. That is alive! The difference is that it is alive. And you see, from this carbonic iron, which is in your mind, currents are constantly going up to the moon. Just as the currents of potassium cyanide go to the sun, so these currents, which a person develops by having the strength within himself to control the ferrous carbon, go up to the moon and back again.

Think, gentlemen, that you are looking up at the moon. You can say to yourself: It has a lot to do with my head. And so it is when you come to any area – I will mention, for example, Sauerbrunn in Hungary or Götsch in Styria, Gießhübl and so on; I believe there are also some in Switzerland – when you come there, it is a place where the moon can best affect the earth through the soil, because only there can such waters arise. So we see how the earth and man on the earth are connected with the sun and moon in that one comes to it: the cyanide currents ruled by man go according to the sun, the iron-carbonic acid currents ruled by man go according to the moon.

If one were reasonable, one would examine all such things properly. That is not done today. You just have to consider that the plants that are on the earth constantly need carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is there. We humans and the animals exhale carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is there! The plants that are on the earth do not breathe oxygen, but carbon dioxide. They throw away the oxygen, they keep the carbon in themselves. Therefore, the plant is built on carbonic acid. But this whole process, which develops best in the plant, is such that the plant can develop out of carbonic acid when the full moon is shining, because it is connected with the power of the moon. On the other hand, when there is a new moon, it develops less. And so it is always a basic condition for the plant that it is illuminated by the full moon. Growth is dormant during the new moon and develops particularly strongly during the full moon.

That is how you also explained the influence of the moon in “old superstitions”! Of course, such things were observed in the past, when people had no science. That is why you will find references everywhere in old country sayings to the importance of the full moon for plant growth. And you see, gentlemen, one should not just talk about the relationships between the individual heavenly bodies, but one should start from how this actually manifests itself on earth among people. Man has, as you have now seen, an extraordinary amount from the moon and from the sun. Man owes it to the moon that he can use his head. Man owes it to the sun that he can use his heart and his legs and hands. Just as we need the ground under our feet so that we can walk on it and not keep falling over, we need the sun and the moon. When we walk at night, we walk by the stored-up solar energy that we received during the day. We need these heavenly bodies!

But now, when you know what I have just said, you will also be able to say to yourself: Yes, but what about the early days? I have already told you that in the early days the sun and the moon and the earth were one single body; only in the course of time did they separate. Today we have the sun, the earth and the moon, that is, three bodies, distributed in space. In the beginning we had the sun, huge; inside it was the earth and inside the earth was the moon itself. They were one inside the other (see diagram $44). If we go back in the process of development, we come to a point in time when things were as if you, gentlemen, were very powerful, we were all very powerful and would now start here in the assembly to pack up the whole earth, load it onto a world wagon, quickly drive to the moon and then we would take the Earth and the Moon, which we had packed up, and drive up into the Sun. We would have reestablished the conditions that once existed. Only all the substances of the earth and all the substances of the moon would immediately take on a different form than they have now. But that was once the case! And when that was the case, there was not the same air as there is now, but there was prussic acid on the earth. So there was prussic acid and carbonic acid everywhere in the sun. You will say: But there was no real oxygen; in hydrocyanic acid and carbonic acid, man cannot live! Yes, gentlemen, as man is today, he could not live in that either; but in those days man did not yet have a physical body. He lived as a soul in this structure, in this heavenly body, which was the sun and earth and moon at the same time. And if we look at it properly, we simply come back to the fact that the whole nature of the heavenly bodies was different in those days, that when we still lived in the sun we naturally did not live on oxygen, but on prussic acid and carbonic acid. The sun, in which we lived, gave us prussic acid; the moon, which was inside the earth, gave us carbonic acid.

Today, all that remains of this is nitrogen in the air, which we cannot live on either. That remained from the prussic acid. The enormous prussic acid air of the sun left us the nitrogen when the sun and the earth separated. So the nitrogen remained from the prussic acid. And the oxygen remained from the carbonic acid after the moon came out. So we can say: Our air, our ordinary air, which consists of nitrogen and oxygen, has not been around forever, it has only been around since the sun separated from the earth; that's when the nitrogen came. And since the moon has separated from the earth, that's when the oxygen came.

But now it goes further! I told you that there is actually only a little oxygen in the air, about 21 percent, and quite a lot of nitrogen, around 78 percent. Now, I also told you: the sun is big, the moon is small; we get our oxygen from the moon, so there is less of it in the air; we get our nitrogen from the sun, so there is a lot of it in the air because the sun is much bigger than the moon. So you can see from the nitrogen in the air that the sun is bigger than the moon, because we get our nitrogen from the sun and our oxygen from the moon.

But I also told you that carbonic acid consists of oxygen and carbon. The carbon that is in black coal is there; the oxygen is in the air. Now I have told you that when the moon came out of the earth, the oxygen was created. But then the carbon that remains in the earth, that is the black coal in the earth, was formed from the carbonic acid. So think, we dig the black coal out of the earth today. What do we have to say to ourselves when we don't just drill into the earth like earthworms, but educate ourselves about how this coal was formed? —Once the moon came out of the earth, gave the air oxygen and the ground coal. We really must say: You, Moon, you gave us plenty when you left the Earth; you didn't just slip away when you left the Earth; you left us oxygen in the air and coal in the Earth! - So the moon, it's actually a very fine fellow out in space; because when he was still with us, he entertained our souls by always developing carbonic acid himself; he left that behind for us. And outside he left us the carbon and in the earth the coal. He did not act like a thief, leaving nothing behind or even taking it with him, but he made the physical human possible in the first place. Before that there was no physical human, but only a spiritual human in the sun with the moon and the earth.

And even earlier, the Earth and the Sun separated. The Sun provided the Earth with prussic acid, actually with potassium cyanide. This is needed to live spiritually, that is, when one does not have a physical body. You have to have prussic acid in the environment where you cannot use it when you are supposed to live as a physical person. Prussic acid immediately dissolves the physical person. But the sun is also such a fine person: it left us the nitrogen in the air when it went away, when it separated; and in the earth it left us the potassium cyanide and other cyanide compounds. These consist of carbon, nitrogen and potassium – potassium is a substance that shines as finely as silver – or also calcium. So the sun left behind nitrogen in the air for us, and also some carbon, but this did not become coal, but lives in plants, this carbon; but it secreted calcium and that is where the limestone mountains, the Jura and so on come from. The fact that we have a solid earth at all comes from the fact that the sun was once with us and went out into space and left us the lime. The moon left us the coal, the sun left us the lime in the earth. The moon left us oxygen in the air, the sun left us nitrogen in the air.

And so the earth was formed out of the sun and the moon. And after it was formed, we look up and see the sun and the moon. But when everything was still together, when the sun, moon and earth were together, man could only live as a spiritual being, could not live otherwise! Yes, gentlemen, in those days man was able to live as a soul-spiritual being despite the fact that he never received a physical body because oxygen and nitrogen and all that was not there. But now, when we bring potassium cyanide into our bodies as we are on earth, it destroys all our movements and vital forces in our bodies. And the terrible thing is that there is always a danger when someone poisons themselves with potassium cyanide that it takes its toll on the soul and instead of being able to live on in the soul, the person is scattered all over the world and especially in the sunlight.

If anthroposophical knowledge were to spread, no one would poison themselves with potassium cyanide anymore. It would not even occur to him! The fact that poisoning with potassium cyanide occurs is only the consequence of the materialistic world view, because people believe that dead is dead, no matter whether one dies from potassium cyanide or from inner dissolution. But it is important! When someone dies through inner dissolution, then the soul and spirit have to take the usual path into the spiritual world; they simply continue to live. But when you poison yourself with potassium cyanide, then the soul intends to go with every body part, and especially to spread out in the nitrogen and dissolve into the universe. That is the real death of soul and spirit. If people only knew that the soul and spirit are the actual human being, then they would say: We cannot possibly cause this terrible explosion, which is then caused throughout the whole universe in a subtle way, when a person poisons himself with potassium cyanide. – Because every person who poisons himself with potassium cyanide connects himself in an improper way to the current that goes from the earth to the sun. And if one had the right instruments, one would see a small explosion in the sun every time a person poisons himself with potassium cyanide. And the sun is deteriorating as a result. Man corrupts the universe and also the power that flows from the sun to the earth when he poisons himself with potassium cyanide. Man really has influence on the universe. When a person poisons himself with potassium cyanide, he is actually ruining the sun! And so it is with every case of cyanide poisoning.

And that is something that does not evoke such an artificially created religious mood, but what really evokes a religious mood, is that man knows: I belong to the universe, and what I do continually evokes influences in the universe. That is precisely what has been completely forgotten by people, that this is the case and that people do not even know: the nitrogen that is around me was created by the sun; the oxygen that is around me was created by the moon. And that is why a real science is basically no longer there today. There is no real science at all anymore! Real science takes the other heavenly bodies into account. And so people look up at the stars through their telescopes, do mere calculating, but do not know that, for example, there is an intimate connection between every iron particle, of which millions swim around in our blood, between every iron particle in our blood and everything that happens in the moon. And so it is that, for example, a young girl suffering from anemia cannot develop a proper relationship with the moon and thus becomes completely disconnected from the cosmic context. So that such a pale anemia young girl, for example, loses her memory, everything that relates to the head, and that as a result the living relationship does not arise, everything that, as I have told you, should arise between iron and carbonic acid - all that is not present in the pale anemia young girl: the head becomes empty of thoughts.

But again, if a person is unable to properly combat what wants to arise in his body in terms of prussic acid, then too much lime is deposited in the bones; the bones become brittle and gradually even the lime pushes into the blood vessels: everything in the person becomes brittle. The human being can no longer develop the right relationship with the sun. But this must be. The human being must develop his right relationship with the sun through that which lives in his movements, in which the bones, of course, play an important part. And the human being must develop the right relationship with the moon through that which lives in his head. Yes, gentlemen, it is indeed the case that if a person does not think, is too lazy to think, then little by little the moon will not take care of that person! Then the person becomes dull, stupid. And if the person does not walk at all, but lies in bed all the time, then the sun will not take care of that person. Then the person becomes dull and lethargic and sluggish in relation to his limbs. Whether someone is very lazy in their movements or in their thoughts depends on their

relationship with the sun and moon. If you are on good terms with the sun and moon, you like to think and like to walk around and like to work. If you are on bad terms with the sun and moon, you stop thinking and you no longer enjoy walking around and working. But man is very closely connected to the sun and moon. If you ask one or the other today what he has learned from all that can be learned today - one tells you how to work with the microscope, the other tells you how to look at the sun and moon with the telescope, how to calculate the angles, how much distance are the distances, that the sun has sunspots, that it has a corona around it, how the nebulae rise – he tells you all that.

If you ask me what the connection between the heavenly bodies is, then I can tell you the same thing, because I have also learned what the others have learned. But if it is to become a living science, I have to tell it to you in such a way that it ultimately comes out that human walking and standing is connected with the sun; that is living science and the other is dead science, living science and dead science! This living science and this dead science, that is precisely the difference between the Goetheanum and, let us say, a modern university. If you go to a modern university, they tell the young doctor that when any body combines with oxygen, it burns. So you have a candle; there is all kinds of fuel, fats, there is the flame and there these substances combine with the oxygen in the air. And that is combustion, the combining of substances with the oxygen in the air, therefore combustion. And then the professor goes on to say: There is also combustion in the human being, because there is carbon in it, oxygen is inhaled, combines with the carbon; there is also combustion in the human being. – And so the professor tells you about the combustion in the human being. But that is just as much nonsense as saying: “Guy, your liver has gone terribly bad, I'll cut one out of wood and put it in for you.” Yes, that's a dead liver! But man needs a living liver. If you light a candle, you have a dead combustion; but the combustion that is inside man is a living combustion! The same difference that exists between a candle and the living combustion inside a person also exists between a living liver and a liver made of wood. So when the professor talks about a combustion taking place inside a person, he is not talking about a real person at all, but about someone he has carved out of wood. That is all nonsense! The combustion itself is alive in the human being. And that is the big difference between the combustion that is outside, the dead combustion, and the living one that is inside the human being. But they look at the combustion in the same way, saying: outside, fat, tallow or something similar burns in the candle, and inside, carbon burns to form carbonic acid. It is the same nonsense as saying that you could just as easily make a liver out of wood or stone. That would be a dead liver! In the body, there cannot be just any old kind of combustion like there is in a candle. There is a living combustion in the human being, and it is different from what is otherwise called combustion, just as the liver is different from a piece of wood. That is why I distinguish these expressions that are used by ordinary natural science from combustion and so on; I only say it by also explaining that it is a living combustion. Even in the word, when one says that a combustion takes place in the body, there is nonsense in the word, because everyone thinks: the same thing that happens in a candle happens in a human being. Even when you speak the words, you are talking nonsense.

Next Saturday, if I'm there, I'll give a lecture; otherwise on Monday.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps you noticed something in particular during the last lecture that would prompt you to follow up with a question?

Questioner: Yesterday, Mr. Seefeld showed me a photograph of snowflakes. The forms come from the universe. It interested me very much; there is a connection. It has already given me food for thought.

Dr. Steiner: I will try to present this to you in context as well, especially since it will then easily lead on from what we discussed last Monday. I have often pointed out that the human being is a very complicated creature. This is not so much apparent from the human being's appearance, but can be seen from the human being's inner life, including the physical interior of the human being. I can point out to you, for example, that in areas in the so-called hot zone, where it is warm for most of the year and only a very short rainy winter alternates with the warmth - say in southern Egypt or India - that people there actually look quite different on the inside than where it is constantly cold, in areas close to the North Pole, for example. Regions close to the North Pole have a great deal of what you just asked about; they have a great deal of the forces that are then expressed in the beautiful forms of snowflakes. So we can say that on Earth we have areas that are strongly warmed and illuminated by the sun, where the sun has a great influence, and we have areas where the sun actually has little influence, where snow and ice prevail. You know that not only snowflakes have beautiful, all kinds of wonderful shapes – snowflakes have, firstly, shapes that resemble a hexagon, but also all kinds of other shapes (see figure $. 52) – but you have certainly also looked out the window in winter when there is ice, when the water freezes that otherwise covers the entire window surface as vapor; then you have seen what wonderful flowers are formed, wonderful figures in which the water is formed. So that we can say: water, which is the basis of snow as well as of ice – because when it gets warm again, both snow and ice melt into water – forms the most beautiful figures when the sun is not quite strong. Of course, they cannot be in the water. Because something that forms its own figure out of itself retains its figure. You all have a figure. But you cannot say of the human figure that you all only have the human figure in pictures, which melts away when the sun comes. That would also be a shame, but it doesn't. The water does not have this figure within itself; it comes from outside. Now let us examine where the water gets this figure from, which causes these beautiful images in both snow crystals and frost flowers. That is the answer to your question. When such a question is posed, it must be possible to address the person as a whole. Now there are two organs in the human being; they are different in a person where the sun has great power throughout the year, as in the hot regions of southern Egypt and India. The inner form of these organs differs in these people from those people where it is cold, so to speak, all year round, where there is always a tendency in nature to form snow crystals and frost flowers, as with the Eskimos. They live up there, wherever snow and ice actually want to be, where water does not melt much. But now let's look at the outside. People will say: Well, people in hot areas may be a little taller on the outside, but the Eskimos are small people. But that is not what makes the difference. The big difference between people in the hot zone and the Eskimos, the people in the cold zone, lies in the difference in the formation of their livers and lungs. The Eskimos have large lungs and small livers in relation to their bodies, and the people in the hot zone have relatively smaller lungs and a large liver. So you see, people in areas where ice flowers and ice crystals form differ from the others in that they have a small liver and large lungs in relation to their bodies. And in people where nature does not tend to form such figures, but where the sun always melts everything, removes everything, there is the peculiarity that they have relatively small lungs and a large liver. Whenever we ask about something in nature, including ice flowers, we must always look at the human being. If you don't start with the human being, you understand nothing in nature, absolutely nothing.

So the thing is this: the liver in humans is a very important organ. If a person had no liver, they would have no bile, because the liver secretes bile continuously. The bile comes from the liver, passes into the gallbladder, from there into the digestive juices, from there into the blood and then passes into the whole body. So we can say: Man has the liver in his right side; from the liver, bile flows out into the gallbladder, from there into the blood, and goes into the whole body. So man actually has his liver to secrete bile.

You may ask why this bile is constantly coming from the liver. Gentlemen, if you had no gall, you would be strange people. It is distributed throughout the body in very small quantities, but it must be in the whole body. If you had no gall, you would be terribly phlegmatic; you would let your hands, arms, and head hang, and it would be unpleasant for you to answer someone's questions and so on. So you would be completely lethargic, phlegmatic people if you had no bile. Man must have bile; the bile must come from the liver. And if the liver is relatively small, then the person is phlegmatic; if the liver is relatively large, then the person has a lot of fire in him, because the bile produces fire. And you see, there can also be too much bile in a person; they can produce too much bile; then they actually feel like hitting out when someone says just a little something to them. In particular, people with a violent temper have a lot of bile flowing out of their liver; a lot of bile flows into the digestive juices and into the blood. So that if you observe inwardly the person to whom you say something or who does not like something that makes a particular impression on him – a lot of bile quickly flows out of the liver and spreads very quickly throughout the body, and he hits you a few times or rants like a trooper. That is what you observe inwardly when a person has too much tendency to secrete bile. But as I said, if he did not secrete any bile at all, he would have no fire at all, but would just flop around as I told you. So you see, the secretion of bile is something that is absolutely essential to a person. I don't know if any of you has tasted bile: it tastes terribly bitter, really poisonous, and a larger amount of bile properly absorbed by the mouth is also a poison. This is related to what I told you last Wednesday. I told you: when a person comes to life, moves, walks, even when he curses and slaps you around a bit, yes, there is so much poison that he has the tendency to produce a lot of the potassium cyanide I told you about. He has to mix that with his blood. I have seen many cases where people have simply developed internal blood poisoning from their anger. One can become so angry, especially when one becomes angry quickly, that one secretes an excessive amount of bile as a result of this anger - actually first a lot of cyan, then bile. Then one gets a terrible toxic mixture in the blood, and that ruins the blood. Wrath can cause terrible blood poisoning. From this you can see how necessary and how harmful something can be for a person, depending on what kind of organ it is in his body. Because everything that happens is connected with the soul again. Anger is something of the soul, the secretion of bile is something physical; but there is nothing in the human being that is not also of the soul and everything of the soul somehow has a physical form.

Let us move on. Now suppose a person is very often exposed to what are often called colds, especially abdominal colds. So a person gets abdominal colds very often; then his stomach says: Yes, I am like an Eskimo, I am like in the coldest region of the earth. - And then it happens that the stomach constantly contracts the liver, so that it is small like an Eskimo's. So if a person has a lot of abdominal colds, then his liver contracts, and then it squeezes out the bile. Bile constantly trickles into the gallbladder and from there into the body.

Now, gentlemen, you have all experienced what is called, for example, overstraining yourself. You lift something that is too heavy for you; then you tear your muscles apart, then you destroy your muscles. If you use too much strength for any organ, you destroy the organ. But that is the case with the liver. If it continues to secrete too much bile, the liver gradually shrinks and becomes ineffective. So most liver diseases that people get arise from the fact that the person has developed a tendency to secrete too much bile due to cold in the abdomen, causing their liver to atrophy. Liver diseases come from cold in the abdomen due to the liver shrinking. Of course, all kinds of other conditions can occur as well. When a person suffers from abdominal colds, the heart does not work properly. Doctors then say that liver diseases come from the heart. But in reality they come from the fact that the abdomen is cold.

But all this – as you can already see from what I have told you – has to do with the sun. Therefore, it is always very good for someone suffering from abdominal colds to expose their lower body to light. The sun cure, for example, is extremely good for this. So we have to say: everything that is connected with the liver is also connected with the sun. Solar activity promotes liver activity. A lack of solar activity disrupts liver activity. It is a very interesting connection between the sun and the liver.

I have always admired the fact that the German language has a word for liver. All other languages don't have such a nice word for this organ in the right side of the abdomen. Because, according to what I have explained to you now, we have to say that the fire, even that which comes to man from the sun, this invigorating firepower, must first be cooked properly in the liver for the human being; the bile must be prepared there for him, which then passes into his body. The sun prepares the bile in the human being. What the human being does there, we call living, and the one who fuels this life can be called a liver. Just as one says: wagon, wainwright, drawing, draftsman, so life is the verb, and liver, the liver - one has only forgotten that this is the case, one says “the liver” instead of “the liver”; actually it is called the liver - that is what gives life! Sometimes language is wonderfully instructive, because in the old folk instincts there was always a knowledge of this, and things were named correctly. The liver is what fires, what invigorates the human being. This is to be said with regard to the liver. Now, if one has a liver in its bile secretion, then one must say: the secretion of the liver is that which is connected with the sun.

Now we turn to the lungs. We have often discussed this and you know it: the lungs breathe. But the lungs drawing in oxygen, breathing, is only part of their activity. The lungs have something else to do. Just as the liver secretes bile, so the lungs secrete what is called mucus. So the lungs secrete mucus. The lungs, like the liver, cannot keep what they have inside. The liver could not fill up with bile; the liver has to release bile into the body. But the lungs have to constantly secrete mucus, constantly secrete mucus. And now it is so that when the lungs secrete mucus, the mucus then goes to all other parts of the body. It goes out with sweat, it even goes into the exhaled air, it goes out with the urine, it goes everywhere, the mucus. But the organ that secretes the mucus is the lung.

If you now examine the air that a person exhales, you will discover something wonderful. You just have to examine the air exhaled from the nose, not the air exhaled from the mouth, which is too irregular; you have to examine the air exhaled from the nostrils.

It is very interesting when someone exhales very slowly. You have to be very careful: if you breathe on a glass plate, something similar to snow will appear in the exhaled breath. You have to do it very carefully, and in such a way that, for example, if you hold your left nostril while exhaling, you only breathe out slowly with your right nostril onto the glass plate in front of you, and then with your left. You have to breathe very slowly, because if you breathe quickly, you smear the whole thing with the breath. You have to breathe very gently and softly. Actually, you have to learn that first. But then it's interesting: when you breathe through one nostril, the exhaled air forms figures on the glass plate, just like snow! The exhaled air is not just a little crumb on it, but a figure. And the really interesting thing about it, I would say, is that if you hold your left nostril closed and breathe out, you get one figure; if you hold your right nostril closed and breathe out, you get a different figure. They are not even the same figures! So we can say: the air from you, from your own person, comes out in figures. It doesn't come out just as a drop, it comes out in figures, and even so strangely that the left nostril gives a different figure than the right nostril.

Now, gentlemen, what is in the exhaled air, which, because it contains water vapor, gives these figures, which evaporate again immediately, but forms these figures, is the mucus that passes from the lungs into the exhaled air. It forms these figures. The mucus, so to speak, sticks the individual, tiny water droplets together into such figures. So that you do not just have the tendency to expel mucus in your lungs in any old shape, but you have the tendency to actually exhale or expel mucus from your lungs in crystals – in crystals! Only these crystals evaporate immediately, dissolve immediately, because they come into contact with the sun.

Just as the bile is related to the liver and the sun, so the lungs and their mucus secretion are related to the moon. We know that the carbon dioxide rises up into the head, as I have told you, and I have shown you that if a person did not send carbon dioxide up into his head, he would become stupid. This tingling carbonic acid, which continuously rises in very small quantities into the head, makes us clever people. We are all so terribly clever people, aren't we! You know, when you drink fizzy drinks, it tingles; that is very noticeable. But humans always produce carbonic acid very weakly. He sends it up into the head. And this tingling in the head makes the head active; that is why he is clever and not stupid. Those people who are really stupid – I don't know if there are any – they have too little strength to combine the carbon with the oxygen and don't send any carbon up, but they combine the carbon with a completely different gas. So a clever person connects the carbon with the oxygen: and that's how sparkling carbonic acid is created. But as I said, those people who are really stupid connect the carbon not with the oxygen but with the hydrogen. So they connect carbon with hydrogen, and that's how this gas is created, which is sometimes found in mines: mine gas, swamp gas. We all send some of this mine gas into our heads; we need it, otherwise we would become too clever. So that we can always remain a little dull, and not be too clever, we also develop swamp gas. But those who become too stupid develop too much swamp gas. In those people who are reasonably clever, the carbonic acid goes to the head. That tingles. And when a lot of marsh gas has gradually accumulated, they become sleepy, then comes sleepiness. This occurs at night, when a lot of marsh gas develops. Only in those who are stupid does the marsh gas also develop when they are awake. So the carbonic acid has to keep rising. But the carbonic acid alone does not do it: the mucus has to go from the lungs to the head. It even comes out through the nostrils in the form of crystals, just as it does in the liver and gall bladder. Now, that will be clear to you from the description I gave on Wednesday.

Just as the liver is related to the sun, so the lungs are related to the moon. Take a look at the moon. The moon is just very different from the sun. When you look at the sun, the sun is round, but it actually spreads its rays in all directions. The sun, which shines on all sides; it flows out in all directions, just as the bile in the human body goes in all directions. One can then compare the sun in its flowing out, in its flowing apart, with the flowing out of the bile. But the moon - yes, gentlemen, when you look at the moon, it always has a very definite shape. The moon is very firm. And in its interior, too, what constitutes the substance of the moon is crystallized, just as our exhaled air forms, which come out of the nose, are crystallized. The moon's effects are at work inside, just as the sun's effects are at work in the liver and gall bladder. The moon's forces are at work in the lungs, and the moon causes this secretion of mucus.

Now we can say: let us go to the hot regions, yes, then the sun is at work. It makes everything melt; people get a lot of fire. Fire, it does not only live in the wrath of anger, but also lives in the beautiful things and in the beautiful wisdom of zeal. People get a lot of fire. If we go to cold regions, then in these cold regions, where the sun does not have the strength to work, where the moon shines in particular on cold nights in the freezing cold, the lungs, which are relatively enlarged, have to work very hard: a lot of mucus is secreted. And those who are not accustomed to this catch cold and secrete too much mucus.

You see, gentlemen, now you also have the cause of lung diseases. The lungs have to secrete a certain amount of mucus, just as the liver has to secrete a certain amount of bile. But just as the liver ruins itself when it secretes too much bile, so the lungs ruin themselves when they secrete too much mucus. This is the case with lung diseases. The lungs are shaken up by what they experience, by secreting too much mucus. So imagine that instead of living in moderately humid air, instead of living in a little humid air, you live in very humid air: then the lungs have to make a very great effort. But when the lungs strain, they secrete mucus. And so, by breathing too much moist air, the lungs begin to strain. And the person coughs when they get lung disease; little by little they cough up their entire lungs when they are too sick.

You can then help the lungs by preparing a certain medicine. You must not use roots for this, but you must use the leaves of plants to prepare a certain medicine. This is the case, for example, with very specific plant species. If you take the juice correctly and prepare certain medicines, you can help the lungs when they are too active. Because such medicines have the property of taking over the lung activity; then the lungs exert themselves a little less. The healing process therefore usually consists of asking oneself: the lung is secreting too much mucus; this is a sign that it is making too great an effort. So what do I do? I look for a plant that has a juice that can take over the lung's activity.

Or I notice that the liver is secreting too much bile: I look for a plant that can take over the liver function. There is, for example, a plant called Cichorium intybus, chicory. If the juice from the root of this plant is made into a medicine and given to a person, then it takes over the liver function, and one can then find that although at first the person does not secrete less bile, and although at first his mental anger does not decrease, but that his liver gradually strengthens again and gradually improvement occurs.

So you help a person by knowing, for example, that the juices of the leaves - not the roots - of certain types of cabbage can take over certain lung activities, and that the juice from the root of Cichorium intybus - it also grows out there, you will all know it, it has such blue flowers - is particularly beneficial for the liver.

So we can say: In hot areas, water melts; warmth, the warmth of the sun dissolves everything. When the sun is less active, when the sun's power diminishes or is weak throughout the year, as in northern areas, the moon becomes all the more powerful. When the direct rays of the sun are not effective, these strange rays of the sun, which are reflected by the moon, are effective. These, however, produce the crystal forms and the ice flower forms. That is very beautiful. We can therefore say: If we have the earth here (see drawing), then we have the hot zone here. The sun's rays have a particular effect on the hot zone. Oh, that is very beautiful how the sun's rays work there! These sunbeams stimulate liver activity. The liver sends bile everywhere, and the bile spreads throughout the body. And when the bile spreads into the feathers of birds or the wings of hummingbirds, for example, it becomes the beautiful colors. That is why hummingbirds glisten in the hot zone because their bile is secreted very quickly and goes into the feathers very quickly.

In cold regions, this does not happen, because the sun has little power there. Instead, the reflected sunlight, the light of the moon, is particularly active, and this light causes the snow to form crystals, and the ice to produce frost flowers. This only happens here when the sun loses its power in winter. But in the regions of eternal ice, at the North Pole or on the high mountains, because the sun also has no power there, because the sun can only develop power in the dense air, these beautiful forms of ice are formed.

We already get a wonderful impression when we look into nature in this way! We get the impression that wherever the sun shines, life appears, life that melts and evaporates, that spreads. Wherever the moon has an effect, shapes and images arise. That is quite an impression that one gets there. And one can only understand these things if one is open to spiritual influences. It is really true that one must say: in the lungs, where man actually produces mucus, the powers of the moon are also at work. And they work in such a way that they do not need direct sunlight, but use reflected sunlight. Therefore, when the lunar forces are predominantly active here in the north, and the sun is inactive, something else happens: the air above becomes such that something that is always in the earth here comes out. For magnetism and electricity are everywhere in the earth. The earth is full of magnetism and electricity. You can see that magnetism and electricity are everywhere in the earth from the following: if you have a telegraph set at a station (diagram), if it is in Dornach, for example, then you have one here, let's say in Basel; you can telegraph to it; but you can only telegraph when there is a wire. Wires must go through the air; only then can you telegraph. But that is not enough if you were to set up a telegraph here and one in Basel, and pull a wire! You could telegraph as long as you like with the button, you would get to Basel, but you have to connect back again, it has to be a closed current. And when you do that, then you can telegraph here, and the signals will arrive there. You know - I only mention this for the sake of completeness - that there is a paper strip wrapped around here, and when a tip presses on this paper strip, either a dot or a dash is created, and when it presses for a long time, and the telegraphic alphabet is then composed of dots and dashes, a -, b----, c-+--. But the strange thing is: you don't need this second wire after all if you run a wire from the apparatus into the ground and put a copper plate in there, and then put another plate there; you can then remove the wire, because there is a connection. Why? Because the earth itself has electricity and the electricity is conducted from one plate to the other. The earth replaces the wire with its own substance. The earth is full of electricity. But when the sun shines on the earth, as at the equator, in the hot area, this electricity, when it wants to come out into the air, is immediately destroyed. The sunlight is a force that extinguishes the electricity. But where the sun's effect is weak, electricity goes up into the air, and you can see it above the earth. You see, gentlemen, the northern lights are the electrical force of the earth, which flows under the influence of the moon's forces. That is why the northern lights are very rare in our regions; but they are frequent, almost always there in northern regions.

This is another point where science reaches a dead end at a certain point. Of course, science today knows that the earth is full of electricity. This science also always looks at the northern lights. But if you read in the books what this northern light actually is, people always believe that it is something that flows from the world into the earth. But that is nonsense, it does not flow in, but flows straight out! What science does with the northern lights is so interesting because it is the same as when someone confuses their debts with their capital. That is the case. It makes a difference in human life when you confuse your debts with your wealth. But science can do it with impunity, it can look at the aurora borealis as something that flows in from the world, while in reality the aurora borealis is something that flows out from the earth. But in the hot areas, it is immediately received by sunlight, and there it is extinguished. In the northern regions, the moonlight is more active when it shines; and when it does not shine, it remains active in the after-effect, and there the northern light, the outgoing electricity, becomes visible. Now, this northern light is particularly strong there because the moon's forces are particularly strong. There is actually a little northern light everywhere, only it cannot be seen because it is weak. In our regions, the aurora borealis, that is, the escaping electricity, is also weak. But in wireless telegraphy it is so strong that it has an effect. What works in wireless telegraphy is the same as what you see glowing in the aurora borealis. There you have the reason. Electricity, together with moonlight, makes the ice flowers and snow crystals. You have to study the northern lights and the moonlight if you want to study the ice crystals, the frost flowers and the snow crystals. Because the power of the sun is less in winter, the power of the moon gets the upper hand and the electricity is less extinguished by us, the snow is formed into such beautiful crystals. It is the moon and electricity together that form the beautiful crystals and cause the frost flowers.

Now, I have already told you, just remember: if someone has too little moon activity, if someone develops too much marsh gas in his head, then, as the vernacular says, he becomes a “Sumser”, that is, a fool. And so he develops too little moon power in himself. Now, what must one have in one's head? One must get everything that comes from the moon, the carbonic acid from breathing, the mucus from the lungs, into the head, that is, a power that constantly wants to form crystals in the head. Snow, gentlemen, wants to form continuously in our heads; we only dissolve it again and again. But it wants to form. Think, gentlemen, you actually all have a very strange organ in your brains. Namely, when Mr. Seefeld showed Mr. Burle these beautiful snow crystal figures, he was interested in them, and he thought to himself: It must be interesting to see what the connection actually is. Yes, Mr. Burle photographed these snow crystals inside himself! It is like taking a very quick photograph, and what arises in a flash disappears again when you exhale through your nostrils. If one could quickly photograph what is going on inside Mr. Burle's head, or in the heads of all of you, one would find the same photographs. They would form such pieces of snow crystals, of ice flowers, window flowers; they could be photographed by your ether heads, and they would be the same! Your head is a very strange thing. If you had such a photographic apparatus, as it does not yet exist - you would have to do it terribly fast, because it always dissolves immediately - you would find: we look in our brain like a pretty piece of snow or a pretty window of ice flowers! It must disappear again immediately, otherwise they would sting us, these sharp crystals, we would not think with them. So that when we look out at the snow, or when we look out at our window flowers, ice flowers, we can say to ourselves: “Gosh, that's the same thing that's going on in our own heads!” – except that it quickly dissipates. All of nature thinks! And in winter, when it gets cold, it really starts to think. In summer, it's just too hot to think. Then it lets the sun scatter and turns it into food and so on. But in winter, when it's cold, thoughts form in the snow and ice. If there were no thoughts out there, we wouldn't have any in our heads either. So you see, it is actually beautiful, this correspondence of nature outside in winter, where nature becomes so clever that it makes visible, external, what is always going on in our heads as our cleverness. We can see everywhere in nature what is going on in ourselves. We just have to understand it in the right way.

Now, all this has a great, practical significance. So, gentlemen, suppose someone gets, let us say, a very specific type of head disease from secreting too little mucus. You can get a head disease from that. If, when someone secretes too little mucus, you give him some silicic acid iron as a remedy, then this silicic acid iron takes over the mucus secretion activity and pushes the mucus up into the head, and you can again cause healing with it. You see, that is the difference between anthroposophic medicine and other medicine, which only ever tries things out. In anthroposophy, you learn that a person who has a certain head disease is too weak to form crystals in his brain, this perpetual formation and decay of frost flowers. Now you have to help him. You can do that with mere silicic acid. If you go up to the high mountains and see the beautiful quartz there, that is silicic acid. It is a beautiful crystal. It has the tendency to form these crystals. If you treat this quartz accordingly, you get the silicic acid preparation that is so effective among our remedies. And this silicic acid preparation is so effective for all diseases that originate in the human head. If the head does not form crystals from within, then it must be helped from the outside by such beautiful crystals, which have such beautifully formed crystal formations within them. But when he stands before his beautiful snow window with the frost flowers in his room like an ox on Sunday when it has been eating grass all week, as our science does, yes, then he also stands with science before the human head; then he can do nothing because he knows nothing about it. All these things show you how science must be deepened through a real knowledge of the human being.

This then naturally extends to the art of education, because one must first know: if one teaches the human being the letters for my sake, it is such a strong activity of the moon that if it is done too much, if it is done incorrectly, it completely erases the crystallization power of the ether head. It is really the case that a person can become even more stupid through much learning, that is, if he does not learn in the right way. It is true. But in order to understand this, we will have something else to discuss next time. It is necessary to know all this.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

Questioner: A few lectures ago, the great cosmic world was mentioned; I would like to ask about comets with a large tail. What does that mean?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, gentlemen, we have to remember what I have said just recently. I will repeat some of what we said a few lectures ago.

When we look at the human being, we have to say: Two things are necessary for his whole life, namely for his spiritual development. Firstly, that carbon dioxide rises to the head. After all, humans constantly excrete carbon within themselves. Actually, one can say: Man, insofar as he is a solid body, is made of carbon. So humans constantly excrete carbon from themselves. Now, this carbon would eventually become so in us that we would all become black pillars. We would become black pillars if this carbon were to remain. We need it to live, but we have to constantly convert it again so that it becomes something else. This is done by the oxygen. Now, in the end, we exhale the oxygen with the carbon as carbonic acid. There is carbonic acid in our exhaled air. But you need this carbonic acid. It can also be found, for example, in mineral water, and the bubbles inside contain carbonic acid. This carbonic acid, which is not exhaled, constantly rises to the human head, and we need it so that we are not stupid, so that we can think; otherwise marsh gas, which consists of carbon and hydrogen, would rise to the human head. So for thinking we need carbonic acid.

Now, I have already hinted at what we need for our will, for our volition. So let's start with walking, moving our hands, moving our arms – that's actually where this volition begins: we always have to form a compound of carbon and nitrogen and then break it down again. But this cyanide or prussic acid must constantly, so to speak, enter our limbs. It then combines with potassium in the limbs. Potassium cyanide is formed, but this is also immediately broken down again. In order for us to be able to live at all, there must be a constant process of poisoning and detoxification within us. That is the secret of human life: carbonic acid on the one hand, potassium chloride, which is connected to potassium, on the other. With every movement, with every finger, a little cyanic acid is formed, and the thing is then that we dissolve the thing again immediately by moving our fingers. So that must also be there in man.

But everything that must be there in man must also be there in the universe, must somehow be present in the universe. It is now the case that comets have always been examined again. And with comets in particular, I would say, a kind of little story has taken place in the anthroposophical movement. I once gave lectures in Paris and, purely out of inner knowledge, said that there must be some cyanic acid in comets, that cyanic acid is present in comets. Until then, scientists had not yet noticed that cyanic acid is present in comets. But then, shortly afterwards, a comet came along. It was the one you are talking about. And it was precisely on this comet that it was discovered, using the more sophisticated instruments that were available at the time, that the comet material really does contain cyanic acid! So that one can point to this when people always ask: Has anthroposophy predicted anything? Yes, this discovery of cyanic acid in comets, for example, was clearly predicted. It was the same with many other things, but in the case of the comet it was quite obvious. Well, today there is no doubt, even in the natural sciences, that in the atmosphere of a comet, in the comet's air - after all, a comet is actually made of very fine material, it is actually only ether, only air - there is cyanic acid.

Yes, what does that mean, gentlemen? It means that the same thing that we constantly have to produce in our bodies is also present outside in the comet's atmosphere. Now imagine how often I have said here that the egg is formed from the whole universe - so humans, animals and plants are also formed from the whole universe, in that they are formed from the egg. I would like to explain this to you using the example of the human being, so that you can see exactly what these comets actually mean in the whole universe.

Let us start with something historical, which may seem strange to some, but you will see that what you want is best explained by it. Centuries before Christianity was founded, there were ancient people in present-day Greece, the Greeks. The ancient Greeks achieved so much for intellectual life that even today our high school students still have to learn Greek because it is believed that if you learn Greek today, you will become a particularly clever person. Well, the Greeks really did achieve an extraordinary amount for intellectual life. Today, people do not learn Indian or Egyptian, but Greek. By doing so, people want to express that the Greeks have achieved a great deal for intellectual life. The simple fact that we cultivate Greek with our high school students shows this. The Greeks themselves only did Greek with their children, even though they achieved so much for intellectual life.

Now there were two main tribes in Greece that were of particular importance, but which were very different from each other: one was the inhabitants of Sparta, the other the inhabitants of Athens. Sparta and Athens were the two most important cities in Greece. In addition, there were a few others that were also important, but not as important as Sparta and Athens. The inhabitants of these two cities were therefore very different from each other. I will ignore the other differences today, but they were different in that they spoke quite differently. The Spartans always sat quietly together and spoke little. They did not like to talk. But when they did talk, they wanted what they said to have a certain meaning; it should have power over people. But because man cannot always say something meaningful when he babbles, they remained silent when they had nothing significant to say, and always spoke in short sentences. These short sentences were famous throughout the ancient world. People talked about the short sentences of the Spartan people, and those that became famous were often tremendous sayings of wisdom.

It was different with the Athenians. They loved beautiful speech; they loved it when it was spoken beautifully. The Spartans: short, measured, calm in their speech. The Athenians wanted to speak beautifully. They learned rhetoric by speaking beautifully. They did indeed prattle more; not as much as we do today, but they did prattle more than the Spartans.

What was the difference between the Athenian who talked a lot and the Spartan who talked less but meaningfully and powerfully? It was based on education. The art of education is of course little studied today. But what I am saying is based on education. The Spartan boys in particular were educated quite differently from the Athenian boys. The Spartan boys had to do a lot more gymnastics: dance, wrestling, all kinds of gymnastic arts. And oratory, the actual gymnastics of the tongue, was not practiced at all by the Spartans. They let speaking come naturally.

Everything that lies in language is formed through the rest of the human body's movements. You can observe it correctly: if a person has slow, measured movements that are truly gymnastic, then they will also speak properly. In particular, if a person walks with proper steps, then they will also speak properly. Of course, it depends on the child's age. If a person gets gout in old age, it doesn't matter anymore; they have already learned to speak. It depends on the time when one learns to speak. But the Spartans attached great importance to practicing a lot of gymnastics, and they supported this gymnastics by rubbing the children's bodies with oil and smearing them with sand; then they let them do gymnastics. The Athenians also did gymnastics – gymnastics were done throughout Greece – but much less, and they let the older boys do tongue gymnastics, oratory. The Spartans did not do that.

Now, this has a very specific consequence. You see, when those little Spartan boys did their gymnastics with their bodies oiled and rubbed with sand, they had to develop a great deal of inner warmth – develop a great deal of inner warmth. And when the Athenians did their gymnastics, it was something very special for the Athenians. If it had been a day like today and the boys had not wanted to do their gymnastics outdoors with the Spartans, well, that would have been it! The gymnasts, the educators, would have treated those boys properly! When the Athenians had a day like today, so stormy, they gathered their boys more in the interior of the rooms and let them do oratory. But they called them out when the sun shone brightly, when everything sparkled. Then the Athenian boys had to do their gymnastic exercises outside. For the Athenians thought somewhat differently from the Spartans. The Spartans thought: All the movements that boys make must be done from the inner body; it may be stormy and hailing and raging and windy outside, it does not matter. They said to themselves: It must come from within.

The Athenian said differently. He said: We live by the sun, and when the sun wakes us up to move, then we want to move; when the sun is not there, we do not want to move. So said the Athenian, and therefore the Athenians looked at the external solar heat. The Spartans looked at the inner warmth of the sun, the warmth of the sun that man had already processed, and the Athenians looked at the outer sun, which shines beautifully on the skin - the skin is not rubbed with sand, at least not as much as it is by the Spartans, but the skin is supposed to be worked by the sun. That was the difference. And when schoolbooks today speak of the difference between the Athenians and Spartans, the only impression you get is that there must have been something wonderful about why the Spartans were quiet, measured in their speech, and also hardy, while the Athenians practiced the art of oratory, which was then further developed by the Romans. People today cannot practice history and natural science at the same time. History speaks for itself, and science speaks for itself. But if I tell you that the Spartans rubbed their boys with oil and sand and then let them practice their Spartan arts in all weathers, and the Athenians did not rub their boys with so much sand and oil and otherwise practiced their oratory inside the palestra, then you know how this difference between the neighboring Spartans and Athenians was actually brought about by natural facts.

So let us say that when we have the earth (it is drawn) and the sun here: if you look at the sun as it shines and there is the Athenian, then the Athenian emerges; and if you look not so much at the sun as at what the sun has already done in man, and you look at the more inner warmth, then the Spartan emerges from that. You see, there you have history and natural history combined. That's how it is.

Now we can say: When a person ensures that he develops a great deal of warmth within himself, his speech becomes short and measured. Why? Because he turns more to the universe with his whole mind. But if a person allows himself to be illuminated by the sun like the Athenian, then he turns less to the universe with his mind; then he turns more inward with his mind, outward with warmth; the Spartan: inward with warmth, outward with mind. And from reason, the Spartan has learned the language of the universe; it is wise, it has been developed within him. The Athenian has not learned the language of the universe, but only the movement of the universe, because he has abandoned himself to gymnastics in the warmth of the sun.

When we look at what remains of the Spartans today, we say to ourselves: Oh, these Spartans have rendered the wisdom of the world in their short sentences. The Athenians began to express more of the mind that is within man in their beautiful turns of phrase. What the Spartans had in their language has been lost to humanity for the most part; it disappeared in Greece with the Spartans. Man can no longer live with the language of the universe today. But what the Athenians began to do: beautifully winding sentences - it became particularly great in Rome with the art of fine speech. And the Romans at least still spoke beautifully. In the Middle Ages, too, people still learned to speak beautifully. Today, however, people speak terrible sentences. You only have to look at it in detail – well, you could take any other city, but in Vienna, for example, the elections have been going on for weeks: yes, they are not beautifully spoken, but terribly, a whole flood of speeches, but not beautifully! And that is what has gradually become of what was still cultivated by the Athenians, albeit beautifully. It comes from within man. The universe, truly, does not make speeches – but man does! The Spartans did not make speeches; the Spartans expressed in their short sentences how the universe speaks. They looked up at the stars and thought: Man, he runs around in the world and is a busybody. The star moves slowly, so that it does not move slowly now, quickly now, but always evenly. Then the saying arose that has remained for all time: haste with Weile - and so on. The star still reaches its goal! And so the Spartans in particular have learned a great deal from what is out there in space.

And now we can move on to something that I have already noticed in your case: we can move from warmth to light. I would just like to say the following about warmth. Consider that if a person needs to develop a great deal of warmth, then he should become a strong person. And if a person has the opportunity to be in the sun a lot, then he should become a person who talks a lot. Now you only need to take a quick look at geography: go to Italy, where people are more exposed to the sun, and you will see what a chatty people they are! And go to the north, where people are more exposed to the cold: yes, you may despair sometimes – people do not talk because, when you always have to develop inner warmth, it drives away the inner urge to talk. Even here with us it seems almost strange when someone comes from the north; he stands there to speak – yes, he stands there but doesn't speak yet. Not so when an Italian agitator steps onto the rostrum, he speaks even before he gets up there, he is already talking down below. Then it continues, then it just gushes! When a Nordic person, who needs to generate a lot of warmth because there is no external warmth, is supposed to speak: a Nordic person like that, he stands there - you get desperate because he doesn't even start; he wants to say something, but he doesn't even start. It's true: inner warmth drives away the desire to speak, while external warmth fuels the desire to speak. Of course, all this can be transformed by art. The Spartans developed this speaking calm not through art but through their own racial character, even though they were neighbors of the Athenians because they mixed a lot with people coming from the north. Among the Athenians, for example, there were many who came from hot climates and intermarried with the Athenians; this is how they developed their flow of speech. So there we see how even the oratorical person is connected to the sun and warmth. Now let's move on to light.

All we need to do is remember something I have already told you. Think of a mammal. A mammal develops the germ for a new mammal internally. The germ is carried internally by the mother animal; everything happens internally. Take the butterfly, on the other hand. I told you: the butterfly lays the egg, the caterpillar crawls out of the egg, the caterpillar pupates itself into a cocoon, and the sunlight drives the multicolored butterfly out of the cocoon. On the other hand, look at the mammal (it is being drawn), this mammal develops the new animal hidden in its uterus. Here we have two contrasts again, wonderful contrasts. Look at the egg: it is uncovered. When the caterpillar crawls out, the light is already coming. The caterpillar, I told you, goes to the light, spins its cocoon, the shell that it becomes a pupa, after the light, and the light in turn causes the butterfly. And the light does not rest and does not rest, gives the butterfly its colors. The colors are caused by the light; the light treats the butterfly.

Take, on the other hand, the cow, the dog. Yes, the little cub inside the maternal uterus cannot have the external light; it is closed off in darkness from the outside. So it must develop inside, in the darkness.

But nothing that lives can develop in darkness. It is simply nonsense to believe that something can develop in darkness. But what is the story here? I will give you a comparison. One can indeed hope that once the Earth becomes very poor in coal, direct solar heat will be able to be used for heating through some kind of transformation; but today that is just not yet possible, that one uses the heat of the sun directly for heating. Perhaps it will not take much longer before one comes up with how it can be done; but today we use coal, for example. Yes, gentlemen, coal is nothing more than solar heat, only solar heat that flowed to Earth many, many thousands of years ago, was trapped in the wood and stored as coal. When we heat, we bring out the solar heat that accumulated in the earth thousands and thousands of years ago.

Do not think that only coal behaves towards the sun as I have just described! Other beings, too, behave towards the sun as I have just described, and that includes all living beings. If you look at a mammal, you have to say: every little young animal has a mother, who in turn has a mother, and so on. They have always absorbed the warmth of the sun; it is still inside the animal itself, it is inherited. And just as we bring the warmth of the sun out of the coal, so the small child in the maternal womb now takes the sunlight, which is stored there, from within. — Now you have the difference between what arises in the dog or in the cow and what arises in the butterfly. The butterfly goes straight into the outer sunlight with its egg, allowing it to be completely transformed by the outer sunlight until it becomes the colorful butterfly. The dog or the cow are just as colorful on the inside, but you cannot see it. Just as the warmth of the sun is not perceived in coal – it must first be coaxed out – so too, with the higher contemplation of dog and cow, one must first coax out what light is stored up within. There is light stored up within! The butterfly is colorful on the outside; sunlight has worked from the outside. Yes, in the dog or the cow, I would say, invisible light is everywhere inside.

What I have described to you, people today could easily determine with our perfect instruments, prove it in their laboratories, if they wanted to. They should just make a laboratory, completely dark, totally dark, and then they should compare in this laboratory a newly laid egg and a cow or dog germ in its early state, then you would see that the dimming that can occur in the dark room shows this difference that I am describing. And if one were to photograph what one does not see with one's eyes - the eyes are not sensitive enough for that - one would be able to prove that the butterfly egg has the spectrum yellow and the dog and cow egg has the spectrum blue in the photograph. These things, which one can see spiritually - one does not need the external when one can see them spiritually - will still be proved with the most perfect instruments.

Now we can say: the butterfly is formed in the external sunlight, the cow or the dog is formed from the sunlight that is stored internally. Thus we have come to know the difference between warmth, which works externally, which makes a person talkative, the light that works externally, which causes the many colors in the butterfly, and the warmth within, which makes a person silent and measured – the light within a being that gives birth to living young, which must receive the light internally. And now we can move on from there to the subject of our question.

There are also things that a person needs inside, but which he must not develop in excess inside, because otherwise he would die from them. And that includes prussic acid, which is also known as hydrogen cyanide. If a person were to continually produce hydrogen cyanide throughout the day, beyond the little bit that is already there, well, that wouldn't work, that would be too much. A person does produce a little prussic acid in himself, but very little. But he also needs some from outside; he absorbs it with what he inhales. It is not much, but a person does not need more.

Now, gentlemen, this potassium cyanide is not present in ordinary air. If comets did not appear from time to time, this potassium cyanide would not be present in the air. Comets and then these meteors, shooting stars, which, as you know, fly through the air in such great numbers, especially in midsummer, bring down this potassium cyanide. And man actually draws his strength from it. Therefore, people who have become weak in their muscles should be sent into the air, which has not only become fresh from the earth, but has become fresh from the whole universe, which has experienced meteorite influences. And it is the case that people who suffer from what used to be called consumption, for example, who become weak in their muscles and for whom this weakness is particularly pronounced towards spring, are sent in the fall to breathe this air that has been refreshed by the universe. In spring there is nothing that can be done; that is why such people most easily die in spring. You have to take precautions, because you can't really do anything for such people until the fall. When the meteor forces deposit their cyanide with the small amounts of potassium cyanide that come in from the universe during the summer, these people should then, when August ends and fall comes, with their weak limbs, come to areas where summer has deposited its best, namely potassium cyanide. Then their limbs become strong again. So for people you notice this happening to, the next year will be very bad for them, because they become weak, and you should actually take precautions in the spring, when you can't do much with external things. You should say to yourself: When spring comes, I will give such people, depending on how weak they have become, the juice of certain plants, for example the juice of blackthorn. If you store the blackthorn juice – you know the tart, acidic plant – and bring it into the mouth of a person who becomes weak in spring, you can sustain them throughout spring and summer. Why? Well, you see, when you give a person the juice of blackthorn, this blackthorn juice forms all kinds of salts. These go to the head and take the carbonic acid with them. So we tilt the head to help this person through spring and summer. And in the fall we have to take him to an area where he is able to take the other thing, which has to go more to the limbs. Carbonic acid goes to the head; we insert it after the head by introducing blackthorn. If we have been fortunate enough to have brought a person through the summer in this way, we can take him to a suitable area in the fall. He should stay for two or three weeks in such air, which we know has just received meteorical influences. Then it is the case that the person, having been strengthened during the spring and summer, really does regain the strength of his limbs.

Yes, gentlemen, there you have the two effects side by side. There you have the earthly effect, which is actually a lunar effect, the earthly effect in the blackthorn juice, and there you have the cosmic effect in what the comets, and when there is no comet, the shooting stars have left behind – it is the same with them, only small; but there are many – which has an effect from the universe. Just as you basically have nothing earthly in the butterfly with its transformation, but light from the universe, just as you have warmth from the universe, from the sun, in the protected eggs, so you also have human warmth within you, which you must develop inwardly in your substance and which stimulates exactly the opposite of the external warmth.

Thus we can see everywhere how there is an alternation in man, but also how there is an alternation in the whole universe: sometimes things must come from the outside of the universe, sometimes from within the earth or from within man. Now you will say: Yes, certain things are regular; but they cannot alone bring about what they are supposed to bring about. Day and night change regularly; they bring about the one thing that comes from the earth. Now, comets appear more or less irregularly; shooting stars too. And that is also the case. There is no such regularity with shooting stars as with the rest. If an astronomer wants to observe a solar eclipse, he can find the exact time when it begins – that can be calculated –; it belongs to the regular, but does not work from the sun. So he can still go to supper beforehand and still get to the solar eclipse. If he wants to observe the meteoritic swarming of shooting stars at the right time, he has to watch the whole night, otherwise he cannot find them. That is the difference between what comes irregularly from the universe to Earth and what is regular.

Now you can raise an interesting question. You can say: The comets that are connected with the cyan - which is connected with our will in our human being - these comets appear irregularly; one comes soon, then it is long absent. - It always also gives rise to superstition in people; but precisely that which does not always appear makes them superstitious when it comes. In the sunrise and sunset, only the formerly prepared human minds have seen the divine; later, superstitious minds have then dreamed up all sorts of things about comets. You may now ask: Why is it not the case with comets that, just as the sun appears at certain hours of the year in the morning, a comet also appears? Well, if that were the case, if comets could regularly appear and disappear with their tails just as regularly as the sun and moon rise and set, then we humans would have no freedom; then everything else in us would be as regular as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. And what is connected with this regularity in the universe is also a natural necessity in us. We must eat and drink with a certain regularity, and sleep with a certain regularity. If the comets rose and set with the same regularity as the sun and moon, we could not begin to move arbitrarily, but would have to wait: we would be in a state of rigor; the comet would appear, and we could leave! If it disappeared again, we would fall into a state of rigor again. We would have no freedom. These so-called wandering stars are what give man his freedom from the universe. And so we can say: that which is necessary in man, hunger, thirst in their course, sleep, waking and so on, comes from the regular phenomena; and that which is arbitrary in man, which is freedom, comes from the comet-like phenomena and this gives man the strength for the power that works in his muscles.

In recent times, people have completely forgotten how to look at what is free in a person. People no longer have any sense of freedom. That is why, in more recent times, people have become obsessed with what is only necessity. Now people express their attitudes in their festivals. For example, they have festivals for necessity: Christmas, Easter; but they have dropped the autumn festival, the Michaelmas festival, because it is connected with freedom, with the inner strength of the human being. And so, actually, people study at most the material side of the comets. The other, they say: Yes, you can not know about that. - And on the one hand, you see today that people shy away from freedom; on the other hand, you see that they have no real mind, no reason to study the irregularities in space. If they were not there, then you would have no freedom. So we can say: the Athenians took up what was inside people. That made them talkative. On the one hand, materialism has become terribly talkative. But this also makes it insensitive, dull to everything that can be used to strengthen one's resistance to meteorite influences. That is why Michaelmas is at most a farmers' festival, and the other festivals are something that is related to necessities, although they are no longer as respected as they were in ancient times because people have forgotten the connection with the spiritual world altogether.

In this way, everything becomes transparent. When people understand again how beneficial the influence of the comet is, they will probably remember that they like to celebrate some kind of festival in the fall to have a kind of freedom celebration. That belongs in the fall: a kind of Michaelmas festival, a freedom celebration. People today let this pass because they have no understanding of it at all; they have no understanding of freedom in nature outside, and therefore also no understanding of freedom in man. You see, the honorable Lady Moon and the majestic Lord Sun, they sit on their thrones, they want to have everything measured because they have no right sense for freedom in the universe, in the cosmos. Of course, it must also be. But the comets are the freedom heroes in the universe; they therefore also have within them the substance that is connected with activity in humans, with free activity, with arbitrariness, with the activity of the will. And so we can say: When we look up at the sun, we have in it that which always plays rhythmic games within us, the heart and breathing. If we look at a comet, then we should actually write a poem about freedom every time a comet appears, because it is connected with our freedom! We can say: Man is free because in the universe, freedom also reigns for these enthusiasts in the universe, the comets. And just as the sun mainly owes its nature to the acid character, so the comet owes its nature to the cyanic character.

You see, gentlemen, that's where you come to the nature of comets, and that is an extraordinarily significant connection, as you can see that suddenly there is something in the whole universe that is alive, but that lives in a way that is similar to us humans. So you can also say: the Spartans had more sense for the non-withdrawal from the sun, and that is why they appreciated everything that was connected with the universe - this did not arise from external arbitrariness. And Lykurgos, the lawmaker of Sparta, had iron money made. In the schoolbooks you will find: Lykurgos had iron money made so that the Spartans should remain fine Spartans. That is nonsense. In truth, Lykurgos was instructed by those who still knew these things in Sparta; they told him that comets contain cyanide of iron, and so he had iron minted in Sparta as a symbol of the comets for the money. That was something that arose from wisdom; while other nations were changing over to gold coinage, which expresses that which is more in the sun, the image of the solar life in us.

Thus it is that one sees that in the customs of ancient peoples there is still something more of what they knew of the universe.

Good morning, gentlemen! It's been a while since we last met; perhaps someone has thought of something in particular that we should discuss today?

Questioner: The large ants that live in the forests have a kind of honey or resin at the bottom of their hive; this is used for cultic purposes, and Catholic priests like to use it for incense. I would like to ask what this comes from and what it is composed of.

Dr. Steiner: The resins that form here contain the same substance as incense, and so it has no other value than that it is a cheap way of getting incense. The anthill is formed by the fact that the ants, with the formic acid, also secrete all kinds of things that they bring with them from the resinous components of the trees, where they collect their juices. So it is not a kind of honey, but a resin mixed with formic acid.

Mr. Müller: I would like to come back to the bees, to the carpenter bees, which nest in the trees. When I was young, I experienced a case in a forest, a district where all the wood had rotted, had not been utilized. Then a master carpenter came along and bought up this wood, which had previously only been used as crate wood, in large quantities. He used this wood for carpentry work for new buildings, built it in. After a year, bees were found everywhere inside the apartments. These bees were so dangerous for the building that after two years the carpenter had to take it back, and all the beams up to the roof had to be taken down. He had to take it back completely, had to buy it.

Dr. Steiner: Of course that can happen, naturally. Was the wood infested by the carpenter bees in the forest or only in the storage area?

Mr. Müller: It was auctioned in the fall, then used in the spring, and in the summer the bees came out.

Dr. Steiner: Anything that can be very useful on the one hand can also be terribly harmful on the other. But that does not contradict what I said, that these bees on the wood are absolutely necessary. As I said, anything that can be extremely useful on the one hand can also be extremely harmful on the other. I will give you an example: Imagine that a young boy is short-sighted and you give him a pair of glasses. This is necessary and can be very useful. But if the other boys see it as something particularly elegant and also want to put on glasses, it would not be useful, but harmful. And so it is: what is extremely useful in one case can be extremely harmful in another. That is already the case.

Mr. Müller would like to return to the topic of bees and what our life and work as beekeepers involves: Recently, my colleagues have repeatedly told me that it would have been better if I hadn't read out loud but spoken off the cuff. But I have to reply to my colleagues: I only attended elementary school and do not have a particular talent for speaking. So I am not able to speak off the cuff. So today I will read and not speak off the cuff: About the bees, the queen. (He moves from the beehive to complaints about the workers and the employer; goes back to 1914, expresses some dissatisfaction. Compares: we are also a beehive, and so on.)

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, it is difficult to deal with such matters off the cuff, and I'm sure we've all had the experience that when such things are put on the agenda and dealt with immediately, the discussion takes on a different tone than when the matter is thoroughly considered. Therefore, if the matter is to be discussed further at all, we want to consider it thoroughly. We do have another hour available on Wednesday, and I will then ask the gentlemen who have something to say about this matter to choose the Wednesday hour.

The issue of temperament has rightly been raised. Temperaments work differently if you have had a good night's sleep! Of course, I don't want to take the matter off the agenda at all, because I'm not saying that I won't say something about it myself on Wednesday. But I think we will do it so that we do not deal with the matter right now, when it could boil up hotly in many people, but that we will take our time until Wednesday. Then I will ask the gentlemen, if they wish, to take the floor on Wednesday.

So today, let us stay with what we usually deal with, with the questions of knowledge. And as I said, Mr. Müller's suggestion should definitely be taken into account, that we then express our views on the matter on Wednesday. And I will also say what I myself have to say.

You see, for someone who is completely immersed in it, it is relatively easy to say something about science, even without preparation; but I would like to think again about the whole matter that has been presented here. You agree, don't you? (Agreement) Does anyone have any questions?

Mr. Dollinger: The question has been raised a lot lately, it has been discussed in all the newspapers, that you never know where the dead elephants are buried because you never find the remains of them. I would like to ask Dr. Steiner if it might be interesting to talk about this?

Dr. Steiner: That is an interesting point about elephants! It is a fact that the remains of prehistoric elephants, of ancient times, are sometimes found in an excellent state of preservation. And the way in which these prehistoric elephants are found shows that these animals, which in natural history are called pachyderms, must always have perished in the same way wherever they are found as prehistoric animals – that is, they must have been preserved in such a way that they were suddenly enveloped by the surrounding soil. So I mean by this: these pachyderms could only remain so well preserved if they were not gradually permeated by water, soil and mud, but rather had to be lying in a cave and were suddenly enveloped by earth in a landslide. As a result, when the foreign soil around the skeletons had dissolved the flesh, the solid shell preserved the skeletons extremely well. You can find beautifully preserved specimens of these mighty prehistoric animals in museums everywhere.

But this proves to you that these animals have the peculiarity of retreating into caves when they are about to die. Not quite so strict as you said before, of course, but one can only say that in very frequent cases – of course, dead elephants are also found – the elephant, which could previously still be seen quite well, is missing without a trace. These animals have the peculiarity of retreating into caves when they see death approaching, and ending up in caves. You see, gentlemen, this is connected with the fact that these animals – and what you said essentially only applies to pachyderms – have this extraordinarily thick skin. And what does this thick skin mean? You see, the hardest parts of an animal are the ones that are most closely related to the earth. Even the nails on your own hands are most closely related to the earth. And the skin of an elephant is so extraordinarily related to the earth. As a result, the elephant feels surrounded by the earth all its life, namely by the earth in its skin, and only feels comfortable when it is surrounded by its skin. Well, the elephant is actually constantly dying in its skin. When death approaches – and this is the peculiar thing about these pachyderms – these animals feel it very strongly precisely because of their thick skin. They then want to have more of the earth inside their skin; it is their instinct that they then stay in burrows. You just don't look for them in these burrows. If you were to look for them in burrows, you would find dead elephants where there are elephants. You don't find them in open fields.

But this fact proves that animals have a much stronger sense of their own death than humans do. This is especially true for those animals that are covered by thick skins. But it is also especially true for those animals that are lower animals, are small, for example insects, which are also covered by horny skins. And you see, with these small animals, one must say: it is the case that they not only feel their death, but that they also, when they come to their death, take all possible precautions to ensure that death occurs where it can best occur. Certain insects withdraw into the earth to meet their death there.

It is the same with humans: they buy their freedom by having as little sense of foreboding as possible. Animals have no freedom; they are all unfree. But they have a strong sense of foreboding, and you know that when, for example, there is danger, earthquake-like danger, animals migrate, while humans are truly surprised by such things.

We can say that it is extremely difficult for humans to put themselves in the shoes of animals. But anyone who is really able to observe animals, who has a sense for observing animals, will definitely find that animals act extremely prophetically throughout their lives. And the peculiarity discussed is precisely related to the prophetic life in these animals. But then again, when animals do something like this, they cannot be compared to humans!

There is something else we want to discuss that relates to elephants, and from that in particular what you asked about will become even more understandable. You see, it has been repeatedly observed that, say, any small herd of elephants is led to the watering hole, as we would say here. Now, there might be some no-good boy standing there when the elephants go, and he throws something at an elephant. The elephant seems to be a patient animal at first and does nothing of the sort, behaving quite indifferently. The good-for-nothing boy waits and wants to throw the elephant again when it comes back. But lo and behold, as the elephant goes back, it has retained a good load of water in its trunk. And as it comes back and sees the boy again, before the boy can throw it, it splashes the boy all over with this load of water. These things have been observed repeatedly. Now, you could say: Gosh, the elephant is much smarter than a human, because the elephant must have tremendous wisdom if it remembers something like the insult the boy did to it and now retains this load of water in its trunk and takes revenge later!

Yes, gentlemen, the thought that you have for the elephant is not quite right. You don't have to compare it to human cleverness, but you do have to compare it to something else in humans. If a fly lands on your eye, you do this: you wipe the fly off without giving it much thought. In science, where we have many expressions for things that we sometimes understand much less, we call this a reflex movement. So you just wipe away, out of some kind of instinct, out of some kind of defensive movement, what could possibly be harmful to you. Such things happen to people all the time. When a person simply wipes away a fly, his brain is not active at all; only the nerves that go to the spine are active. Not so when a person is thinking about something: Up here he has his brain, then, for example, when he has seen this or that, his optic nerve goes to the brain, and from the brain the will goes through the rest of the organism, which does something. But if a person simply swats at a fly sitting there, then the nerve does not go to the brain at all – even if it is at the head – but goes directly to the spinal cord, and without the brain even thinking about it, the fly is swatted away. So it is the spinal cord that actually causes us to instinctively defend ourselves as humans when something approaches us in this way.

We humans, at least physically, do not have thick skin, but very thin skin. Our skin is so thin that it is even transparent, because the human skin consists of three layers: the inner one is the so-called dermis, then there is a layer, which is the so-called Malpighian layer, and then there is the outer skin, which is already completely transparent. We also have skin like an elephant, only it is very thin. The outer skin is completely transparent. The fact that we have a skin that is transparent means that we are in contact with our surroundings through all our senses, and the fact that we are in contact with our surroundings means that we are inwardly thinking people and reflect on things. The elephant is simply a thick-skinned animal in the physical sense, while people are often thick-skinned in the moral sense. But what does that achieve? You can easily imagine, after what I have told you, that the elephant is extremely insensitive to its surroundings. Such an elephant, basically, feels nothing at all, and everything it perceives of its surroundings, it must see; it is like a world closed in on itself. To study the mind of an elephant in depth is, of course, something extraordinarily interesting for some people. Sometimes a person would have to have an extraordinary desire to advance in knowledge, to be an elephant. Because, you see, if a person had the mind to do so – to have an elephant's mind – then he would indeed become so clever that it would be impossible to express how clever! But the elephant doesn't have the brain to become so clever. Because he is completely closed in on himself, his reflex movements, his defensive movements, are prolonged. This takes a long time. If you had a fly sitting on you and you didn't have the instinct to swat it away right away, the fly would fly away by itself first. Now, with the elephant, it is like this: He would let a fly sit because the story that he would brush it away would only come to him after an hour, that's how slowly the reflex movement, the defensive movement, works. And what the elephant does with his trunk is nothing more than such a reflex movement that just takes a longer time. And it is not that he thinks: The boy insulted me, I have to splash a load of water over his head – the elephant does not think about that. But he wants to actually hit the boy with his trunk while he is standing there; but that takes a long time for an elephant. If you throw dirt at a boy, you hit him without thinking twice. But the elephant is a slow animal, precisely because it is a pachyderm, and so it takes a long time, going back and forth, until it has extended its trunk and wants to hit the boy. But while he is drinking in the meantime, he realizes: When the water is in his trunk, his trunk is stronger, it strengthens his trunk; he wants to make his trunk stronger by keeping water in it. And he feels that his trunk is getting longer. It is simply the extended trunk with which he wants to hit him when he squirts out the water load. That is what you have to think about. You can't just ascribe human wisdom to the elephant, but you have to go into the elephant's whole mind, and then you find something like that. And so it is with the elephant that he is inwardly a closed entity and notices everything, and especially notices what happens inside him. That is how he also notices the approach of death and can withdraw.

It is a fact that there is very little animal psychology at all today. It is true that people do observe animals and find all kinds of interesting facts, as I have already told you. But actually looking into the animal soul is something that is extremely rare today. But if you want to find out about these things, you have to sharpen your senses by observing life in general.

Go to the very small animals, as there are such. There are very small animals that consist only of a soft, slimy mass (see drawing). This soft, slimy mass can, when there is a grain of some kind nearby, stretch out something like a thread from the mass. First an arm is formed out of the mass. This can be retracted again. But you see, such animals excrete lime or silica shells, so that they are surrounded by lime or silica shells. Now, you cannot notice much about such a small animal that excretes a lime or silica shell. But then there are more perfect animals, and you can already notice more. There are animals that also consist of a slimy mass, but inside there is something that, when you look closely, looks like small rays; and then they have a shell around it, and there are spines on the shell. Everything that then grows into a coral looks like this.

Take an animal like this, which has a shell with spines and, inside its soft mass, such radiant structures. What is that? If you really investigate, you will find that these rays inside are not caused by the earth, but are caused by the earth's surroundings, by the stars. This soft mass is caused by the sky, and the hard mass, or the mass with the spines, is caused by the earth's interior. How does something like this come about? Well, gentlemen, if you want to know how something like this comes about, imagine: here is a piece – I am drawing it quite enlarged – of one of these slimy little creatures. Now, due to the influence of a star from far away, a piece of such a ray is formed here inside. As a result of this forming, the star's influence presses the rest of the mass here quite strongly. But the surrounding mass presses even harder against the wall. Because of this, a stronger bulge forms on the shell inside because it presses harder, a spine of the surrounding lime or siliceous mass. So this spine is caused from the outside, from the earth, but this ray from the inside through the influence of the star. Can you understand that?

What is forming in there is the beginning of a nerve mass; what is forming out there is the beginning of a bone mass. So we see that in these lower animals, nerves form under the influence of the external world, the extraterrestrial. Everything that is bony, shell-like – after all, the lower animals only have an outer bone – forms under the influence of the earth.

The more you look at more perfect animals, the more you see that the formation of shells stops and the formation of skeletons sets in, which is then most perfectly present in humans. But look at the human skeleton. When you look at the human skeleton, you come to the point where you can actually compare the head with a lower animal, because it has a kind of shell. Inside it is soft. That is a great difference compared to the rest of the human bone structure. Your leg bones, you carry them internally, and the flesh covers them. The soft mass is on the outside. In this way, the human being has taken the bone skeleton into itself. Now, the fact that the external skeleton is not taken in as it is with the head, but as it is with the rest of the human being, is connected with the fact that the blood develops in a certain way in these higher animals and also in humans. If you look at such lower animals, everything is a white mass. Even what runs through them as blood is white. These lower animals actually have white blood that is not warm at all. The higher the animals become and the more we approach the animal organization up to the human being, the more the human being, who remains light, is permeated by the blood mass. And the more the nerve is permeated by the blood mass, the more the skeleton, which was previously only an outer shell, also retracts into the interior of the organism.

So that one can say: Why do human beings have internally structured bones, like on their arms and legs? Because they have permeated their nervous mass with blood mass. So that one can say: The higher animals and human beings need blood internally so that they can take the shell inwardly. Can you understand that?

But from this we can also say that a lower animal knows nothing of itself. But humans and higher animals know of themselves. How do we know of ourselves? By having a skeleton within us, we know of ourselves. So if you ask how humans actually have their self-awareness, how they know of themselves, then one must not point to the muscles, then one must not point to soft tissue, but one must point straight to one's solid skeleton. Through the solid skeleton, man knows of himself. And the thing is that it is extraordinarily interesting to look at the human skeleton.

Imagine you have a human being here and I draw in his skeletal system very roughly (see drawing). Now it is extremely interesting: when you look at a skeleton, you have to imagine that this skeleton was inside the human being; but this skeleton of the human being is completely covered by skin. If I am to draw this skin here, I would have to draw it like this. When a person is alive, his entire skeletal system is enclosed in a skin, the so-called periosteum, which is very closely adapted to it, just like in a sack. So imagine a joint here, where a bone has a head that engages, let's say, in a joint socket. This is how it is with the periosteum: there is the periosteum; the entire outer bone is surrounded by the periosteum, and there the periosteum continues, it arrives again, goes over the skeleton. So if you simply imagine the skeleton inside the human being, the skeleton is quite separate inside the human being. Between all the other parts of the human being and the skeleton is a sack-like skin. It is really as if you take the skeleton of a living person and imagine spreading a sack over the whole skeleton and touching it everywhere so that the sack would cover the skeleton on the outside. But you don't need to do that at all, because nature has already done it; the whole thing is inside a sack, in the leg skin. And the interesting thing is: the blood vessels only go as far as the periosteum – the periosteum is permeated by them – this blood nourishes, as far as it is to be nourished, the bone, but within the sac the bone is completely earth: calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, ash, salts and so on. So you have the strange fact: So you have muscles, liver and so on, and you have your blood vessels in you, and the blood now first forms a sac. The sac seals you off from the inside. Within this sac is a cavity, but this cavity first contains the skeleton. So it is really as if your bones were inside you, and you had sealed your bones off with a sac, the peritoneum. And these bones are completely earthy, they are earth inside. You cannot feel them inside. You feel your bones through what the bones are, just as you would if you took a piece of chalk. If you take a piece of chalk, you don't feel it either, it is outside of you. So the bone is outside of you, and you are separated from it by a sack. All of you have something in your skeleton that is not really you, that is earth formed into bone, phosphoric acid lime, salts, carbonic acid lime; you carry that within you, only you have surrounded it with a sack, the periosteum.

You see, gentlemen, there is no room for anything unspiritual; because if you bring any splinter of earth into yourself, it must fester. The bone does not fester. Why? Because in the place where you are dead within, where the bone appears dead within the skin of the leg, there is spirit through and through. You see, that is the wonderful instinct why simple people, who often knew more than the learned, imagined death under the skeleton, because they knew that the spirit resides in the skeleton. And so they imagined that when a spirit walks around, it must also appear in skeletal form. This is a correct pictorial representation. Because as long as a person is alive, he makes room for the spirit through his bones.

This is something we will discuss in more detail in the near future. But you can also see from this that people put a lot of effort into bringing the spirit into their bones. The elephant still leaves room for the spirit in its thick skin. And because the elephant leaves room for the spirit in its thick skin, the spirit that the elephant then feels can perceive when the outside world destroys it. Man knows nothing of his own death because his skin is too thin. If he were also physically a pachyderm, he would also withdraw into a cave and die in a cave. And one would also say: Where do people go? They go to heaven when they die! Yes, gentlemen, the same thing was said about those people who were greatly revered in certain circles as they were about the elephant. For example, about Moses, of whom it was said that his body had not been found. He disappeared because people imagined that this had really happened to him. He became so wise, people imagined, as I told you earlier. If man were physically a pachyderm and had his brain, then he would be so clever that one cannot even express how clever he is! And people knew such connections. Think, it is amazing what people knew! They say of Moses that he was already as clever as he would have become if he had had a thick skin; that is why he also withdrew and his body was not found. It is a very interesting context. Does it not appear so to you? Ancient legends are often related to pure, beautiful animal worship.

Well, we'll talk about that some more next time, if the proceedings we've been saddled with today leave us time.

So next Wednesday, gentlemen.

I would like to add a few more things to what I told you last Saturday, and I can answer the two questions I was given for today next time. We talked about poisons and their effects on people, and we have just seen from the poisons that if you understand real science, you have to ascend to the supersensible, to the spiritual parts of the human being.

Now, in order to give you a complete picture, I would like to add to what produces such strong toxic effects, so that you can see the full picture, what the more or less healthy body can cope with when it comes to nutrition. I have spoken about nutrition several times, but let us talk about it again and take into account what we presented last time.

When it comes to nutrition, humans mainly consume three to four types of food. The first of these is protein, which you can best recognize by looking at a chicken egg. Protein is produced by plants as well as by animal and human bodies. Not only do human and animal bodies need the forces they have within themselves to produce protein, because every living body produces protein, but they also need the protein that is independently produced by plants. The human body also absorbs animal protein. In relation to this protein, science in particular has basically been embarrassed in the very latest times; because it was still taught everywhere twenty years ago that a person must absorb at least 120 grams of protein per day in order to stay healthy. And so the whole diet was organized in such a way that people were prescribed which foods they should eat in order to get the necessary amount of protein into their bodies. It was believed that 120 grams were necessary.

Today, science has completely abandoned this view. It now knows that if a person eats that much protein, not only does it not help their health, but it directly contributes to their illness, because most of the protein in the human intestinal tract decays. So that the human organism, by consuming 120 grams of protein a day, constantly has something like rotting eggs in its intestines, which terribly contaminate the intestinal contents and sweat out the poisons, which then pass into the organism, into the not only easily produce in the body what later leads to so-called hardening of the arteries – most hardening of the arteries comes from eating too much protein – but also what makes people extremely susceptible to all kinds of infectious diseases. The less protein a person consumes, the less he is exposed to the risk of contracting diseases – provided, of course, he has the necessary resistance. People who consume a lot of protein contract infectious diseases such as diphtheria, measles, and smallpox more easily than people who do not consume as much protein.

It is indeed very peculiar that today science teaches that not 120 grams of protein are necessary, but only 20 to 50 grams. That is the amount, they say, that a person actually needs daily. In just two decades, science has so quickly changed its views. So you can see how little you can actually rely on when something is supposedly scientifically established. If you happen to need to inform yourself on this subject and you pick up a twenty-year-old encyclopedia, you will read in the relevant chapter that you need 120 grams of protein. If you get a later edition, you will read: 20 to 50 grams, and if you had more, you would become ill from it. So you see what the situation is with scientific truths. We are taught what is to be considered true or false depending on which edition of the encyclopaedia we get hold of. All this just goes to show that you cannot get a clear idea of such things, which go into the spiritual, at all in this way. And that is of course a reason, when one really considers the matter, to go into the spiritual, when one wants to understand what happens when man takes in egg white. But it is that food, which must still be processed in the intestines, in the abdomen, and the abdomen itself must have the strength to process this egg white. You know that protein, especially fresh egg white, is semi-liquid. All protein is semi-liquid. The human etheric body has access to all semi-liquid substances. The human etheric body cannot do anything with solid substances, only with liquid ones. So the human being must take all the food he consumes in a liquid state.

Now you will say: When a person takes salt, sugar or something like that, it is solid. But it is immediately dissolved! That is what the saliva is for. The solids that make up the actual physical body must not enter the human body from the outside world at all. Therefore, you can conclude: You have solids in you, you know that; the bones are solid. But the thing is this: The firm bones are formed only out of the fluids in the human body itself. Nothing solid from the outside can ever enter the human body. The human body must allow everything solid to arise from the fluids. Therefore, you can say: We have the solid in us and the physical body forms it. But the physical body is formed entirely out of the liquid, and for the liquid, the etheric body is there, the fine body that cannot be seen, but which permeates the whole human being. And the egg white must also be completely processed by the etheric body, in the lower abdomen. Of course, as I have already told you, the other spiritual elements of the human being also work in there; but the egg white must be processed in the etheric body. So the fluid is there for the etheric body of the human being. Now, from the fact that you can know that the egg white must be processed in the human abdomen, you can see that the egg white cannot actually do the very hardest work in the human being, because it does not need to work its way up into the thoracic body, and above all, it does not need to work its way up into the human head. You see from this that egg white cannot serve as a nutrient that comes into consideration in the first place. One could say that it is actually impossible for a person to eat too little protein, because in the abdomen, what one eats is immediately inside; it does not need much work there. The protein is processed in the abdomen. Even if a person only consumes food that is very low in protein, all protein is processed immediately.

So you can see that it is entirely possible for humans to get by on a low-protein diet. Today, science already admits that, but years ago, children in particular were overfed with protein. Today, we see the children who were overfed with protein in the 1870s or 1880s; they now suffer from hardening of the arteries or have already died from it. So the harmfulness of something does not become apparent in the same period of time, but only much later.

The second type of food is fat. Fat naturally goes into the abdomen when it is eaten. But fat passes through the intestines and has a very strong effect on the middle part of the human body, on the chest. So for the middle part, the thoracic region, for the proper nourishment of the heart, chest and so on, humans must take in fatty substances.

From this it follows that man needs fat in the thoracic region because breathing takes place in the thoracic region. What does that mean? It means that the carbon that humans carry within them combines with oxygen. When carbon combines with oxygen, warmth is needed. The function of fats, in combining with oxygen, is to produce warmth. So fats contribute greatly to what the human chest organism needs.

Now one can say: proteins, when not processed by the body, and specifically when not processed in the abdomen, have a tendency to rot. If we have proteins in us that cannot be properly processed, we really do have something like rotten eggs in our intestines. Isn't that right, gentlemen? You are well aware of the smell of rotten eggs, and the thing is that if a person takes too much protein, he sweats this rotten-egg smell out internally into his body. He permeates himself completely with this rotten egg stench. Yes, if you leave eggs standing, then they will become rotten eggs, then they will stink like rotten eggs. And the part that the body has not processed will of course also stink in the body; but the other part, which is processed, will not stink, but will be transformed into something pure in the body. But that is the work of the etheric body. The etheric body is there to overcome and eliminate that which arises as a putrid stench. It is the case in the human body that the etheric body is the fighter and the victor over putrefaction. Putrefaction is conquered in the human being through the etheric body. If a person no longer has their etheric body after death, then they begin to rot. So I would like to say quite tangibly here: a person does not rot while they are alive; as soon as they are no longer alive, they rot. Why is that? Because the etheric body is gone when a person is dead! The etheric body is therefore the part of the human being that prevents rotting. So we are constantly fighting putrefaction within us, and the one who fights putrefaction is our etheric body.

So I think, gentlemen, anyone who thinks this through must find with the utmost clarity, merely by external observation, that an etheric body must be there, that an etheric body must be there everywhere at all. Just imagine, proteins are produced everywhere on earth, and they rot. The earth would have to stink up to heaven if it were not for the ether, which repeatedly drives away this putrefaction. So, inside and outside the human organism, it is the ether that constantly fights against the proteins from becoming putrid. This must be taken into account.

If we move on to fats, then we have to say: fats do not go bad, but they do go rancid – you all know this if you have ever left fats out somewhere – even butter goes rancid. So fats have the peculiarity of going rancid. Now, if you have left butter standing, you won't be able to tell whether it's rancid or good, fresh butter — unless you're trained to look at it. But when you put the butter on your tongue and taste it, you know immediately that the butter is rancid. So it has something to do with consciousness, with sensation. Rotting has something to do with smelling, with the external, you can smell it. Of course, it is different with rotten eggs than with the scent of roses, but at least you smell it. But not the process of going rancid. Rancidity is something that is described in terms of something more internal, of tasting.

This already indicates that it has much more to do with inner sensation than with what is putrid about eggs. The human thoracic body is physically connected to all that is sensation in consciousness, but the astral body is spiritually connected to it. And you know that what is air-like is in the thorax. We breathe in the air. We process the air. In the chest, the air is in the right place. In the other part of the human body, only a small amount of gases and air types may be produced. If too much gas is produced in the intestines, it causes bloating, and that is not healthy. The middle body of the human being is there for the actual gas production. And the higher supersensible spiritual link that intervenes there — that intervenes in the gaseous — is the human astral body. This human astral body now fights the rancidity of fats within itself; just as the etheric body fights the putrefaction of proteins, so the astral body fights the rancidity of fats. Man would constantly have a rancid belching of his own fats, would taste rancid inside, if his astral body did not constantly fight this rancidity. So that we have this astral body within us to fight the rancidity of fats.

You see, gentlemen, that is quite wonderful, because you can see from it that what is outside in the ordinary physical, material world takes a completely different course from what is inside with us. Outside in the physical world, fats definitely go rancid. Man does not always go rancid for his own good, only when he becomes ill inside. So the thing is that in a healthy state, a person's astral body is such that it cannot go rancid. It only goes rancid if the person eats too much fat for the astral body to cope with, or if too much fat is produced due to some other reason. But internally, the person does perceive when their fat is going rancid. And one can say: When a person becomes very rancid, that is, when the activity of the astral body is much too weak, then he has an unpleasant taste in his mouth all the time. This unpleasant taste then has an effect on the stomach. And in this roundabout way, a person first gets stomach and intestinal diseases from the rancid fat within himself.

If you notice that a person is becoming rancid inside, then arsenic is a good remedy for the fats that he has inside that he is not processing. Arsenic fights against fattening and strengthens the astral body. And the result is that the person can fight this rancidity. These are things that are extremely important. If a person shows an inclination within themselves to be unable to overcome their putrid protein through the etheric body, then some compound with copper usually has an extremely strong effect on the person as a remedy. Copper is effective when the lower abdominal diseases, intestinal diseases, are directly caused by the protein. But if you notice that something is making itself felt through the mouth, through the sense of taste, it does not help to give the person copper, but arsenic is needed because you first have to strengthen the astral body. So it is not enough to simply state that this or that disease lies in this or that part of the human being; instead, one must know where they come from. Whether they come from rotten protein in the intestines or from fats that have gone rancid, which in turn affect the intestines and stomach through the taste of the mouth.

So you see, gentlemen, we have within us the opposite of what these substances show on the outside. We have an astral body that fights the rancidity of fats, whereas in the ordinary physical material world, fats simply go rancid.

A third food that humans consume is the substances that are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are found in particular in potatoes, for example, in lentils and beans, and of course in all types of grain. The carbohydrates are in there. In a great many of these substances, either sugar is directly contained, which we always take with our food, or sugar is produced directly from these carbohydrates by converting what we take in with the potato, for example. Potatoes contain mostly starch. This starch paste is first converted into dextrin and then into sugar in our bodies. So when you eat potatoes, you are actually nourishing yourself with sugar, because the potato paste, the starch paste, is converted into sugar in the human body. Isn't it true that grapes, for example, contain a lot of this sugar, and so does alcohol. What alcohol is for a person is actually based not only on the alcohol itself but also on its sugar content. Sugar is produced in the human organism from alcohol.

The first kind of food was therefore protein, the second kind was fat and the third kind was starch, sugar. We have seen that protein is processed by the etheric body in certain quantities, so that it does not become putrid. The fats are processed by the astral body, so that they do not go rancid. Now for starch and sugar! If you look at the etheric body, you have to say that it is mainly active in the lower body. The astral body is mainly active in the chest area. Now we come to something else. You all know, I don't want to say from your own experience, but from seeing people who are not like you, the effect of alcohol, and you know that alcohol produces a particular characteristic in people, first in the intoxication, but we don't want to talk about that for now. But you know, the next day – we have already spoken about this – the so-called “brummschädel” (headache) comes, it is also called a hangover. What does the headache or hangover mean?

Yes, gentlemen, you will already have gathered from the name that a headache has something to do with the human head. And if you have heard people describe how they were different from you the next day because they had a little too much to drink the day before, you will have heard them complain mainly about their heads. Their heads hurt, and when they don't hurt, they feel like they might fall off their shoulders and the like. What actually happens then?

The task of the head is namely to fight what starch and sugar want. What do starch and sugar want? You only have to look at wine. Isn't it true that when autumn comes, you harvest the wine, the grapes. They are pressed and then the mixture ferments. What is left after the process is enjoyed as wine. Now, because wine has become wine through fermentation, it has overcome fermentation. But when you bring wine into the stomach, something is created from it that in turn goes into the food. The alcohol is almost transformed back. And now the substances that want to ferment directly are starch and sugar. Starch and sugar in the human organism want to ferment. When you drink alcohol, the alcohol in the head drives away the forces that prevent the fermentation of sugar and starch in the human body. Let's take the story very clearly. Say you ate potatoes and beans on January 22nd and drank alcohol with them. Well, if you hadn't drunk alcohol, your head would have stayed sober. Potatoes and beans contain starch and sugar, which is produced from the starch; the head would have the power to properly prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar. If you take alcohol, the head loses the ability to prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar that you have taken in with the potatoes, and the potatoes and beans, and also the other things, cereals for example, begin to ferment in you.

So instead of preventing fermentation in the human being, it now occurs. And it occurs through an inability of the head that has occurred as a result of alcohol, so that the person is now full of fermentation. There is a strange expression in central Germany, in Thuringia. When someone talks nonsense, they say in Thuringia: He is fermenting. In these parts, it is not customary to say that someone who talks nonsense is fermenting; but those who have been to Germany will have heard it said in central Germany. And if someone always talks nonsense, then in central Germany, in Thuringia, they call him an old hag. So the thing is that in central Germany, fermenting is associated with being confused in the head, with talking nonsense. That is a very good folk instinct. You know that there is too much ferment in a person when they talk too much nonsense. Now, if someone has drunk alcohol and has a headache, then he does not talk nonsense, because he becomes quiet, but the nonsense is in him, it rumbles in him. So it is something that occurs to prevent starch and sugar from fermenting, something that counteracts the tangible effect of alcohol. So that one can say: There is something in the human mind that constantly works to prevent the starch and sugar in it from fermenting.

Now, no one denies that the human head is home to the strongest I, just as the abdomen is home to the etheric body and the middle body to the astral body, the I, the actual I. It is now the case that this actual I has to do with the warmth, just as it has to do with the solid of the physical body, with the liquid of the ether body, with the gaseous of the astral body. It is the case that in everything that depends on the actual self, the human being sets warmth in motion. This can be traced in the human body down to the last detail. The actual self is also connected with the blood, which is why the blood generates warmth. But the actual self, that which the human being experiences in consciousness, is also connected, for example, with glandular secretion. Therefore, glandular secretion is now associated with warmth. It is also the real self that now prevents fermentation from the supersensible through the powers of the head. So one can say: the etheric body fights the putrefaction of the proteins, the astral body fights the rancidity of the fats, the I fights the fermentation of sugars and starches.

This is also the reason why I had to tell you that excessive consumption of potatoes is bad for the head. Excessive consumption of potatoes has the following effect on people. You see, potatoes contain little protein. Because they contain little protein, they are actually a good food for humans. And if a person eats potatoes in moderation with other foods, then it is a good food because of its low protein content. But the potato contains an extraordinary amount of starch, which has to be converted into sugar in the human body, first into dextrin and then into sugar. I told you at the time that if a person eats too many potatoes, his head has to work terribly hard; of course, because the head has to prevent the fermentation. That is why people who eat too many potatoes and therefore have to work their heads terribly to process the potato fermentation become weak-headed. In particular, the middle sections of the brain become weak; only the frontal sections of the brain, which do not have to work as hard to prevent potato fermentation, remain. And so it is precisely because of the fact that potato food has become widespread in recent times that materialism has come about, because it is produced in the forebrain.

It is so strange: one believes that materialism is a logical thing. In a way, materialism in modern times is nothing more than the result of eating potatoes! Well, it's not true, people don't like to think that they should live on potatoes alone; but then they like materialism. So they are actually in a contradiction. If you really wanted to be a materialist, you would actually have to advise spreading potato food everywhere, because it would be the best way to become convinced of materialism, wouldn't it? That is something that most people don't succeed at. But if the materialistic monists wanted to fight effectively, they would actually have to ensure that other foods are replaced by potato foods as much as possible. Then the Monist League would achieve quite tremendous successes. If it did not work very quickly, it could work best over a period of several decades, and it would have the best possible results if it tried to influence people to eat only potatoes. But the people on whom it wanted to exert an influence would have a few tricks up their sleeves to get around its efforts, so it would not have the best possible success!

But you can see from this that spiritual science, as practised here, recognizes precisely the right kind of materialism. Materialism knows nothing at all about the material; spiritual science recognizes precisely that the potato is the right producer of materialism. It is terribly insidious, the potato, cunning, clever to excess. For just see, man can only eat the tubers of the potato, not even the eyes on the potato – they are harmful in themselves – and he certainly cannot eat the flower, because the potato is a member of the nightshade family and the flowers are poisonous. But what is the poison? I already told you last time: in large quantities the poison kills, in small quantities, finely distributed, it is a remedy. The potato itself has a great deal of starch paste in it, it consists almost entirely of starch paste. It could not live because the starch paste would be terribly harmful; at the same time, it draws the poison out of the world and destroys the harmful effect in itself. That is why I call her clever and cunning. She herself has her poison, through which she removes the harmfulness for herself. But the poison of the potato is particularly harmful to humans; she does not give that to him, she only gives him what she herself combats in herself through her poison. It is really something that can be called that: the potato is a clever, cunning creature! And humans must be clear about the fact that if they eat too many potatoes, their midbrain will atrophy and that even their senses can suffer precisely from excessive potato consumption.

If you eat too many potatoes as a child or very young person, your midbrain will become extremely weak. But the midbrain contains the sources of the most important sensory organs. The midbrain contains the four-mound body, the visual mounds and so on, and excessive potato consumption can even weaken vision because it has its sources in the midbrain. And some eye diseases in old age are caused by the fact that a person was raised on too many potatoes as a child. The person then becomes visually weak, weak-eyed. It is really the case that in the past, people in Europe became visually weak much less often in old age than they do now. And that in turn stems from the fact that, in addition to what otherwise affects the eyes – but that does not even have such a strong effect because it does not work internally, electric light and so on – the excessive consumption of potatoes has a very harmful effect on the eyes, on vision and even on the sense of taste – even on the sense of taste! You see, that is where the following comes from. Suppose a person eats too many potatoes from childhood on. You will often see this in later life: the person never knows when he has had enough because his taste has been spoiled by eating too many potatoes. In contrast, a person who has not eaten too many potatoes knows instinctively when he has had enough. So the instinct, which is more tied to the midbrain, is spoiled by excessive potato consumption. This is what has emerged particularly strongly in recent times.

But from all that I have told you, you can see that a person must be particularly careful to be strong enough to overcome, firstly, the decomposition of proteins, secondly, the rancidity of fats, and thirdly, the fermentation of starch and sugar.

Now, as I told you last time, a person cannot be completely teetotal, because if he does not drink any alcohol at all, alcohol is produced in him. But this alcohol remains in the abdomen; it does not go up to the head, because the head must be free of alcohol, otherwise it is immediately unable, as the carrier of the ego, to fight the fermentation that is in the body in the right way. You see, now you can form an idea of the way in which man relates to his natural environment. If you look, for example, at the protein that is rotting everywhere – after all, animals and plants are rotting – you have to say: there is ether everywhere, which gradually balances this out. If you look at the fats, which are also in the plants and are everywhere, you have to say that these fats would gradually make all living things incapable of living, both animal and human, if it were not for a fighter against rancidity in the astral body. So, in fact, the human being fights that which is outside in nature. And when the human being dies, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego leave the physical body. The human being then passes over into the spiritual world. What happens then? Well, gentlemen, you know what happens. The corpse immediately begins to decompose, to go rancid and to ferment at the same time, except that the decomposition is of course more visible, or rather more noticeable, because people rarely walk around with their noses stuffed up. So the putrefaction is easily smelled. But somehow lying over a grave and tasting whether the fat of the corpse in question has gone rancid is not something one usually does, and that is why one usually knows nothing about it. And the fermentation that does take place is certainly not studied. So it is actually the case that when the ego departs, the human body begins to ferment; when the astral body departs, the human body begins to go rancid; and when the etheric body departs, the human body begins to rot. Man carries this within him continually, but while he lives on earth, he fights it continually. Anyone who denies that the etheric body, the astral body and the I are spiritual realities within the human being must be asked: what do you think actually happens, why does the human being not rot? Why does he not ferment? Why does he not turn rancid? He would have to do so if he were like the mere physical body!

But what does our science do? Our science waits with its study until the human being has died. Because what it knows about the living human being is actually very little compared to what it actually knows from anatomy when the human being is a corpse, has died. Everything you can actually learn relates only to the corpse. Our science always waits for the corpse. So this science cannot know anything at all about the real human being who is alive, because it does not take this human being into account at all. And that is precisely the damage to our science – it has only been like this since the 17th century – that it has basically only gained its knowledge from the corpse. But the corpse is no longer the human being, because one must ask: What is it that, while the human being is alive, the corpse, which he also carries with him during his lifetime, does not behave as a corpse in such a way that it rots, ferments and becomes putrid? It is precisely when one really looks at the living human being that one comes across these spiritual, these supersensible aspects of the human being. And then one also notices that the ego works primarily in the head, that the astral body works primarily in the chest, and that the etheric body works primarily in the lower body. And science does not even know about the lower body, because it believes that the same processes that are outside in nature are in the lower body. That is simply not the case.

Well, gentlemen, it is interesting to study things, I would like to say, not in the study chamber, but to study them in the life of the people outside. There are, as you know, baths where it smells of rotten eggs, for example Marienbad. There are also German baths that contain hydrogen sulfide, where it smells like rotten eggs. Yes, really: people who are otherwise gourmets and also have a fine sense of smell have to go to such bathing places. And why do they do that? Why do they sometimes live there for several months during the summer in places where it smells as if everything has been sprinkled with rotten eggs? You see, it is like this: these people have actually eaten too much protein, and now they come to the seaside resort; because they are covered with skin and the thing is internal, they themselves do not smell like that, but if you could smell it, they would smell terribly of rotten eggs inside! Now all these people, who smell of rotten eggs on the inside, come to the seaside resorts, where it smells of rotten eggs, and what happens there? Yes, you see, one time the rotten egg smell is inside, the other time it is outside. The first time it is inside, the nose does not notice it; the second time it is outside, the nose notices it. Head and stomach are opposites. What the stomach produces in terms of rotten egg smell when it comes from the head through smelling is fought. And so, in the seaside resorts that smell of rotten eggs, the internal rotten egg smell is fought.

This is especially noticeable for those who have the sense to make such observations. As a boy, I happened to go to a seaside resort like this. I had to go to Bad Marienquelle every other day. So it stinks of rotten eggs there. While it is so unpleasant on the outside because it smells so terrible, you suddenly start to feel very comfortable in your stomach. So if you are not sick, if you don't have a rotten egg smell in your stomach, you experience a feeling of a higher zest for life. Those who do not let themselves be repelled by the rotten egg smell can experience this. Of course, the one who holds his nose shut does not have the opposite, does not have this spring effect in the stomach that one has when one really surrenders to the rotten egg smell. And the rotten egg smell, for example, even when artificially produced, is an extraordinarily good healing agent. It gives the body the strength, for example, to make fading muscles firm again, to make them strong. Now, people do not love such cures, but they are extremely useful in a certain respect. Because, you see, when the rotten egg smell approaches a person externally, it becomes spring in the belly internally. And in spring everything sprouts and grows, and a person can become strong again by getting spring in his belly.

This is what happens to people who gluttonously spoil their stomachs during the winter. You see, if you don't spoil your stomach in winter through gluttony, then you join in with the spring that is outside. It is precisely the abdomen that participates in spring in an extraordinarily strong way. But if you really want to experience spring outside in nature, then you should eat as few such things as goose liver pâté and so on as possible. If you have eaten a lot of goose liver pâté, then it is not spring in the human stomach, but rather it remains in the human stomach as it is under the earth in winter - not as it is on the earth, but as it is under the earth. It is warm there, that is where you put the potatoes in the pits. But everything in the person rots because the warmth is stored in the belly; it does not spring in the person. And then you have to look for an artificial spring in the rotten egg smell.

Such is the contrast between the ego and the etheric body. The I and the etheric body must balance each other out in the human being. You can see from this that if you only really study nature, if you go to a seaside resort with an open mind and there is a rotten egg smell, hydrogen sulfide, then the feeling of spring in the belly teaches you how the opposite of this actually works internally in the putrefaction of the protein substance.

I wanted to give you some additional information to what I said last time. You know that I told you that when someone has taken a certain poison, they must take liquid egg white as an antidote. Those things that are healthy become poisons if they are not properly treated in the body, if too much of them enters the body. So even egg white can expel a toxin from the human body, but egg white itself is toxic if it decays in the body, if too much of it enters the body. So close together are nutrition and poisoning. And you will have heard for yourself how excess in nutrition can become poisoning. A large part of illnesses are nutritional illnesses, that is, no consideration is given in nutrition to the fact that the substances in question should only be consumed in a certain amount if they are to be processed.

I will have the next lesson announced because I cannot be there on Saturday. I will be in Bern.

Gentlemen, the question that has been asked is:

Is the iris in the eye the mirror of the soul in a healthy and diseased state?

I think the second question can be added, they are probably meant together:

What causes albinism or leukopathy in black people?

If we want to answer this question, we must first take a closer look at the workings of the human eye. The question relates to the fact that certain people can tell whether a person's entire body is healthy or sick by looking at the color of the iris, the colored ring-shaped body in the eye that surrounds the black of the so-called pupil. Not only, as you know, is a person's iris colored blue or black or brown or gray or even greenish brown, but the iris also has lines drawn in one way or another, which are created by fine vessels. So that, just as the general facial expression of one person is different from that of another, the finer structure of this iris or rainbow skin is quite different in different people, and much more different from each other than the actual physiognomy of people is different from each other.

Now we have to go into the structure of the eye a little if we want to talk about such a thing. This is connected with the other question you have asked. Namely, that especially in Negroes, but also otherwise, in non-black people, an abnormal, not quite ordinary skin coloration occurs, which is connected with the special coloration of the iris. This is connected in a certain way. Now this skin color is particularly noticeable in naturally black people, because they are just black, and then they have all kinds of white spots, and are then mottled like a tiger. They are very rarely completely pale and completely white; this occurs very rarely among Negroes, extremely rarely. But such so-called albinos also occur in other races that are not completely black. But this albinism also occurs in white people, in the so-called cockroaches – that's what they're called – they have a very pale skin color, almost milk-white skin color. Then they usually have a light reddish iris, and the pupil, which is otherwise black in humans, is then dark red. I once saw a female cockroach like this who even exhibited herself in all kinds of sideshows and let herself be seen. She had milky-white skin, a red iris or rainbow-shaped pupil, dark red pupils instead of black eye stars, and would then say in an extremely weak voice: “I am all white, have red eyes and see very weakly.” That was true, she saw very weakly.

If we want to get into this matter, we must, above all, study the structure of the eye itself. Over time, I have told you many things about the eye. Therefore, today you will perhaps understand what I have to say. You see, the eye is located inside the very firm bony body of the head. The bone structure of the head bulges inside, and in this bone cavity, which is open towards the brain at the back (see drawing), the eye sits inside. The eye is now first limited from the outside by a hard skin, which is opaque here. The so-called eyeball is limited by the cornea. This skin becomes transparent towards the front, here, where it bulges out a little. Otherwise, one could not approach the light with the inside of the eye if this outer cornea were not transparent. It is called the cornea because it is horny. Inwards from this is a skin, which consists of fine veins. The blood network of the body extends into the eye and also sends very small, fine veins into the eye. So here we have the hard cornea, which becomes transparent towards the front, and then the so-called choroid, which is adjacent to it. The third skin inside is formed from nerves; this is the so-called retina. So I still have to draw a third membrane, the retina. And the retina goes backwards into the brain, as does the choroid, of course. And this is called the optic nerve because it is a nerve substance, it goes to the eye. You know that people say: you feel through the nerves. — So with the optic nerve you see.

Now, the strange thing is that everyone has to admit that, as people say, you can see with the optic nerve everywhere here, except precisely where it enters; there it is blind, you see nothing there! So if someone looks just enough to somehow see out there, or if the nerves around it are diseased and only the spot where the optic nerve enters is healthy, then you still see nothing where the optic nerve enters. Now people say: with the optic nerve you see, it is there for that, that you see. Have you now heard the following? Just imagine: there is a group of workers, let us say thirty workers. Twenty-five of them have to work very hard; they are standing everywhere. And there is a group of five – they won't do it, but I'll assume they do it – these five are allowed to laze around while the others work hard. So we can say: there are the 25 hard-working laborers, and there are five who laze around all the time, sitting on padded chairs and lazing around. If someone were to tell you that the work is being done just as well by the five idlers – or perhaps he can't say that because he doesn't see it, but the work is accomplished by idling – you won't believe it, will you? That is nonsense. But now science teaches us that the optic nerve sees. But precisely at the point where it is most, it sees nothing! It is just as if you were to say: the work is done by what the five loafers are doing. You see, one knows such things—that is precisely the strange thing—one knows such things, but one nevertheless continues to assert quite ordinary nonsense. Isn't it, from the fact that here is the so-called blind spot—that's what it's called—and that you see nothing at all at the point where the optic nerve attaches the most, it is quite clear from this that the optic nerve cannot be what you see with.

The thing is this: there is something in the human body that is very similar to this thing in the optic nerve; namely, your two arms and hands. Imagine picking up a chair. You strain your arms all the way down to your hands. But what connects them stays up there, doesn't it. It's the same with the optic nerve. They are aiming at something that is affected by light, and in the middle it is as it is between the two arm approaches here. But it is not the optic nerve that is affected - because if it were the optic nerve, it would have to see the most of all - but what is affected is something of the very invisible that I have described to you. That is precisely the I, the ego organization. It is not the physical body, not the etheric body, it is not even the astral body; it is the I. And so I have to draw something else in there besides what is already there: there is the invisible I that is spreading out. Only it is not as if there were two such arms, but rather as if the arms were closing and becoming a sphere. We already begin to make a sphere with our hands when we touch something. So there is the supersensible I; it is reaching out there. And what is the nerve for? Yes, gentlemen, the nerve is for this purpose - because it is the work of the invisible human being - that something is secreted. Substance is secreted everywhere, and it remains there everywhere. With the supersensible self, one sees. But the nerve is there to secrete something.

Think of the nonsense that science says, just as if one were to examine the large intestine and what is inside it, and then immediately say, from what is now being excreted from the large intestine, that this is how humans nourish themselves! Just as what is excreted is inside the large intestine, so the nerve substance is excreted here. And this (the blind spot) is then the place where it is excreted the most. What is not needed in the eye is excreted into the brain, then goes further and is excreted at all. You see, this is something that you can easily understand, but about which the most fantastic stories are told to you today. It's just that people don't realize what it means when it is said that the nerve substance is seen or felt or something is perceived. That would be just as if one were nourishing oneself with the contents of the rectum. So you see that this business of the blind spot has no significance for vision, because the optic nerve does not see around it either, only here, where the blind spot is, is where the most secretion occurs. And just as nutrition ends in the rectum, where it is only for excretion, so here too vision ends, because that is where most is excreted, and because it makes no sense for vision to be in the middle.

Imagine you have a stick lying there and want to pick it up with your head! You can't. You have to pick it up with your arm, with your hand, with what is attached at the side. You can't see with your nerve either. You have to see with what is attached.

Now, gentlemen, everything that is there (pointing to the drawing) ends here in a kind of muscle. This muscle carries the lens. This is a completely transparent body. Why transparent? So that you can get to the light. And behind this body here is a thick liquid. In front of it is an even thicker liquid, and in this thicker liquid at the front floats the iris or rainbow skin, which is located here near the veins. It really floats in the liquid and leaves a hole open for the light. This hole appears black when you look into it, because you look through the entire eye to the background, which is black.

This iris is fairly transparent at the front, but at the back it is black. This black skin at the back is quite thin in some people. Because if it is thin, when you look through the transparent part into the black, certain people have blue eyes. And in those with thicker skin here, where you look at the thick back skin at the iris, they have black eyes or dark eyes. We will talk about brown eyes in a moment.

Now, gentlemen, we need to educate ourselves about what it is that causes the skin here, which actually determines the blue or brown or black, to be thicker or thinner in some people. I have already told you: what is called the I, the noblest, supersensible part of the human being, goes into the eye. The I goes into it. The I is more or less strong in different people. Now suppose a person has a very strong ego. You see, such a person is capable of completely dissolving the iron that is in the blood and that he also gets into the eye through this choroid. So someone with a very strong ego completely dissolves the iron, and the result of this is that little iron enters this skin, which is at the very outermost edge of the body, because it is completely dissolved. So little iron enters, and the result of this is that this skin becomes thin. Because it becomes thin, you get blue eyes. Now imagine that a person has a weak ego; then he does not dissolve the iron as much, and the result of this will be that a lot of undissolved iron gets into this skin. The skin becomes thicker because of this undissolved iron and the person gets dark, black eyes. So it depends on the ego whether the person has black or blue eyes.

Now, gentlemen, there is also another substance in the blood: sulfur. And even if the ego can process the iron, it is sometimes still unable to process the sulfur. If the ego lets the sulfur into the skin without processing it, then a yellowish-brown color develops in the iris, and that is how brown eyes come about. And if a lot of sulfur gets into the eyes, then a reddish iris develops. Because of the sulfur shimmering behind it, even the pupil does not turn black. You do not see the black, but the emitted, sprayed sulfur itself makes the pupil dark red. This is the case with cockroaches and humans who otherwise cannot supply their skin with the right color. So you can say: there are people who can inject sulfur into their eyes. The ego can inject it, and this is how the iris gets its special color.

But what goes into the eye in the way of sulfur or iron goes into the whole body, because it comes from the blood. There are only small blood vessels here in the eye. So if someone injects sulfur into the eye, he injects sulfur into his entire skin everywhere. And the consequence of injecting sulfur into his entire skin everywhere is that he does not have his natural skin color at the points where the sulfur has been injected; because the natural skin color comes from the processing of iron. So when a person processes their iron only slightly, but instead spews sulfur, then they get such mottled spots in their skin, and at the same time you can see it in the color of their eyes.

So you see: when you look at this invisible human being that is in every human being, you can understand the human being right down to the material level, right down to the substance. Anthroposophy is not so stupid that it does not understand the material. Materialism does not understand the material. Read somewhere about albinism, what can you read? The one of you who asked me the question will probably have read somewhere: the cause of albinism is unknown! — Materialism always comes to this strange conclusion: the cause is unknown! — because it does not trouble itself at all with those cases where the causes can be found. Of course it is easy to say: There is a red pupil. Yes, but one must know what is actually working inside and what history injects, because the red coloration and the pale coloration of the body comes from sulfur.

Now you can understand what real science is. Imagine you come to a place on earth where something has been worked on; someone looks at it and says: The work is already there, the cause is unknown. He does not care what happened before; that is why he states: the cause is unknown. He does not care that, for example, thirty people have been working there for many days. That is how science does it when it says: the cause of the red coloration of the pupil and the pale coloration of the skin is unknown. — But the cause lies precisely in the I that works in the matter, in the substance.

But from this you can also see that the iris really does contain a true reflection of how the whole body works with iron and sulfur. But take such an albino, such a cockroach; that is actually a kind of disease. There is too much sulfuric work in the body, but the body gets used to it, and it is organized. But now it can happen that this enters the eyes to a much lesser extent. You see, apart from the cockroaches I told you about, apart from the lady who exhibited herself in the show, I have seen many cockroaches. You can always tell that there is something very special about such cockroaches. You can say: There is a cockroach, an albino like this, and it has this peculiar reddish coloration of the iris, pale red, has the dark red coloration of the pupil, has the pale body. If you examine it further, you get from the nature of its body the view that in its case the connection between heart and kidney is particularly weak. He is not only weak in the eyes, he is weak in the connection between heart and kidneys. The kidneys of such a person are supplied with blood with great difficulty, so they work very hard. If he were to deposit the sulfur that he carries throughout his body in his kidneys, he would die as a child. Therefore, he releases the sulfur through the surface of the body – the skin turns white, the eyes turn red – so that the kidneys can work gently. Such albinos have kidneys that work very gently, for example. This can also occur in other people. But if, in people who are not cockroaches (most of them are not cockroaches), some kind of defect occurs in the kidneys, then doesn't it have to show up in the iris as well? What the sulfur and iron do together there is also expressed here. From the nature of the human iris, one can therefore conclude whether there is any damage in the human body. Therefore, if there is a spot here or there in the fine appearance of the iris, which is not actually normal, one can see: there is damage in the body. But, gentlemen, you have to bear this in mind: the human body is a unified whole, and what you see in the iris you would also see, if you were clever enough, if you cut out a small piece of skin and took it out – something would also appear in the skin that would not be normal – or even if you cut the nail of your big toe. There is also a very fine structure that could show if the liver, kidneys or lungs were not working properly, although it is a little different again. So if someone were particularly clever and, instead of examining the iris, were to examine the cut fingernails, for example – it would be much more difficult because it is not as pronounced – they would also be able to recognize the healthy or diseased condition there. It is only noticeable in the eye because the eye is an especially delicate structure, and the delicate is easy to grasp. It is most pronounced in the eye. But you can see that things are most pronounced on the surface of the body. For example, I have rarely seen someone put something on their shoulders when they want to feel a particularly fine material or something like that. If it were the case that it would be more advantageous, we would do something about it, so that when we have to feel something fine, we could free ourselves up there on the shoulder and feel it. But that doesn't help us. We feel it with the fingertips. And at the fingertips we are particularly sensitive to feeling things. There you have the same thing again. If the nervous system were what actually makes up feeling, then we should feel the most where we are close to the brain. But we don't feel the most close to the brain; instead, we feel the most where we are furthest from the brain, in the outermost fingertips, because the I sits most on the surface of the body. What a person is in their inner self can best be recognized on the outermost surface. Therefore, because the eyes are closest to the surface, they can also recognize the most, because the eyes are delicate and far away from the brain.

You may say: The eyes are in the skull and close to the brain. But there are quite a few bones in the way, and where the eye is connected to the brain, where there is no bone, nothing can be seen. So at the fingertips, it is due to the vastness of space that they are particularly sensitive; in the case of the eyes, it is because they are most protected from the brain.

There is something else that is strange. When any lower animal develops its brain, it develops the brain in such a way that the brain leaves the cavity free for the eye, and the eye does not grow out of the brain in that way, but rather it starts from the side and grows into it (it is drawn). The eye grows from the outside, not from the brain; the eye grows into the brain. So it is formed from the outside.

From all this you can see that what is formed on the surface, whether in the skin or in the eye, is connected with the way in which a person is actually most in touch with the outside world. In a person who is always in bed, who cannot use his will for his body, one cannot say that he is developing his ego strongly. In a person who is very mobile, one can say that he expresses his ego strongly. And that which otherwise brings us into contact with the outside world, that is precisely in smelling, seeing and so on, these are the senses. And the eye is just the most delicate sense that brings us into contact with the outside world. So you can say: because the I is particularly strong in these fine veins – there are terribly fine veins in this iris – you can see a lot from this, how the whole I works inwards, whether a person is healthy or sick.

That is the original truth and knowledge that can be gained about this matter. But the fact that I have just described to you is also one of the most difficult, because one must be very thoroughly informed about what such a small irregularity in the iris means if one wants to draw conclusions about a healthy or sick person. I will give you an example. You see, it may be, for example, that in some irises there are dots, dark dots, here or there. These dark dots naturally mean that the person has something that is not there otherwise, if these dark dots are not in the iris. But suppose the person in whom these dark dots appear were a terribly stupid fellow. Then he will have some kind of illness that these dark spots indicate. But in the case of the person with these dark spots, it may also be that in his youth he was overstrained with some kind of learning, had to learn beyond his physical strength. Then, as a result of having used certain organs too much in his youth, he may have developed a certain weaker activity in the eyes, and then these small iron deposits, these very fine iron deposits, can occur as a result of overexertion in childhood. So they can occur as a result of an illness in later life, but they can also occur as a result of overexertion in childhood. Most people think: if I see black spots in the iris, then there must be this or that in the body. But it depends on knowing not only the present life of the person concerned, but especially if you want to recognize something like this in terms of the causes of the disease, you have to go through the whole life of the person with him; you have to let him remember what he has already done here or there in childhood. Thus, what one sees in the iris can point to many things. And to draw conclusions from something like this to something in particular is one of the most complicated forms of knowledge.

That is why it is so outrageous that all kinds of little books are being written today; the things that are written there are usually very short and are called: On Eye Diagnosis. There you get a fifty-page instruction on how to examine the iris. Like this, right? There is the iris classification, there is the pupil, drawn quite schematically, then the disease is indicated; spleen disease is then indicated; lung disease, syphilis and so on. Now the eye diagnostician in question, who is familiar with what is recorded in this way, when he looks at the iris with a moderate magnifying glass, need only refer to his little book; and when he notices what is written where lung disease is written, he states: lung disease! And that is how numerous eye diagnosticians do it today after a study of an hour. They then leave the rest to the little book they have; they just make the diagnosis. Yes, gentlemen, but that is outrageous. Because what is most difficult is to be learned in the easiest way. This does not lead to the acquisition of something valuable, but on the contrary, it damages the whole medical system. And one must distinguish whether someone seriously wants to achieve something in the medical field, or whether someone just wants to make money.

Of course, people are upset about science today; and rightly so, because, according to the example of the optic nerve that I told you about, science actually does not pay attention to what a person really is, but most appreciates the filth of a person, the filth in the eye, for example, which is the optic nerve. Of course, people don't know that, but they feel it and become disgusted by science. This outrage can be understood. But what the eye diagnostician usually does is not better than science, but usually much worse. Science, unsuspecting because of materialism, considers dirt to be the noblest components of the human being. Of course, the dirt is also very necessary, because if it were to remain in the body, it would kill the body very soon; so it is necessary. But science thinks that dirt is the most valuable thing about a person! But that means it is on the path of good and does not just want to make money. It is just blinded. It just has a very large blind spot in its knowledge; but with all that, one must acknowledge the good will. But with these little eye diagnostic devices, one can no longer speak of good will, only of the desire to make money. That is why you always have to ask yourself about all these things: a good truth can underlie any endeavor, but it is precisely the best truths, gentlemen, that are most often misused by the world. You see, it is truly wonderful that in this little iris the healthy and the sick person are both completely reflected. But on the other hand, because the healthy and the sick person are both completely reflected, the iris is also most difficult to recognize in its entirety, and it must be said that anyone who practices eye diagnosis without recognizing the whole person, without really knowing something about the whole person, is practicing nonsense.

And what does it mean to recognize the whole person? You see, we have learned that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and the I. So not only do we need to know something about the physical person, but, especially if we are doing eye diagnosis, we also need to know something about the spiritual person. The usual anatomy, which only deals with the corpse, can, under certain circumstances, suffice with what it offers; it can actually offer relatively good things. Even if it does not know that the eye nerve is the dirt of the eye, at least it finds the eye nerve. But the eye diagnostician usually has no idea how the nerve runs, but has his little book of fifty pages and the classification of the iris and diagnoses away, without examining the person. Now, of course, he needs some other little book, again of fifty pages. There is the rubric “lung disease” and the remedy for it. But lung disease is something that can come from many causes. Knowing that the lungs are affected is not enough. The lungs can be affected by digestion. You have to know where it comes from. Many people suffer from lung disease. For many, the lung disease has a wide variety of causes. This is precisely where you have to be extremely careful, because where the most beautiful things are present, there is the most nonsense. How much have I told you in these lessons about the fact that man does not depend only on the earth, but on the whole starry sky. But that is precisely what requires the most complicated insight. You must not do any nonsense with it. After all, the various astrologers in the world today are doing a great deal of fraud and nonsense. It is similar with eye diagnostics as with astrology. There is also something very noble and magnificent underlying astrology; but for those who practice astrology today, there is nothing very noble underlying it. For them, speculation about the wallets of their fellow human beings is usually the underlying basis.

And so you can understand the connection, gentlemen: on the one hand, there are the phenomena that change the entire surface of the human being externally. The person gets pale spots where the skin is otherwise darker; his eyes change color, he is an albino. A certain activity is driven to the surface, diverted from the internal organs. But if the person is not a cockroach, not an albino, then the same things, the outer appearance of the eye, are present in the iris; but the finer structure, the finer arrangement then points to the inside. An albino is not a completely sick person just because he is an albino, but he is only afflicted with a predisposition to disease because he has it from an early age and his physical makeup becomes accustomed to it later.

You see, it is not at all good to call the albino a leukopath. This already indicates, because leukocytes, for example, are certain bodies in the blood, that the blood of such people is different. We do not know the cause. But if the blood becomes paler on the surface, then the general pallor does not occur, but the skin becomes paler on the surface. That is the difference between the disease of anemia, where the blood simply becomes paler on the inside, and leukopathy or albinism, where the blood is pushed more to the surface. So it is the case that in the case of people with anemia, an activity in the interior is not in order. The ego is more active on the surface, the astral body more in the interior. Therefore, all the bodies with which one sees and hears are more pushed to the surface. You need them for the ego. You need your liver in the inner being. And if you felt everything as strongly as your liver does, then you would constantly observe only your inner being and say: Aha, now I have just received a little cabbage soup in my stomach, the stomach walls are beginning to absorb it. It is like a radiance, very interesting. Now it goes through the pylorus into the small intestine; now it goes into the villi that are on the intestinal walls. You would observe all this, and all this, that would be very interesting; but you would not have time to observe the outside world! It is very interesting and there is plenty to observe and in some things much more beautiful than the outside world, but the human being is just quite distracted by it. So in general, what is inside does not come to consciousness; what lies on the surface comes to consciousness. So if someone does not process the iron properly in his inner being, where the astral person is more active, he will become an anemic person. If he does not process the iron properly on the outside, but dissolves it as I have described to you, then he will become an albino - which is very rare - or he will get leukopathy.

So you see, the question I was asked is related to this: albinism comes from an irregular processing of sulfur or iron by the ego. Anemia comes from an irregular processing of iron by your astral body and has more of an effect on the inside of the blood. Thus, if one only understands the human being correctly in what is going on inside him, one can also see which supersensible part of the human being is actually involved. He who properly understands the physical human being also understands the superphysical, the supersensible human being. But with materialism it is just the opposite: he does not understand the supersensible human being at all, and therefore he does not understand the physical human being either.

I will let you know whether I will be back next Wednesday. Perhaps someone will have another question by the next lesson, so that a similar discussion can take place as a result of this question.