The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, gentlemen! Have you thought about what you would like today?

Mr. Burle: If one might ask the doctor about human clothing, about the clothing that people wear. In some countries people have just one rag and throw it around them; others are buttoned up. One has dazzling colors, the other has simple colors. Then again, we could ask about the national costumes, what the peoples or the people in question wear. Then also what the waving flags are and - this is perhaps also connected with that - what ecstasy they exert?

Dr. Steiner: Much thought has been given to the question of human clothing because, as you can imagine, there are few external documents and little historical evidence about these things.

You see the clothing of the simpler peoples and tribes, and you also see the clothing of the people in the city to which you yourself belong. And finally, one sees what one puts on oneself, but actually pays the least attention to what one puts on oneself. In this matter, one simply goes along with what has become the custom. Yes, after all, one must do it to a certain extent simply for the reason that otherwise one is considered at least half a fool, if not a complete fool.

Now, the first question is that which is perhaps the most difficult for an external science to answer, because, as I said, external written records are only available in very few cases, about the reasons why people originally clothed themselves. If we really take into account everything that can be seen in this direction, we have to say to ourselves: Certainly, much of what is in clothing has already emerged from the human need for protection, from the need to protect oneself as a human being against the influences of the environment. You must remember that animals have their own protection. To a large extent, animals have protection against external influences that cannot penetrate their hair, skin and so on into the more delicate, softer parts of the organism.

Now you may ask yourself: Why doesn't man have this protection by nature? — I don't want to emphasize this question, which always asks why, because in nature it is actually not entirely justified to ask why. Nature simply puts the beings in place, and one must simply examine how they are placed. The why is never entirely justified. But we shall understand each other if I nevertheless say: How is it that man, unclothed by nature, must go through the world like this?

We must then ask ourselves the other question, whether this covering that the animal has from nature is not clearly connected with the less highly developed spiritual organization that the animal has? And it is. You see, gentlemen, it is really the case that sometimes those parts of a living being, that is, of an animal and also of a human being, that are most important, do not appear to be the most important in external life. We can cite some very small organs in the human organism. If these are not as they should be, then the whole human organism breaks down. For example, here in the thyroid glands on both sides, there are very small organs – I have mentioned them to you before in a different context – that are hardly the size of a pinhead. One might think that these are not so important. But if it should happen that a person needs an operation on the thyroid gland, and the surgeon is inept and removes these tiny, pinhead-sized organs as well, then the whole organism becomes ill. The person becomes dull and gradually perishes from exhaustion. So small, tiny, pinhead-sized organs are of the greatest possible importance for the whole human being! They have them because these organs secrete a very fine substance that must flow into the blood. And the blood is useless if these organs are not there and their secretions do not flow into the blood. So you can see that even organs that we do not pay much attention to have the greatest possible significance for the being in which these organs are found.

Take, for example, those animals in the animal kingdom that have hairy skin. Well, you can imagine that the hairy skin is good for keeping the animals from freezing in winter and so on. Certainly, that is one of its uses. But if these hairs are to arise in the skin, the animal must be accessible to a particularly strong effect of the sun. The hairs arise only when the animal is accessible to a strong effect of the sun.

You might say: Yes, but hair does not develop everywhere only where the sun's rays have access! - And yet it is so. It even goes so far that the human germ, in the first periods, while it is carried in the mother's womb, is hairy. You may say: It is not exposed to the sun. It loses these hairs later. And every human being who is born was actually quite hairy during the first weeks of the mother's pregnancy. He loses this hair. Why is that? It is because the mother absorbs the power of the sun, which works internally. The hair is very closely related to the effect of the sun.

Take the lion, for example. The lion, whose male has this mighty mane, is an animal that is extraordinarily exposed to the effects of the sun. As a result, the lion also has well-developed chest organs, which become particularly strong under the influence of the sun, a short intestine and powerfully developed lungs. This distinguishes him from our ruminants, which have more developed organs of the abdomen, intestines, stomach and so on. The way an animal is hairy, feathered and so on is therefore mainly related to the effect of the sun.

But again, when the effect of the sun on a being is very great, then it is the case that this being lets the sun think within itself, lets the sun will within itself: it does not become independent. Man has his independence from the fact that he does not have this outer protection, but that he is more or less exposed to the influences of the earthly environment. It is even interesting to note how the animal is less dependent on the earth than man. The animal is largely formed from outside the earth. I have, of course, provided you with evidence for these things everywhere. But man is emancipating himself from these external natural influences. And that comes from the fact that he has, so to speak, an unprotected skin on all sides and therefore has to seek his own protection.

You can see from our ordinary clothing that it is actually composed of two parts. One part is revealed to us when we put on a winter coat in winter and protect ourselves from the cold. That is the part of clothing through which we seek protection. But that is not the only one. You can see, for example, especially with women, that they don't just seek protection through clothing, but they arrange it so that it should be beautiful; sometimes it is indeed horrible, but it should be beautiful. It depends on taste or bad taste, but in any case it should be beautiful, it should adorn. These are the two functions of clothing: to provide protection against the outside world and to adorn.

One part of this task for clothing originated more in the north, where protection was needed. Therefore, there the clothing has more the character of protection. In terms of protection, people do not go to extraordinary lengths. But in warmer areas, in areas where entire nations actually walk quite naked, decoration forms the little that you see, or, when they put on more, the main part of the clothing.

But you will now know that it was precisely from the warmer regions that higher civilization came, that more of the spiritual life came from the warmer regions. Therefore, when we look at clothing, we can always see that, in a sense, the type of clothing designed to protect the human being from external influences has remained incomplete. On the other hand, clothing that is intended to adorn has undergone all possible development. Of course, what a person's taste is comes into play here, doesn't it? The whole spiritual direction of people comes into play. So let us assume more primitive peoples, simpler, more original ones. Such peoples have a strong sense of color. We in our regions, who are so far advanced in terms of reason – or at least we believe we are – do not have the sense of color that the more original peoples have.

But these more primitive peoples have a completely different sense. They have the sense that there are spiritual-supernatural parts to the human being. In the so-called civilized areas, people no longer believe that there are people who are not as clever as civilized people want to be, but who have a sense that the human being has a supernatural side. And they perceive this supernatural side as colored. This is the case with primitive peoples: they perceive the supersensible part that they carry within them – what I have called the astral body – as colored, and they want to make visible that which is invisible to us. So they adorn themselves in red or blue, or the like, depending on how they see themselves in the astral realm. This comes from the view that these people have of the spiritual world.

The Greeks, for example, saw how the etheric head of the human being is much larger than the physical head, how it protrudes, and so they endowed Pallas Athena, this goddess, with a kind of helmet. But you can see for yourself if you take this Pallas Athena and examine the helmet she is wearing, the helmet has something like eyes at the top. You can see that everywhere; just look at Pallas Athena, even in a bad statue, there are eyes at the top of the helmet. This proves to you that it was meant to be part of the body. That is something else you can see; they put it on Athena.

And the type of clothing that people made in those areas where they had a sense of the supersensible human being was adapted to how they imagined this astral body of the human being.

Now, in our regions — as you gentlemen know — only the ritual clothing in the truest sense is still made in colors. If you look at what the ritual clothing is, you will see that it is modeled entirely on how the astral body is imagined. So the colors and also the shape and form of the clothing are basically derived from the supersensible. And only when one understands this, does one understand how clothing is designed as an adornment. This is also very important. If you look at pictures painted by the old masters, you will see: Mary, for example, always has a very specific dress and a very specific wrap, because this is intended to suggest how she is in her astral body, in her heart, in her mind. This is to be indicated by the clothing. Compare pictures where Mary is with Magdalene at the same time, and you will always find that the old painters looked at Mary and Magdalene differently, just as differently as they are portrayed, because it is said to be based on their astral body and the clothing is made in the way the astral body is now supposed to be in terms of color.

We civilized people have simply moved into materialism, so we no longer have any sense of this transcendental side of man. We think with the mind of the earth and think that the mind of the earth is master of everything. Yes, gentlemen, that is why we no longer have any sense of dressing in such a way that what we wear looks halfway human! We put our legs, if we are men, into tubes. That is probably the most unadorned of all the clothes that have appeared in the world, the trouser tube! But we do a lot more; if we want to be particularly noble, we also put a so-called angstrom tube on our heads. Just imagine what an ancient Greek would make of a face if he could stand up and meet a person who has his two legs in tubes inside and also has a tall Angström tube up there, and what's more, it's black! The Greek would not think that this is a human, but that he would have an incredible ghost in front of him! You just have to imagine that. And it even comes to such things that, in a completely abstract way, people still cut off such rags from the coat, which is already ugly enough; then they call it a tailcoat. Yes, that is something that shows much more than anything how thoughtless humanity has actually become. Just because one is accustomed to it and because, as I said, one is regarded as a half-fool or a complete fool if one does not go along with things, one goes along with them. But one must be aware that the whole way men dress today is actually somewhat reminiscent of an insane asylum, especially when it is supposed to be quite normal. This just goes to show that little by little one has become completely divorced from any reality,

Women, of whom many men believed that they are less civilized than men, have remained somewhat closer to the original way of dressing. Today, however, there is also a tendency to make women's clothing more like men's, but it has not yet been fully successful.

What does decorating actually mean? To shape oneself outwardly in such a way that one thereby gives expression to what man is spiritually! In this respect, in order to understand how everything related to clothing comes about in more primitive peoples, one must realize that in primitive peoples people do not consider themselves to be as independent as people today consider themselves to be independent. Today, every person considers himself, and with a certain right, to be an independent personality. Well, he says to himself: I have my own mind, through which I think out everything I can do. - If he is particularly conceited, he considers himself a reformer, and so today we have almost as many reformers as people in the world. So today, people consider themselves to be something absolutely independent. Now, that was not the case at all with earlier people and tribes. These tribes considered themselves a unit in their group and regarded a spiritual being as their group soul; they regarded themselves as belonging together like the members of a body and regarded the group soul as that which held them together. In this group-like way, they imagined themselves to have a very specific form. Then they expressed this in their clothing. So, for example, if they thought of the group soul in Greece as having a kind of helmet-like extension on its head, they would put on a helmet. And the helmet was not created out of a need for protection, but because they believed that it would make them more similar to the group soul.

Likewise, some group souls have been thought of as eagles, vultures, other animals, owls, and so on. They then arranged their clothing accordingly, so that it was adorned in some way with feathers and the like, in order to become similar to the group soul. And so clothing has mostly arisen out of spiritual needs.

In the case of primitive peoples and tribes, something emerges through clothing about how they have imagined their group soul. And if you find an original tribe and ask: How did they dress, especially how did they adorn themselves? Did they adorn themselves with feathers or with fur? then you can say: If you find a tribe that adorns itself mainly with feathers, then you know that the common group soul, which was in a sense their protective spirit, was imagined to be bird-like. If you find that a people adorns itself mainly with animal skins, then you can be sure that the group soul, which was in a sense their protective spirit, was imagined by them as either a lion-like or a tiger-like creature. So you can also see something in this for the design of the original clothing, if you ask yourself: How did these people imagine their group soul? And Mr. Burle was quite right when he said: One loves flowing clothing, the other tight-fitting. — Flowing clothing developed from the fact that they wanted to make themselves some kind of bird's dress, wanted to make dresses with wings; they liked it when the thing was wing-like. And it even had a great influence on people's skill when they acquired such flowing clothes. And when they turned, they also made pleasing movements with their arms. This made them skillful and so on. One can say: Adorning is the will to express the spiritual in temporal garments. And mere protection, which of course is not to be criticized, is the expression of the philistine in man. The more one wants to arrange clothing merely to protect oneself, the more one is a philistine. The more one wants to adorn oneself, the less one is a philistine and actually wants to express in clothing the spiritual that lies in human dignity.

It is natural that later in civilization these things have shifted completely. For example, one must be clear about the following. Imagine that such earlier peoples come to the conclusion that the sun has a special influence on the human heart, on the human breast in general, and they say to themselves: I am only a hearty person if the sun has the right influence. Not externally on the skin, where I would become quite hairy, but internally processed, the sun's rays act on the heart. The heart is rightly associated with the effect of the sun. What do people do who still know something about this connection with the sun? Yes, you see, they tie a kind of medallion around their necks, a medal that represents the sun. And so they have something hanging down around their necks that represents the sun (see drawing). These peoples go around with it, saying, as it were: I acknowledge that the sun has an influence on my heart.

Later, of course, this was forgotten. The civilized people have forgotten that originally it was a sign that the sun had an influence on the heart. But what once made sense has become habit, really become habit. And out of habit, people then adopt something like that, no longer have any concept of why it was originally created. These habits develop first; later, the states or governments take possession of such habits, they occupy them. Most of the so-called progress of states and governments consists in taking possession of what has become a habit. Someone finds — it can only ever be one person — let us say a cure. That comes from his mind. The government sets about claiming this remedy for itself and says: Only if I allow it, may it be sold here and there. — So in the end it comes from the government.

The same thing happened with the sun medallion. People originally made it out of their own knowledge, and later they made and wore it out of old habit; and then the governments said: No, you are not allowed to do that voluntarily, but we must first give permission for you to make and wear it. - And so the medals were created! And so the governments decorated their relatives with the medals. Of course, the order no longer has the slightest meaning. But those who scold the medals should also know that they originally had their good sense and that they emerged from something that made sense.

You see, that's what happened to many original garments. The ancient Romans and Greeks still knew that when they go around showing their naked bodies, it is not the whole human being, but there is a supersensible body. They imitated this supersensible body in their toga, and so they formed the toga. In this way, the Romans wanted to recreate the supersensible body. The toga is nothing other than the astral body. And in the artful folds of the toga, the powers of the astral body came to light. And in more recent times, because they no longer knew anything about the real spiritual human being, they knew of nothing better to do than to take the old garments and, in order to make them new, to cut off some piece here, there, or everywhere cut, first making the one that went down close to the ground shorter, and then making it so that it could be slipped on, and gradually transforming it into the modern man's skirt. The modern man's skirt is nothing more than the redesigned toga, only it is no longer recognizable.

Take the belt, for example. Yes, the belt came about because man knows: I am divided in the middle, unlike any animal. No animal has a diaphragm like the one humans have. For no animal does this division in the middle have such significance as it does for humans. Just compare the two. Today, people forget this in the most incredible ways. For example, the length of a human being is often compared with the length of an animal in order to find out something, such as how much food an animal needs and how much a human being needs. But just think about it: there is an animal, and there is a human being. Now someone measures the length of the animal and measures the length of the human being. Yes, gentlemen, can you compare the two things? That is nonsense. What you measure in the animal is only that in humans; so you can only compare it with the animal world if you measure the length of the human being from the crown of the head to here, the loin measurement. Or if you want to compare the human being with the animal, you can compare it with what the two hind limbs are in the animal. It is really the case that thoughtlessness sometimes goes terribly far.

Now, when primitive peoples realized the significance of the fact that man has a division in the middle, they indicated this with the belt. So that a human characteristic has also been indicated by the belt.

And you see, when a person is properly recognized, it is known, for example, that a special power even for thinking lies in the knee bend. And that is why the knee-bend - which we can no longer particularly adorn today because we have our trouser tubes over it - was adorned. From this something like the English Order of the Garter arose, in the way I have described. All these things have developed out of a real observation, not out of such terribly abstract, theoretical thinking as we have today.

And, you see, modern clothing has lost all its colors too. Yes, why has it lost its colors? Because the sense of the supersensible is expressed best through color. And the more a person enjoys color, the more inclined they are to somehow grasp the supersensible. But our time loves gray on gray, preferably undyed colors. The reason for this can be hinted at by the saying: 'All cats are gray at night' — because modern man no longer sees into the light at all, I mean into the spiritual light. Everything has become gray for him. He expresses this best in his clothing. He no longer knows which color to adorn himself with, so he adorns himself with no color at all. It has been completely forgotten that everything to do with clothing is connected with what was still known in ancient times, what was known by supersensible man. Now the general civilization has become grey. But for certain purposes in life the original colorfulness has remained, without anyone knowing where it actually came from.

The uniforms worn by our military in the modern state originated at a time when people had to rely more and more on defense. And all the individual parts of military clothing can be examined to see if they are somehow related to means of defense or attack; and basically, it can be said that all military clothing is actually outdated today and cannot be understood anymore. You see, the modern private's tunic is understood because it developed from the Roman toga. The military tunic is only understood if it is explained not from the Roman toga, from this drapery, which has been distorted into caricature, but if it is explained from the knighthood of the Middle Ages, where the whole was a kind of armor. There the armor was redesigned.

The flag was also mentioned (in the question). You see, the flag has the following background: originally, the so-called heraldic animal was on the flag – it didn't have to be an animal – but what was the heraldic animal? It was precisely the group soul, this soul that held the people together. And when they were together in groups, they wanted to have this soul before them in the picture. That is why they made the flag out of it. The flag is proof that the common thoughts that people have are summarized in this flag.

So it is particularly important to be clear about this: ancient painters were actually much more real in their painting than today's painters. Today, one usually paints so-called easel pictures, that is, one paints pictures that are then put into frames and hung somewhere, because one has been accustomed to it. Basically, there is no sense in this. For why should one hang a picture on a wall? One must ask. In ancient times it was like this: there were altars; there one painted the picture on the altars that one should remember when standing before the altar. There were churches where one walked around. One painted on the wall that which should come to mind in succession when one walked around. There it had a meaning, a relationship to what was going on inside in people.

And, let's say, in old knight castles --- well, what was knighthood based on? Chivalry was based on the fact that the people who belonged to it always looked up to their so-called ancestors. The ancestors were much more important than one was. If you had a large number of ancestors, you were worth more. Well, that's where the ancestor pictures were hung. So that made sense again.

But when that meaning was lost, that was when landscape painting first came about. And landscape painting – having a landscape on the wall, yes, you can have a thing for that. I don't want to be horrible about this and criticize all landscape painting, but after all, a painted landscape can never be the same as going out into the countryside! And so, basically, landscape painting only came about at a time when people no longer had a real sense of nature.

If you look at pictures from a few centuries ago – yes, even at those by Raphael or Leonardo – you will see that what is painted are the people, and the landscape, only hinted at, is actually done childishly, because people agreed that the landscape should be viewed outside in nature. But in the human being, one can express different things; the human being is not just nature, one can express different things there! And so Raphael was able to express a lot in Mary. You may know the picture that hangs in Dresden: Mary with the child Jesus on her left arm, clouds above; then below are two figures: Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, this picture that is called the “Sistine Madonna”. Yes, gentlemen, Raphael did not paint this picture to be hung on a wall, but he painted Mary with the baby Jesus so that a banner could be made to carry in processions. Now there are these processions where you go out into the field to the altar. They always had a banner that was carried in front. They stopped at the altar, where the people then knelt. Then someone later added those who knelt, St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. They don't even belong in the picture, and they are terrible in comparison to what Raphael himself painted at the time. But people don't notice that. Many admire the rather repulsive figure of Barbara in this picture just as much as they admire what Mary and the Christ Child themselves are!

All these are things that show you: one has also strayed from what still had meaning in painting. Why was this picture painted by Raphael for a church banner? The reason was so that people should have this common thought when they were in their procession, which corresponded to the purpose for which flags were made in the first place.

Well, then the desire arises to still associate a certain meaning with that which has been preserved from the old days, when things really had a meaning. Today you can go to areas, for example to Finland, where you will again encounter people in traditional clothing. Those who particularly want to be national wear the old clothing that was forgotten and is being rediscovered.

But all these people no longer live in the time when ancient instincts were present, when clothing was associated with meaning. Today, we would have to find clothing from what is in the spiritual life today, just as these ancient peoples found clothing from their meaning, from what they considered to be right in the world and humanity. But today, people no longer have this ability because they know nothing of the real, that is, of the spiritual human being. And so it has come about that today we have garments that are actually quite meaningless and that are based only on the fact that one drives meaninglessness to excess.

Originally, people wore belts. The belt emphasized that there was something special here in the human body. The belt was there to express this. Later, people saw the belt and saw that the human body was divided up; now they themselves made this division with the belt. Instead of the belt expressing something, in women's clothing it often led to women's clothing being made in such a way that it expresses nothing, but here only the liver and stomach and all sorts of things are squeezed together. You can say that a large part of what has emerged in the materialistic age has actually emerged out of senselessness, out of real senselessness. Even things that we today must consider nonsense had a certain significance for primitive peoples. Take, for example, the peculiarity of wild peoples not to clothe themselves by putting on garments, but to clothe themselves in a different way. No, the garment is actually that which adorns, which adds something to what the person is. The significance of clothing is actually suggestion, revelation. Thus, the invisible is to be revealed through clothing. So, you don't need fabric to dress, the wild tribes thought – they still think so today, and others think so too – but you can also dress by making all kinds of drawings on the body itself. They adorn themselves with so-called tattoos. People make all kinds of marks on their bodies.

Yes, gentlemen, these signs that people make on their bodies originally had a very great significance. Suppose, for example, a person carves a heart on his body. Now, if he walks around during the day, it has no great significance in the waking state. But when he sleeps, then what he has carved into his skin makes a very meaningful impression on his sleeping soul, and then it becomes a thought in his sleeping soul, which he naturally forgets again in the morning when he comes to consciousness. But this tattooing originally arose from the intention of having an effect on the person even in their sleep. Later on, however, it lost its significance even among savage tribes, at least to the extent that people only do it out of habit, continue it out of habit, but it has just lost its significance.

Now, you have to take all these things into consideration. Then you will see that clothing arose partly out of the need for protection, but for the most part, the greater part, it arose out of the need to adorn oneself. And adorning oneself is connected with making the supersensible visible on the outside. And then, precisely with regard to clothing, people came to know nothing else but that the human being wears it. And so the national costumes came into being. Of course, a tribe that is more obliged to protect itself will have close-fitting clothes, thick clothes, the whole body more or less laden with clothes, or at least those parts that are more exposed to the cold. A person in a milder climate will develop the adornment much more, will have thinner clothes, flowing clothes and so on. So it will depend somewhat on the whole environment, on the climate, how man protects himself in part, adorns himself in part. Then people forget this. When the migrations of nations then come about, it can happen that a nation from the area where the clothing was suitable for the area moves into another area where it is no longer understood why the clothing should be suitable for these nations; but they have just kept it out of habit. And in this way it is often very difficult today to find out from the immediate surroundings why these people have precisely this clothing. You can see then, can't you, people just stop thinking. They are like the polar bear that gets its white coat because it stands out a little against the northern snow and it then means protection for him against all kinds of persecution and so on – yes, if he were to wear it in a warm climate, it just wouldn't be protective, would it!

So it is in general: Man retains what he is used to without being fully aware of the reason for it. That is why it is not so easy today to answer the question of why one or the other tribe dresses in a certain way, just by looking at how people dress. As I said, you have to go back to earlier times.

For example, you will find that the Magyar costume of the Hungarians is quite special. The Hungarians wear somewhat high boots with tight tubes, tight-fitting leggings that are tucked into the tubes, and a tight-fitting skirt. It is all modernized, has lost its original meaning, but it points to what the Hungarian language also points to; namely, it mostly has hunting expressions in what is original! It is very strange: if you come to Pest and go, for example, across a street, you will find something like an inscription like: Kave Häz. That is nothing more than coffee house! Of course, this is not Hungarian or Magyar, but a bit changed from German. Kave Häz is what they say; so you do not realize that it is actually a German word. But if you ignore the numerous words that come from Latin or German in the Magyar, then you come to the conclusion that these are mostly hunter expressions, and you come to the conclusion that the Magyars are originally a hunting people. And if you look at their clothing, it is the one that was originally the most comfortable for hunters. But then it was modernized and changed. You can still understand that at least. But when you look at today's clothing, you can't understand much anymore.

Well, Mr. Burle, did some of what I said

Mr. Burle: Pretty much!

Well, then we will continue the lectures next Saturday. Perhaps one or the other of you will think of something else you would like to ask.

Good morning, gentlemen! Do you have anything special in mind today?

Mr. Müller: Yes, a small request. The other day, the doctor talked about arsenic and about fat children. Years ago, I always saw fat children at the fair. I noticed afterwards that the children shown at the fair were no older than eight, twelve or sixteen years old. The children who were artificially raised for this purpose sometimes came from Hungary. And after what the doctor said about how easily arsenic can be found in the rocks there, I would like to ask how old such children can become, who were artificially raised with arsenic to make them fat? Would it not be possible to take legal action against

people who raise children with arsenic, and to have the law forbid it? Or is it only used in secret as a commercial source?

The doctor mentioned that people who stopped at a certain stage came down again with arsenic. This was not the case with these children; they were children who weighed almost two hundred kilograms, even though they were only about sixteen years old. Are these children not heading for a bad period after all?

Then the doctor talked about alcohol, how we also produce alcohol in our bodies, and about the different effects of alcohol. One person is terribly upset, making a fuss and so on, and the other is completely calm. It affects the next person's eyes, as it does mine. After one, two, three drinks, I have hard grains in my eyes the next morning that you can hardly crush with your fingers, as the effect of alcohol.

Then the doctor said that you could, to a certain extent, tell all of a person's illnesses by looking at their eyes. Now there are also various people who, if they only see the urine, think that they want to recognize all illnesses. They have one like that in Basel too; I wonder if that's right? I can't believe it.

Then I would like to ask whether there is anything to it when people somewhere get a medicine and they have a firm belief in it, whether that contributes to the healing?

Then I would like to talk about the penultimate statement by Dr. Steiner about fresh water. There is a pond near Darmstadt where the chemical industry is constantly discharging hot water – it even steams – and there are thousands and thousands of goldfish in this pond, and they are all completely dark red. How come? They are completely dark red.

Dr. Steiner: So the first concerns the obese children. The matter is as you rightly suspected, that these children, who are simply shown in all sorts of fairground booths as special curiosities, are artificially fattened by arsenic or similar substances (not true, many substances are similar to arsenic). They are, after all, as one could easily check, not particularly strong, but they are actually just fat, thick.

Now you see, this is something much more complicated than what I told you the other day about the consumption of arsenic by adults. What I said then applies only to adults. The adult comes into the conditions I spoke of then through the influence of arsenic. In the case of these children, however, in whom a kind of crime is actually being committed – that cannot be denied – the effect of arsenic or similar substances is based on something else. These children have to be treated in this criminal way at roughly the age that I have always indicated to you as an important stage in life: the age between changing teeth, that is, the seventh or eighth year, and sexual maturity, that is, the fourteenth or fifteenth year. And, isn't it true, at this age the child is not just sent to school, to the ordinary elementary school, because that is where he can best learn through human development, but at this age something completely different is taking place.

Do you remember, gentlemen, I told you that man does not only consist of this physical body that you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands, but that man also consists of supersensible, soul and spiritual elements. Now there is a fine body of man, which I have called the etheric body of man. In human development, one must look at this etheric body just as one looks at the physical body. If I am to draw it schematically for you, we have the human being (see drawing) according to his physical body; but around this physical body and also within it is this fine body, the etheric body. And further, in addition to this physical body and etheric body (of which the etheric body cannot be seen with the naked eye), we have the astral body in humans, which is able to feel. Plants also have an etheric body, which enables them to grow; this comes from the etheric body. Humans and animals have an astral body; they can sense and feel. Plants cannot do this. I told you that some people believe that plants can feel; they just can't!

You see, gentlemen, for every substance that has an effect on a person, you have to ask yourself: on which of these limbs does the substance in question act? Now arsenic has a particularly strong effect on the astral body and on breathing. Breathing is precisely dependent on the astral body. So when you give someone arsenic, all the consequences that arise from arsenic come about indirectly through the astral body.

When a person goes through the first years of their life, from birth, let's say until the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year of life, the physical human body develops primarily. You can see how this physical human body develops. Look at a very young child who has just been born; you won't be able to tell whether it looks like the father or the mother. When a child is born, the aunts and uncles come, don't they? One says: Oh, it looks just like its mother — especially the feet! — the other comes and says: But it looks just like its father! — It is just like that: the little child is still undecidedly developed in relation to its physical body, and only later can you see who it will resemble. Just consider a child's nose, for example, which is such an expressive organ. A small child's nose can look quite different from what it will become later. For some children, it comes later, of course, but as a rule, by the time the teeth change, the nose, which is the last to develop into its proper shape and form, is already in its proper shape and form.

Later, after the seventh or eighth year, the physical body only grows larger and stronger in the muscles, but its actual form and shape is already established by the age of seven. So it is that between the ages of one and seven, the physical body in particular expresses itself. And between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, between the ages of seven or eight and fourteen or fifteen, the etheric body, in which the forces of nutrition and growth are found, develops primarily. And the astral body only develops between the fourteenth, fifteenth and twentieth, twenty-first years. Only then does the astral body really develop. Not that it was not there before – the human being has it from birth – but the actual formation of the astral body only occurs after the fourteenth, fifteenth year.

If an adult who has passed the fourteenth or fifteenth year is given arsenic, then they have developed their astral body. Arsenic still works in him, but the organism can still defend itself against it to some extent. However, if a child between the ages of seven and fifteen takes arsenic, the astral body is not yet formed, and arsenic takes full effect on the child. There is no counteraction at all in the human organism. And the consequence of this is that the effect of arsenic, which mainly causes the fat masses to accumulate in the human body, causing everything to become fat, causes everything to become spherical, to become wider between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year.

You must bear in mind that the things I am telling you are of tremendous importance for life! Isn't it true that each of you can say: Well, you are telling us that arsenic, when given to a child between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen, has a great significance, makes the child fat, round; but I know people who, even without being given extra arsenic, became terribly fat from childhood on! Yes, gentlemen, you must only consider that the substances that exist in nature are present everywhere, at least in small quantities. And it can be said that a person cannot nourish himself at all, or a child cannot nourish himself either, without taking something that contains arsenic. Arsenic is also found in food.

Now you know that children have different tastes, different appetites; one child likes this, the other that. And now there are children who particularly love those foods that contain arsenic. In later life, it also happens that you get fat from what you like. If you eat stuff that you don't like, you'll get spindly. If you eat stuff that you like and also have time to indulge in, you will become stout and fat. However, this is especially the case with children; and it is especially the case with children between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen. So if children have such a taste for food that contains arsenic, they will become stout and fat. But in the case of those children who are exhibited in fairground booths, at trade fairs and the like – as the questioner has mentioned – the arsenic is artificially introduced, just as it is in the Alpine countries, and in Hungary, where arsenic is found in the rocks of the mountains. So these children are taught about arsenic, and the main thing is that the child acquires a taste for arsenic at precisely this age. It is horrible, but it is true: the child gradually begins to crave this arsenic as if it were sugar, and consumes it, and as a result, before the astral body is properly formed, the child becomes fat and plump. Such children can be shown because they are abnormal and gain an awful lot of weight. And then people think it is something strange. People always want to see something unusual, and what is not done to please people! There are many other things that are intended to please people. For example, there is something else that can be done with boys at the same age!

You know, at this age of sexual maturity, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, the human voice also changes. This shows that sexual maturity is connected to the human voice. In boys, it changes; in girls, it transitions more to the development of the breasts and so on. But in boys, the voice changes. Now there is the nonsense – and it was practiced in Rome with great skill – that in order to keep the voice boyish, to get a really high voice, they castrate the boys, that is, they cut out their sexual organs. This is how you get the famous choirboys with their incredibly high voices. Now, you see, that is even greater nonsense. But it is done under the guise of holiness. I don't know if you know him or not? Isn't it true that these things also exist, and one must be quite clear about the fact that there has been something like this in the world, and that people will do anything to exploit even human nature for show.

If we now consider the consequences of something like this, it is indeed the case that if a person has been taught this arsenic at a young age and then, after he has grown thick and fat, he is supposed to develop his astral body, it is now much too small for the thick body! It is much too small and weak. And the consequence of this is that when the astral body is supposed to begin to develop with sexual maturity, this astral body is indeed much too small and weak for the thick, fat body. And such children, who have been fed with arsenic in this way and dragged around to sideshows, then have an astral body that is too small. And the consequence of this is that certain organs cannot develop at all. The organs then become flabby, quite flabby. And in particular the lungs become flabby in such children. This is sometimes a terrible pity, because these children reach a state where they are actually no longer able to breathe by the age of twenty, or even earlier. This is not only because the lungs become clogged with fat, but also because the lungs become flabby and lose their strength. And then the time comes when something very special happens to the lungs. You see, gentlemen, the lungs are not just a respiratory organ, the lungs are also an important organ for nutrition, and the lungs must be properly nourished if a person is to live in the right way. Most lung diseases are not even based on the fact that breathing is not healthy, but rather they are based on the fact that the lungs are not properly nourished.

Now, in these children, from the age of seventeen or eighteen onwards, the lungs are no longer properly nourished at all, because the fatty degeneration of all organs prevents the nutrients from reaching the lungs at all. They reach the lungs last, so to speak, even though it is the lungs that need nourishing. As I have already explained, the nutrients undergo all kinds of transformations in the human body. They undergo six to seven transformations. And the lungs need these seven times transformed nutrients, the noblest things. But with these children it no longer comes to this transformation. Therefore, such children die at least in their early twenties. And one can definitely say that such children, who are exhibited in this way, must die at an age in their early twenties. They either die of exhaustion or they get lung disease. They usually die of lung disease. This is related to what you said about the fact that you no longer see such people later because they die earlier.

Of course, it is difficult to take legal action against such things. People should ensure that it stops, and in general they should do more to contribute to a proper social life than just shout for the law. It is not right to just shout for the law. But I am also convinced that very few people know what I have just told you, for example. Very few people know how much more harmful arsenic is at the age at which it is administered to these children than, for example, at a later age. And I still believe that if people are educated about these things, things will improve even without laws, without coercion, without the threat of a truncheon. But how can things get better if you can't educate people!

You say: Well, we have learned little, we cannot know that; the university professors will know. Yes, but they don't know either. They just don't know. And that is why such things are not spread. And it is important that such things are really understood in the widest circles. Such things must be known at all costs.

Now, something similar, but yet again quite different, is the case with alcohol. We have already spoken about alcohol. But, in the case of arsenic poisoning, which consists of fatty degeneration, it is of course the case that children are taught it by others, and when an adult teaches themselves arsenic, they actually do so consciously. And it has to be said: education would have an enormous effect here. For example, one could say that someone who simply teaches himself about arsenic out of vanity, as I have told you, could be educated; he would probably refrain from doing so if he knew the consequences very well. With alcohol, on the other hand, the problem is that education is not particularly useful if it does not lead to a person not drinking alcohol at all. Because when he starts drinking one or two glasses, he reaches a state where education loses its effectiveness, and then he continues drinking. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult with alcohol to achieve much through education. It should also be effective through education, and the fact that so much is resorted to by law is actually a sad fact for the strength of humanity. There are already countries today – just think of North America – where bans on alcohol imports are being enacted so that people will remain reasonable. Yes, if it comes to that with humanity, that humanity will only remain reasonable, will remain useful at all, if every single thing is prescribed by law, then humanity on earth is actually no longer worth much.

It is like this with alcohol: I have already told you that man produces alcohol in his body. This is because man needs alcohol for his preservation. And you can be sure, gentlemen, that you will never get drunk on the alcohol you produce in yourselves! It has just the right amount that you need to preserve the food in you, to permanently maintain everything that man needs permanently. You can imagine, can't you, what you need alcohol for that you produce yourself. You will also have seen here or there that if you want to preserve a dead animal or some human limb, you cannot put it in the air, but you put it in spirit, in alcohol. So alcohol preserves the dead living thing in its form. This is a very important law of nature. If you leave the dead living thing to ordinary nature, what happens to it? The human body perishes the moment it is left to the earth, it is dissolved. And so it is with all living things. The moment the etheric body is out of the living being, the living being is destroyed; only not if a substance like alcohol is used. Alcohol therefore has the power to hold together the other forces that hold a living limb together.

From this you can see that alcohol is not of this earth. Yes, but you can also see from something else that alcohol is not really of this earth at all. The human body and the animal body and the plant body are destroyed by what is of this earth; but alcohol, as they say, preserves them, keeps them, protects them from destruction.

But how is alcohol produced? Well, you just have to look at the vine. Alcohol is produced precisely where the sun can best shine on the vine. And you know that no wines thrive in northern Germany because it is already too cold there, because the sun no longer has the appropriate strength there. If you draw a line parallel to the equator at Grünberg in Silesia, very few people get drunk on the Grünberger, because it is as dry as it can possibly be! Only where the sun's power reaches the plants can wine be created. So wine is produced not by the earthly, but precisely by the extraterrestrial, the solar, by that which is outside the earth. Man must be very careful indeed when he takes into himself that which is outside the earth.

How does it come about when a person produces alcohol in himself? This comes about in the following way, and I will tell you something that will probably be of particular interest to you, but you have to pay a little attention to understand it. Do you see where there is solar power, gentlemen? Yes, solar power is everywhere where the sun shines. But solar power is not only where the sun shines; it can also be there in another way. Let's make it quite clear: on a really hot summer's day, I put the chair out there in the burning sun, leave it out there for a few hours, and then I invite you to sit on the chair. You sit on it. Gosh, you think, it's gotten warm! Well, it's not that the sun is shining on the relevant organ and warming you. If you had stood in the corresponding position for so long, it would have become as warm for you at the corresponding organ as it has become for the chair; then you would have experienced it on your own body. But that is not the case; the chair has become warm. So you see, there is a very ordinary inanimate body that has absorbed the warmth of the sun and then gives it off to you.

With coal, it is much more complicated. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the coal was a palm tree or some other tree. How did it become that? Well, there was the earth (see drawing), there was the palm tree or a palm-like tree, which was illuminated by the sun. Afterwards it perished and went into the earth. But just as the warmth of the sun remains in the chair, so the warmth of the sun remains in the palm tree, going down into the earth.

The palm tree carbonizes; the heat of the sun remains inside. And after millennia, you dig the coal out of the earth, put it in your oven, and the heat of the sun comes back to you. Today you heat with the heat of the sun that shone on the earth thousands of years ago. You often don't think about that. When you sit on a chair and it warms your backside, you are still aware of the fact that the sun has left behind some of its energy. With coal, you no longer notice it. So you have to say: wherever there is coal in the earth, there is very old solar energy. Very old solar energy is present everywhere in the coal deposits.

Yes, gentlemen, you eat plants. You take the plants into yourself. Your own organism works faster than the earth; there, coal endowed with life is transformed very quickly from the plants, and you actually get carbonic acid with a high carbon content in your own body. This carbonic acid that you have inside you, it just doesn't carbonize like the hard coal in the earth, but remains carbonic acid. Now, in carbonic acid, you have carbon, which you carry within you, and oxygen, which comes from the air and also from food. It is called carbon and oxygen. But in the human body you also have hydrogen in it, for example, when you drink water. This hydrogen combines with the carbon and the oxygen. And you only have to think of what is in the human body and what, under certain conditions, starts to get smelly. You only need to think of what is in the animal body as eggs - we talked about it recently - that gets smelly. That is the nitrogen. Only it does not stink in the air because it is connected with other substances in the appropriate way.

Now, you see, gentlemen, you go around, need oxygen, carbon, nitrogen for your life, and form alcohol inside your organism. Alcohol is formed in the human organism so that we do not always disintegrate internally. The body would dissolve, as it does as a corpse, if alcohol and alcohol-like substances were not developed. That is natural. But now we must ask: on which of these bodies does alcohol actually have an effect? You see, alcohol has an extremely beneficial effect on the physical body at first, if it is drunk in moderation, because then, if a person produces too little alcohol himself, he can take a good preservative with him in the alcohol, and alcohol does not actually harm the physical body at all. Alcohol does not have a particularly bad effect on the physical body. If alcohol were to harm the physical body – people do not consider this enough – then the vine would be in a bad way, because the vine also has a physical body. The vine is now completely drunk – it is, because it has nothing but alcohol in it – but its physical body does not suffer at all. Well, but the etheric body does not suffer from alcohol either. It is only the astral body that suffers from alcohol in adults. In the case of children, it is so harmful, as I will mention in a moment, because something else happens. But in adults, alcohol in turn affects the astral body, just like arsenic, and in particular the I itself. And the I lives in the blood circulation. So that alcohol has an extremely strong effect on the blood circulation.

It is especially bad for children because alcohol already contains an astral body. Plants have only an etheric body, but the alcohol in the grapevine already has an astral body. It has the same effect as what is seething in the blood. Can't you understand that? Yes, you can understand that: it has the same effect as what is seething in the blood. And that is why a child who drinks alcohol early on actually acquires an astral body, which it is not supposed to have fully developed until the age of fourteen or fifteen; and it does not have it under its control. This is why alcohol is particularly harmful for a child, because the child immediately acquires an astral body under the influence of alcohol.

From this you can see that alcohol actually has a real effect on the soul and spirit of a person. That is where it works. There it destroys breathing and blood circulation, which of course emanate from the soul and spirit. That is where alcohol has an effect.

Now you don't have to imagine it as if the head were an organ in itself and the chest were an organ in itself, but although the human being is tripartite, everything goes into each other again. Not only the lower part of the human body needs to be nourished, but the head of the human being needs to be nourished in a very special way. And if a person drinks alcohol and has such an abdomen that the alcohol is processed particularly well in the abdomen, let's say a person is one who can tolerate two or three glasses of alcohol quite well. I don't know if Mr. Müller wanted to say that about himself? But you can probably tolerate a small amount of alcohol quite well?

Mr. Müller denies this by saying that the first glass of beer made his eyes water the next morning.

So then it is actually the opposite for you; you can't actually tolerate any alcohol at all?

Confirmed by Mr. Müller.

Well, then you are an example of those who do not tolerate alcohol very well. Now, if someone does not tolerate alcohol well, does not actually digest alcohol very well, then the alcohol comes undigested into the head, then also affects the eyes and causes the mucus masses to push up into the head. In the same way that a good alcohol drinker's blood starts to boil, the mucous masses start to boil in the person who can't tolerate it well, and they solidify on the outside, becoming grainy. These are mucous masses that have become dense. This is how it can be for someone who can't really tolerate alcohol, even with the first glass. But let us assume that someone can tolerate it well. Then it also happens that the matter goes into the head, but then it goes into the blood; and then not these granules come, but then the whole blood circulation of the head is stimulated, and the whole blood circulation of the head secretes substances that are harmful. Then comes the general daze, the general hangover, and the person just comes to the state where he just keeps drinking. So that's the one where you can distinguish the effect of alcohol on one person or another.

One might be tempted to say that these distinctions should not be necessary, because in all circumstances, when an especially abnormal effect of alcohol occurs, one should actually drink less alcohol. It is not good to have any effect of alcohol at all and then continue drinking.

But as I said, alcohol affects the astral body and the ego today. The ego feels stimulated. People like the taste of alcohol, and that is why they feel that alcohol gives them something that elevates them above the earthly. This feeling is actually very interesting, because I had to tell you: alcohol does not come from the earthly, but from the non-earthly. That is why a person feels elevated above the earthly. Alcohol breaks down worry, doesn't it. So a person actually comes out of himself a little through alcohol, and it does the person an extraordinary amount of good when he comes out of himself a little. And that is what now also leads to alcohol-related mischief in the broadest sense.

Now there is still one question that we have to deal with. It is this: Mr. Müller said that near Darmstadt, if I understood you correctly, there is a pond and that warm industrial wastewater runs through it? From what I have already said, you can see what it is about. The time before last I already tried to make it clear to you that when I say that the fish in the sea do not have the direct sun, you must of course not believe that these fish have no solar effect at all; but just as the coal still has the solar effect in the earth after thousands and thousands of years, so the water still has the solar effect in it. And there, it must be said, the fish must be organized differently than the animals that live on land. Now, you can see that the fish are organized differently. If the fish had lungs like the other animals and humans, they could not live in the water, of course. You know that the higher animals and humans, if they live in water all the time, will simply drown. So they cannot live in it. Fish can live in it because they have gills instead of lungs; this enables them to absorb the air that is in the water and which still contains the solar forces.

Now you know how to breed goldfish. You can't breed goldfish in ordinary water, you simply won't get any goldfish. In the shade, you can at most reproduce goldfish, but not breed them. In the shade, you can only reproduce the offspring of the old goldfish, but not raise them. The children of the old goldfish take on their vivid color if you want to raise them without sun; but you will notice that if you keep the goldfish in sunless water, they will turn completely pale after three to four months. The goldfish get their vibrant color when they get direct sun in the water. That makes a difference. It is not the same if I have a pond or even just a small basin here, and the sun shines into it (see drawing), as it is for the fish in the same place as in a different place: in this case, it has to use old solar forces that have been in the water for longer; here it gets new solar forces that have been in the water for a shorter time.

Now, at the Darmstadt factory, where the warm water flows into the pond, there is something very special. You will admit that something that has lived under a certain constraint for a long time struggles and develops particularly strongly when it comes to a free life. Just think what it would be like if you had tied a person up for a long time. They cannot move a limb when they are locked up. When they are free again, they enjoy their life and savor it all the more. And now think of the water that flows from the Darmstadt factory into the pond. This water has received its solar effect in a very special way. This Darmstadt factory is initially also powered by coal, it all goes back to the coal. The warmth that is there comes from the coal. The coal has stored solar forces that are thousands and thousands of years old. These solar forces now flow into the pond as warm water. And it is indeed the case that these solar forces, which are released again from the coal after they have been imprisoned in the coal for thousands of years, are particularly effective. So you can't do better than to let these effective solar forces flow into the pond with the warm water. Yes, you could even develop this artificially. You could develop it artificially by pouring warmed water into the basins in which you raise the goldfish. And especially when you let it flow, when the solar forces are set in motion, they have a particularly stimulating effect on the goldfish, giving them the most vibrant color.

You can do the following experiment. Imagine taking a large basin; first, let warm water flow in slowly at the bottom, standing still, and then the usual water over it; and then put goldfish in it. Then take a second basin, let warm water into it, but let a stream of water flow into it all the time, and then see which fish have a more vibrant golden color: not those in the still water, but those that have the constantly flowing warm water, because that keeps the powers alive.

All this works independently in the industrial enterprise, because new warm water is always flowing in. So it is not at all surprising that the goldfish thrive there particularly well. Such are the natural effects. Only if one really understands these things correctly can one discover these natural effects.

You will now ask yourselves: Yes, but what is it actually that works in the sun's rays? — Yes, gentlemen, that is precisely the aether that also works in our own etheric body! What works in the sun's rays is the aether. And just as the aether first stimulates the astral in us, so it is also out there in nature.

The vine itself has an etheric body within it; but through its contact with the warmth of the sun, something astral, something actually extraterrestrial, is formed in the vine, and this works as alcohol. And so one can only come to an understanding of things by taking into account both the human being within and the human being without, in nature.

And now I come to a completely different matter, a small addition that I want to give you at the last moment in relation to Mr. Burle's question about clothing. You see, I have already told you a great deal about clothing, but it is interesting that clothing really did come about through human instinct in such a way that it corresponds to the whole being of the human being, to the whole nature of the human being. The human being already has three parts as a physical human being. He has his head, his chest organs, where breathing and blood circulation are primarily, and thus inner movement, and he has outer movement in the limbs. So, even in his physical body, the human being consists of three parts: the head, the chest system – I always call it the rhythmic system because everything moves in rhythm – and the outer movement of the organs, the outer movement organization.

Now, you see, the etheric body is particularly effective in the head, in the chest, in the blood circulation and in the breathing of the astral body and in the arbitrary movements of the I. If you look at all the clothes, with the exception of the somewhat too simple clothes of wild people - not true, of the very wild ones - you can always see what kind of frippery is made on it, essentially all clothing consists of three pieces, somehow of three pieces. Of course, it is somewhat different everywhere; you just have to bear in mind that in the course of the historical development of mankind it has changed tremendously, frippery has been added, wischiwaschi has been added, but actually every piece of clothing consists of three parts. One part is what originally developed from the apron skin – and the men of ancient Egypt essentially only wore apron skins. What is this clothing for in humans? For the limbs. By covering the feet, man expressed that he can walk with his feet. The power of the feet, the way they move, was to be expressed with the apron skin.

It is interesting that such things are inherited and that Freemasons wear the apron as a special distinction at their meetings. This is an old Egyptian inheritance. Just as people today know why they pin medals on, they know just as little why they put on the apron. The apron is put on as a sign that one is supposed to make a particularly strong impression with one's limbs. And the apron gave rise to everything that in any way concerns the limbs, for example our trousers, although they have been so greatly modified that they tend to hinder rather than promote our gait. So this relates to the limbs. The Egyptians developed the apron fur particularly artificially, making it fit particularly snugly around the limbs; they then stuck their arms into it, and so the apron fur was created, which goes up, gets a bib, sleeves, so that the upper limbs are also enclosed in it.

The second thing, gentlemen, is that man expresses the chest system in clothing. And this chest system is best expressed in everything that is shirt-like and pulled over the head. This was particularly developed by the ancient Assyrians. They developed the shirt-like garment that you slip through at the top and which then goes down smoothly. This is the expression for the chest system, for the inner movement. That is why the folds are made that way. The Greeks then adopted this from Asia and added this artificial fold that was supposed to even imitate the blood vessels in their most important course. It was designed to imitate the most important blood circulation and the flow inside.

The third is the cloak, the cloak that is thrown over. Now, the cloak that is thrown over was originally not only thrown over the shoulders, but also over the head. You can see that in certain parts of the country, where it is still done in the same way. The cloak is thrown over the head so that it also covers the head. In the throwing of the cloak, the idea of everything that comes from the head is expressed; in the throwing of the skin, more the will that lives in the limbs; in the shirt-like garment that we have – not true, there is only a little left in our vest, but in the priestly garment, in the garment of Catholic priests, you can still find it very well developed – that is still present in female clothing, there is the chest garment. And the head clothing is the mantle. Only of course it has undergone changes. Imagine the mantle that is thrown over the shoulders and also over the head, thrown over there (see drawing), it originally covered the head. If it is a red mantle, it is very beautiful. The red color is such that one does not even try to disfigure it. Then the time has come, of which I spoke the last time, when people are no longer attentive to colors. So they also made a black coat or a blue one, and what did they do? They cut off the coat here and made the headgear separately! That's what the hat became. Of course, you can't tell that from it anymore. But I still have to say: when I see a person wearing a tailcoat and a top hat, I always say to myself: Gosh, how you've changed! – because originally the tailcoat and top hat were a coat. Then the coat was cut down, took on its terrible shape from the tailcoat, and the top remained as a top hat to cover the head. You can still see it originally. Just see a top hat with a tailcoat together, and then try to cut the top hat apart at the front so that you can throw the whole thing over your head. So you have to go back to the old clothes to find out what the clothes are made of, although I don't think that Mr. Burle wears so many tailcoats and top hats that he asked why they are worn. (Laughter.) But it does look as if the heads of the people have been cut off when they walk around in tails and top hats. Next Wednesday at nine o'clock in the morning, the continuation.

Good morning, gentlemen! So, you probably have another question?

Mr. Müller asks what might cause a change in the pupils?

Dr. Steiner: That is a very personal question! You would have to come down to the Clinical Therapeutic Institute; when I go down again, I will tell you so that you can come then. That is a medical matter.

Another question: what does the vertical stripe on the sides of the fish mean?

Another question: a man who drank an awful lot of alcohol died eight weeks ago. In the last few days before he died, he ate chocolate and sugar, which he had never done in his life. Why do you think that was?

Dr. Steiner: Now, regarding the question of the longitudinal stripe in fish, you must be clear about the following. When you look at any being, be it of the plant or animal world, you have to ask yourself how these beings relate to the outside world. You see, plants have their green color, first of all, in their leaves. This green color in the leaves comes from the fact that the plant has a very specific relationship to light and warmth. The plant absorbs what comes from the light on the one hand and gives back something else, which it does not absorb. And that is where the green color of the plant comes from.

Likewise, you may ask yourself: what is the reason for one or the other in the case of fish? Now I would just like to point out that you will see that fish that live more in cloudy water have a much darker color than those that live in bright water. Those fish that seek out the darkness are bluish, even black. Those fish that live in lighter places are lighter in color themselves. So you can see how the external influence of light and warmth affects the fish.

And consider other animals that live in areas where there is a lot of snow, for example polar bears. They themselves take on a white color. Everything that lives is somehow exposed to the environment.

Now, in the case of fish, there is a very clear relationship between their own being and their environment. And these stripes on the edge are there to make the fish finely sensitive to light and warmth in their environment. So the fish become particularly sensitive as a result. This is not so useful for them - I have spoken of this before - for the way they move, but it is useful for the way they process light and warmth internally, so that this is a kind of nerve organ.

As for your other question about the man who drank alcohol all his life and now, before his end, began to become very pious and ate the pious chocolate and sugar – you say: the last days before his death – well, this phenomenon can easily be understood when compared to numerous others that occur throughout life. I have met many people who have grown old. As they grew old, for example, they saw their handwriting become more and more shaky. The handwriting became shaky; they could no longer write properly, and it was precisely in their handwriting that they had grown old. They might have had a handwriting in which they wrote, let's say, Lehfeld (clear, distinct), and then they wrote: Lehfeld (shaky). But then, in the last days before their death, it turned out that they could write in a certain clear handwriting again; they could suddenly write well again. I have met many people who had regained their former ability to write clearly before their death. It has also been observed in numerous cases – I am not just sharing my own observations in this area, but well-attested observations that have been made – that people who have learned some language as a child – as a child they may have been in some foreign country, learned a language and forgot it again; that does happen; let us assume that as a forty- or fifty-year-old man, they had absolutely no opportunity to communicate with anyone else in this language – suddenly, a few days before their death, they begin to speak this language quite understandably again. It came out again! Yes, you see, these are very significant phenomena. What is actually going on here? This is what happens: when a person dies, his physical body, that is, one part of his being, remains on earth; it dissolves into the earth, is destroyed by the earth. I have already told you that the next part of the human being, the etheric body, gradually dissolves into the general cosmic ether a few days after death. And then, the astral body and the real self remain for the human being to pass through the spiritual world. They then pass through the spiritual world.

There is a complete separation of the individual members of the human being. And anyone who has an eye for it can observe in someone whose death is near how the various members, physical body, etheric body, astral body, separate from one another. Now, what does it mean when someone changes his writing a few days before his death? Yes, gentlemen, we do not write with our physical body! What do we actually write with? We write with the I! We use the physical body only as a tool of the I when we write. And our I does not grow old! With your I, you are as young today as you were when you were born. The I does not grow old. The astral body does not age to the same extent as the physical body. But it is the physical body that one has to use as a tool if one wants to write, so the physical body has to grasp the pen with its hand. Now, as a person grows older, he becomes weaker and weaker and can no longer properly access his physical body. But not only that, but all kinds of things are deposited in the physical body itself. And the result of this is that the person can no longer use his fingers properly. He becomes clumsy, trembles, instead of making firm strokes when he writes. When a person is close to death, the etheric body begins to separate from the physical body. There is a loosening. Sometimes this can happen a few days before death; sometimes it happens at the last moment. It cannot be said that one should no longer try to heal a person whom one has observed for days before his death, that he could also die; on the other hand, what has become loose can be joined together again. One must always, as long as a person is alive, try to heal him under all circumstances. But the fact is that in many people the etheric body loosens for days before death.

Now, when the etheric body loosens, the person becomes stronger. That a person becomes stronger when his etheric body loosens, you can also see from something else. There is a kind of madman who develops tremendous strength, quite extraordinary strength. You might often be amazed at what such a madman can achieve in terms of strength. Not only are the beatings he gives out much more severe than those of others, but furniture that no one would think of lifting can sometimes be lifted with ease by a madman. So you see, something strange happens that distinguishes such a person from a normal person. What happens in the case of the insane person? Well, in the case of the insane person, the etheric body is always somewhat loose, or the astral body is loosened. Now, the human being is not exactly strong through the physical body, but weak. He must serve the physical body through the etheric or astral body. It is quite correct to say in the vernacular: “Something is loose in him” - something is loosened. The people sometimes speak very correctly because an instinct for the supersensible is present in the people, and in such old folk sayings one should not see something contemptible, but something that is absolutely true. When the etheric or astral body of a madman has become loosened and thus strong, then, as a madman, he is in the same position as someone whose etheric body has already become loosened because he is dying in a few days. And when he becomes stronger in the etheric body, he can write better again. When he becomes stronger in the astral body – because everything that one has forgotten is in there – then he draws out of the astral body what he has forgotten and can again speak the language he used to speak.

But now take your case. You see, I didn't know the man and therefore don't know how he lived. Perhaps you knew him? Then you can answer certain questions. Did you know him well? Well, you see, with a person like that, it is very important to consider whether he had a woman or someone else in his life. Perhaps it could have been you who constantly told him how harmful it is to drink so much alcohol? (This is confirmed.) Now, there we have something that will lead us on the trail. He had people around him who always admonished him not to drink so much because it is not good for him. With this man, as they say, it went in one ear and out the other. This is another popular saying that is not without foundation. It is true that man is so constituted that certain things go in at one ear and out at the other. Why? Well, because the astral body does not hear them. The ear is only the instrument of hearing. The astral body does not hear.

But now it happens that the astral body hears the matter, but the physical body does not participate because the person in question is too weak. Now think about this. The man heard from Mr. Erbsmehl himself on my account: You are a completely crazy guy – I'm saying it quite radically now, aren't I – because you get drunk every other moment! That's not on, it's inhuman! and so on, and the man swallowed it all. That's what happened, it happens in life that people swallow the matter and then move on again. But his astral body has kept something of it. Perhaps you said it so strongly and so often that the astral body and the etheric body could not get away without keeping it. As long as they were stuck inside the physical body without any hindrance, they did not hear anything. At the moment when the physical body became so relaxed that the etheric and astral bodies were loosened, yes, then suddenly the thought came into the person through the etheric and astral bodies: Mr. Erbsmehl might have been right after all! Maybe it is completely crazy that I have drunk so much throughout my life. Now I want to do penance, now that things have been loosened up, as you can imagine. The astral body and the ether body say: Aha, now he is not drinking alcohol, now he is drinking chocolate and sugar water! Perhaps he would have drunk lemonade too, if there had been any. The fact that something like this can happen proves, especially to the person who looks at things sensibly, that all kinds of things can get into a person that do not come out. I also told you the opposite case once. The opposite case was where the story did not remain in the astral and etheric bodies, but entered the physical body too strongly, where, so to speak, one listened far too much to the matter. The opposite case is this: a former acquaintance of mine — he was a very learned gentleman — it happened one day that his consciousness and memory left him. He no longer knew who he once was, what he had done; he no longer knew anything of his entire erudition. He had forgotten everything. He didn't even know that he was himself, that he was he. But nevertheless, his mind was clear. His mind was working clearly. He went to the train station, bought a train ticket and traveled far. He had also taken money with him, what little he had left. He could travel far. When he arrived at the station for which the ticket was valid, he bought a new ticket. And he did that several times, not knowing anything about what he was doing. But the mind is so separate from the actual person that everything happened quite rationally, as animals act rationally - as I have often shown you in many a good example - without having an ego. Now that he found himself again, his memory came back. He knew who he was, and his learning also came back to his mind. But he found himself in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless! That's where he ended up last. He left from Stuttgart. It was later established that he left from there. He was unconscious in Budapest and so on. He was able to make the journey from Berlin to Stuttgart again. Then someone from his family, who was terribly worried, picked him up. He was able to do that again. He then ended it by committing suicide. One time it was due to unconsciousness, the other time it was suicide.

But what is going on in such a case? Yes, you see, I actually have this man I've been telling you about in front of me, so that I could actually paint him anytime. The man had eyes that made you think they wanted to go deeper and deeper into his head. He had something here at the front, as if his nose had dug into – all very subtly suggested, of course – the physical body. He spoke to you in a very strange way. He spoke to you in such a way that he was completely convinced of his words in a different way than another person. You had the feeling that he always tasted his own words on his tongue and swallowed them, he liked them so much. He likes it so much when he speaks, he swallows it all in. And if you contradicted him in any way, he would get quite angry. But he didn't show much of this anger on the outside, but his face distorted. If a car rattled somewhere on the street, he would jump terribly; if you told him any kind of news, he would jump just as much, whether it was happy or sad.

You see, this person had listened too much, and everything expressed itself immediately in his physical body. And so he had the habit of always burying his astral body very deep in his physical body; he didn't keep anything to himself, like your alcoholic, but everything was buried in the physical body until the physical body was ready to also move his own self for a while.

There you have the opposite case. In the case of this alcoholic, the admonitions remained in the astral body and came out when it loosened. In the case of the other person I told you about, the astral body became so deeply embedded in the physical body that the physical body also left on its own.

So you see, there are indications everywhere in the human being that these higher limbs, these supersensible limbs, are intimately connected with his physical body and with his etheric body. All this shows you, however, that you can really only get to know life by looking at such life contexts, which directly reveal to you: There is a physical body in a person, there is an etheric body in a person, there is an astral body, there is an I.

You can also see from the case where the person suddenly develops a completely different appetite under the moral pressure of what he has left in the astral body in life, how other phenomena can also occur. There is the following example. I will tell you an interesting story now. There was once a woman who dealt in vegetables and similar things. It is still the time that lies far behind us. The woman went from house to house with her vegetable basket. Now, she was always seen as a woman who saw life from a greengrocer's point of view. She laughed when someone said something funny; otherwise she was indifferent to life. She carried her vegetables into the houses, took her money and spent her life that way. Once she came to an apartment and wanted to sell vegetables. There was no one else there but the master of the house, who opened the door for her. And this master of the house had a very special look. He looked at people very sternly and had often noticed that when he looked at people with his special look, people would talk about things they would otherwise remain silent about. Now the following came to light; this is a very well-attested fact. This vegetable woman came to the man; he looked at her. She was frightened. He said nothing at all, just looked at her. He saw that she was frightened, didn't say a word, but kept looking at her. Now she was not only frightened, but said, “Don't look at me like that! Please don't look at me like that, I'll tell you everything!” He said nothing, but kept looking at her. So the woman said, ‘Yes, but I only did it out of fear.’ He said nothing again, he just kept looking at her. ‘Don't look at me like that, I really wouldn't have done it if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He said nothing again, just kept looking at her. “Yes, I want to tell you everything, but don't look at me like that!” He looked at her. ‘I want to tell you everything! Yes, you see, I wouldn't have murdered it if I hadn't, if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He continued to look at her. “Yes, I was so afraid of people, the child would have said something very bad about me, and so I did it out of fear. I wasn't even properly conscious!” And you see, this woman told him about a child murder she had committed from A to Z! What happened there?

The thing is this: this man had a certain keen eye. When a person has normal eyes, well, he talks to others, he doesn't particularly pierce them. When someone has an eye that can easily fixate, which then becomes penetrating, then magnetizes, one could say, the etheric body of the person. And the conscience is located in the etheric body. If the etheric body is properly connected to the physical body, well, no, when something stirs in it, the person will immediately push it down. But if the etheric body is magnetized by such a look, then this etheric body loosens. And if a person has something on his conscience, then it loosens and comes up and disturbs the astral body and the ego. And the consequence of this is that through this loosening of the conscience that has happened to the etheric body, the person makes confessions that he would not otherwise make.

These are the things that show, in turn, how the etheric body, when it is artificially loosened from the physical body, works independently and how the physical body actually hides much in the person that the person carries within himself. And that comes out when the etheric body loosens, possibly - not always, but possibly - before death.

There has also been a lot of abuse in these matters. If you were a bit of a life observer before the war, you could find the same thing over and over again in every hotel or wherever people pick up letters that are piled up where letters are usually piled up: something with the label of an American company. The same thing was everywhere. What had happened back then? Well, an American company had been founded that had branches. There was one in Berlin, in Frankfurt, in most of the larger cities. So business must have been good! It was announced that anyone who wanted to gain power over humanity would receive little books from this American company. All he has to do is send in a certain amount of money and he gets little books, and these little books contain instructions on how to gain power over humanity. Well, all the traveling salesmen, all the agents, they thought to themselves: “That's a nice thing, gaining power over people. Gosh, we'll sell a lot of those, no one will be able to resist us!” These little books immediately started to contain instructions on how the person concerned should adjust his eyes so that he does not look the other in the eye, but at the point between the eyes, he should stare fixedly; then the other person is magnetized and comes under his influence and does what he wants. Well, you know, the wine travelers and the other travelers have had all this sent to them. And you could see that, especially in hotels where such agents had stayed, these letters and things were always sent in bulk. Most of them didn't do better business because of that, but American society did do good business. It was of no use to most of them, but it might have been of use to a few; and they did something that no one should do under any circumstances, because it is a sin against human freedom. No person may aspire to get power over another person in such a way! And if nature gives it to him, as it did to that person of whom I told you, then it can indeed become bad enough under certain circumstances, but then it is nature that gives something like a special look; it is much less abused than with the person who wants to learn the matter. Now, during the war these follies have decreased and now they actually no longer exist. But one can say that one can learn from these things, on the one hand, how people themselves exploit the spiritual, and how the worst materialists – because they were mostly materialists, who allowed these things to come to them – also turn to the spiritual when it is a matter of making a profit with the spiritual. They do not believe in him, but they turn to the spirit when it is a matter of making a profit with the spirit! So I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that these things can be terribly abused.

But there are many other things to be considered. What people consciously strive for in this little book is, after all, practiced, albeit to a lesser extent, by some people who also achieve something with it for themselves. Perhaps you have occasionally attended meetings where speakers have spoken. Now, you will admit that the conviction that emanates from the speaker does not always play the only role, but that a tremendous amount of what emanates from the speaker as an influence also plays a role. And that is the case; the most popular popular speakers are sometimes those people who gain influence over crowds of people or other masses in an improper way. One does indeed have very special experiences in this time.

For example, I am currently writing essays about my own life at the Goetheanum. These essays, which some of you may have read, strive with a certain intention to tell the story as simply as possible, without embellishment, in the most straightforward way, with no particular emphasis. Now a critic has already been found who particularly criticizes this, who says, I do not bring poetry and truth like Goethe, but truth with all sobriety. Yes, that is precisely what I am striving for! And I do not strive at all to achieve what is demanded of such a critic. In the case of such a critic today, there is precisely that which, in contrast to a sober style, is a 'drunken' style. And, isn't it true, this drunken style is almost everywhere today. It is no longer important to people to somehow make an impact with what they say, but they need words that overwhelm others. That is where the wrong influence begins. If you write in the way I try to write, you have an effect on the ego, which has free will. But if you write in a drunken style, you have an effect on the astral body, which is not so free but is in fact unfree. You can influence the astral body especially when you talk to people in a way you know they like to hear.

Those people who do not want to convince in this way but to persuade usually use as sentences and words what pleases others, while the one who wants to tell the truth cannot always say what pleases others. For in our time it is even so that as a rule people do not like the truth. So just from the way a person writes his sentences, one can see: If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are logical, that one sentence follows from the other, then he will have an effect on the ego of the other person, which is free. If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are not logical, but rather are intended above all to please the other person, to stir up the other person's desires, urges, instincts, passions, then he will act on the other person's astral body, which is not free. And that is a characteristic of our time, that freedom is so often talked about, and that the greatest sin against freedom actually comes from public speaking and writing today. Actually, public speaking and writing is misused everywhere.

So you will understand the ordinary conditions of life better if you can distinguish between the I and the astral body in such a way that you can see how you can have an effect on one or the other. You will also be able to understand better such a phenomenon as when, before dying, a person starts to write again, or speaks a language again that he has forgotten, or, under a moral influence that he has ignored all his life, eats things that he would otherwise never have eaten. There you can see how the I is embedded in the physical body and loosens up.

Another question: last time, Dr. spoke about arsenic. Today, the opium question has become topical in Switzerland. Some time ago, an article by Dr. Usteri was published in the “Goetheanum” about the poppy plant in connection with opium. Would it be possible to hear something about opium?

Another question: About two years ago, the Einstein theory was introduced to the public. Today, we hear little more about it. Has this theory actually been proven, or has it also been neglected?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I would have to talk about Einstein's theory at length, because it is difficult to discuss Einstein's theory briefly. If you want to understand it properly, you need mathematical knowledge. But the strange thing about Einstein's theory was that everyone talked about it without understanding it, but only on authority, because, as I said, you need some mathematical knowledge. But insofar as one can understand something without mathematical knowledge – there is no time for that today – I would like to explain something so that you can see how it is based on truth on the one hand, and a great error on the other. People are still talking about it today. The general public is such that it takes to something when it is spread through the newspapers; but it does not remember anything. The public has forgotten it today, but the relevant university professors are now Einsteinians. So among the actual scholars, Einstein's theory is much more widespread today than it was years ago. I will discuss some of this next time, as far as one can do it in a very popular way. I just need more time than we have today. — Does anyone else have a question?

Question: I would particularly like to know the difference between alcohol and opium. According to Dr. Usteri's article, we can assume that poppy juice has an upward effect, while alcohol has a downward effect.

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, here we must ask ourselves: when a person drinks alcohol, what part of his being is influenced? The I. And this has the blood circulation as its tool in the physical body. The influence of alcohol on the I reveals itself physically in the blood circulation. So that the human being is very strongly influenced by alcohol in that which actually constitutes his life, in the blood circulation.

With opium, it is the case that it has a particularly strong effect on the astral body, and it affects it in such a way that the person draws it out of the physical body. You see, it is the case that he then perceives this drawing out of the astral body from the physical body as a very great sense of well-being. He is rid of his physical body for a while, and he perceives that as a sense of well-being.

People easily say, as you have probably heard, that sleep is sweet. But when we are asleep, we cannot really feel the sweetness of sleep because we are asleep! We cannot feel the sweetness of sleep; we can only experience it in retrospect. And because we experience it in retrospect, it may happen that people say that sleep is sweet. But when a person takes poppy juice or opium, he feels this sweetness, because in his body he is actually as if asleep and yet awake at the same time. This allows him to enjoy the sweetness, and he feels this sweetness and feels tremendously well in it. It is as if his whole body is permeated with sugar, with a very special sugar, with sweetness through and through. But at the same time his astral body is free from the physical body, and so he perceives, even if not clearly, all kinds of things. He does not have ordinary dreams, but perceives the spiritual world. He makes great journeys through the spiritual world. He likes that. It lifts him up, as you say, into the spiritual world. When he drinks alcohol, on the other hand, his physical body is completely taken up, right down to his blood. His astral body is not freed. Everything is taken up even more by the physical body. Therefore, when a person drinks alcohol, his physical body takes up much more of him than usual. That is precisely the difference. With opium, the soul and spirit are freed, firstly enjoying the physical body in its sweetness, but secondly it goes on journeys, whereby it enters the spiritual world, albeit somewhat disorderly, but nevertheless into the spiritual world. And the Orientals have much of what they describe in the wrong way, but still from the spiritual world, from opium, hashish and the like.

These are the things that show you, in turn, how one cannot understand such things in any other way than by taking into account the higher members of human nature.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday at nine o'clock.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps one or the other of you has thought of something else you would like to ask? Or anything else about what we discussed the other day?

Mr. Müller asks if Dr. Steiner would like to say something about a question he asked the other day: There are quacks who can diagnose people's illnesses from their urine.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, you asked that recently. I just overlooked the question, or I didn't have time to answer it.

Mr. Müller continues as the person asking the question: In the Basel area, there is a man who has

his practice, urine tests, and the remedies he has prescribed have achieved good results. What do you think of that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, regarding the question about urine testing, I have the following to say. Urine testing is not limited to quacks and the like, but it also plays a major role in medicine today, which is recognized as scientific. However, there is a big difference between the way in which today's physicians and the people you are actually talking about – and you were basically talking about non-medical practitioners – treat things, and that is based on the following. Urinalysis has always played an extremely important role in all disease investigations since ancient times. However, you have to bear the following in mind. If you go back to the old medicine that existed until the 18th century – because medicine was only reformed in the 18th century in Italy in the direction of materialism – you will find that both the recognition of diseases and healing were based on completely different principles. Today, this old medicine is completely despised by science. To a certain extent, this is justified, but it is not entirely justified. And one must be aware of the difference between the old medicine and the newer medicine in order to understand what it actually means today. The old medicine knew very well that man is not just this physical body that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, but is also a supersensible being that permeates the body, as we have always emphasized.

You will find the differences between this old medicine and the newer medicine if you go back very far in human life, namely if you go back to the time before birth. I do not mean the spiritual before birth, but the physical, the body of the human being in the womb. Today, medicine and science in general see the essential thing about a human being as it develops in the womb, the essential thing is how the egg gradually builds up. At first, we are only dealing with the egg that has been fertilized. This is therefore a small cell, only visible under the microscope. This cell then multiplies and takes on a kind of cup shape. And in the third week, this cup shape bulges out on one side. Then, in the sixth or seventh week, the human being becomes similar to a small fish. On one side, the head then develops (see drawing), and the first nerve cords form here. And so it continues. And in this way, observing formation after formation, today science is trying to get closer to understanding the origin of man and also of animals.

But apart from what is present in this way, there is also a thick liquid around the human being in the womb. This thick liquid is present in this way (it is drawn), and only then is the uterus all around it. This thick liquid, with all kinds of thick inclusions, then flows out at birth as the so-called afterbirth. This is considered to be a waste product, something that has no significance, because everything that occurs in a living being today, that is, that occurs in such a way that it comes out, is considered a waste product.

But that is not the case. Here, in the way the cell multiplies and the physical human body forms, the external natural force is at work inside, while in the surrounding fluid, which is then expelled as the afterbirth, the spiritual-soul element is at work. This spiritual-soul substance is first in the vicinity of the small human body; only later does it move into the human body. And one must actually look for the spirit in what is later rejected as the afterbirth. This is, of course, very surprising, but it is extremely important.

Today, there is so much denial of the spiritual that a friend of mine has set himself the task of examining this afterbirth, as it gradually releases the spirit to the actual embryo, the actual physical. One could examine this quite well scientifically; but that fails only because, where one gets human germs - it is not the case in very many cases - the fact that the mother dies or has to be operated on, the present-day natural scientists immediately take away everything that is around, and one does not get a human germ to examine in order to find out. So even the way things are treated today is a hindrance to real science. This materialistic way of thinking, I might say, begins with the examination of the origin of man.

Now you know that a person also secretes while they are alive. The secretions are not particularly popular in the external world, because they do not smell good. Almost all secretions do not smell good. Today, however, all secretions are considered, and quite rightly so, to be something that simply has to be secreted, washed away, and so on.

So the secretions in humans are, first of all, what you have mentioned: urine, perspiration, right, and then there are the coarse secretions, the feces and a few others. After all, what you cut from the nails is also a secretion of the human body. It is just a solid secretion. But some things that are also secretions are not recognized as secretions, but in reality they are secretions.

You see, the eye is often thought of as the noblest organ in the human being. Well, you just have to consider how easily an eye can be removed. It lies almost completely isolated in the eye socket. And what is in the eye as fluid – I have explained this to you – is also a secretion. And that there are secretions in the various organs of hearing, in the ear, that the secretion plays a role there, you can already see from the formation of earwax, which is the outermost secretion. So we are dealing with secretions everywhere in the human being; on the one hand the human being is built up, but on the other hand he dissolves, he secretes.

Now, what follows from this? I told you something the other day that might be instructive for you in this regard. I said: People see the nerves, the whole brain, as something that is just such an organ as the other organs, like the liver or spleen. But that is not true, gentlemen. The brain is a secretion. The whole brain, I told you, is a secretion! And if you want to compare the brain to something, then you should not compare it to the intestines, but to what is inside the intestines. So if you have a piece of intestine, there is the intestinal wall, and there is the intestinal contents (see drawing p. 159, bottom). The thing is that the intestinal wall is so corrugated. In the brain, in the nerve, the wall is missing; it is also there, but it is transparent, it is not visible, and only the contents are there (see drawing, above). You can quite rightly say: What is our brain actually filled with? It is filled with a very special kind of intestinal content! And if you call the intestinal content dirt, you can say that the brain is dirt. That is absolutely scientifically correct. For the activity of thinking does not consist in an activity of the brain, but the activity of thinking consists in the brain being separated out by thinking. The more you go from bottom to top in man, the more man is separation.

Now I have spoken to you about the sensual and the supersensible man, about the man you see and the man who is also in you, whom you do not see. That which you see in a person is what is continually being built up, what comes from what forms the physical human body. That is where he gets the arm stump (see drawing on p. 156), and the leg stump. But the supersensible, the astral body and the ego, are there to separate, they are constantly separating. Only the physical body and the etheric body build up. The astral body and the ego break down again.

When you build a house, you try to build it as quickly as possible and live in it for as long as possible. Little by little, nature also breaks it down. Otherwise, you would still have to see the houses that stood in ancient India today. But you will find few of our houses that stood here three hundred years ago. In the human being, building up and breaking down happens simultaneously. First, there is building up: We eat, absorb things; they come to the liver, where they are transformed. Then the breakdown begins again, the sorting out. And in this building and breaking down, the whole activity of the human being actually consists. If we only built up, we would be dull and stupid. We would be nothing but stupid fellows. We would not even be stupid fellows, but we would be completely spiritless plants if we only built. The fact that we break down, that we, for example, continually excrete in the brain, that we therefore have excretory organs, glands, is what it is that we are not stupid guys, but that we are clever people, with differences of course. But the spiritual is based on breaking down, not on building up. And that is why the secretions are of particular importance.

You see, the thing is this: the same activity that takes place when the afterbirth is secreted takes place during every decomposition. Whenever more and more is destroyed around the structure of the human being, then the spirit is at work. And when the spirit can then work in the human body itself, when the human being is born, then the afterbirth is no longer needed; then it is simply expelled. But it is expelled throughout life. It is expelled in the more or less solid-soft intestinal secretions, it is expelled in the urine, it is expelled in sweat, for example. You can observe the significance of sweat as a secretion when you have a real anxiety dream. Just observe it once when you have a real anxiety dream. If, for example, you dream that someone is chasing you with the intention of killing you or at least beating you up, you run away from him, you run in your dream, run, run, run; you wake up quickly, but not without being completely bathed in sweat. This activity, which is so intensified that you have such frightening images, takes place in the form of sweating attacks. And these sweats are the physical accompaniment of what the anxiety dream is. Or think of a person with a serious lung disease who is not in the last stage, but whose lungs are not in order. The lungs cannot breathe well, causing the lungs to compress: he suffers greatly from anxiety dreams. But he also always sweats when he sleeps. So you have the connection between the perspiration and these mental activities, images that come in dreams. Yes, then, gentlemen, the etheric body is active because the anxiety dream actually arises only at the moment of waking up. You only think that dreaming lasted almost the whole night. The whole dream takes place at the moment of waking up.

It can be proven that dreams play out at the moment of waking up. I once told you a characteristic dream, when many of you were not yet here, from which you can see how, when you wake up, you first have the whole dream flashing through your mind. A student is standing at the door of the lecture hall. Another student comes up to him and jostles him. Now, being jostled is a terrible insult among students! It can only end in a duel; there's no other way. So now, immediately, the moment the other student bumps into him, one of them looks for a second; the other student also has to look for a second – this is a long story that the student dreams – the whole thing is agreed, the negotiations for the seconds, everything; apparently it takes an awfully long time. He dreams of how they go out into the forest, how they line up, how the distance is determined, how they pace off how far away they are. The pistols are loaded – he dreams all this –; how they are then raised, the first shot is fired, and he wakes up! He quickly realizes that, because he has become restless in his sleep, he has tipped over the chair; but it falls while he is waking up. So the chair falling over made the whole dream; at that moment the whole dream shot through his mind. The dream only expands inwardly to the length. In reality, one actually dreams in the moment of waking up. And that is why it is also the case that such sick people have the frightening dreams when they wake up; they sleep, wake up, and in doing so, they start to sweat. That is the etheric body at work. When we wake up early of our own accord, we go back inside with our ego and astral body, which have left the physical body during the night, and that is why we break out in sweat. So when we sweat, it is the etheric body that mainly brings about the fact that we are spiritual beings, because stones and plants do not dream, and therefore are not spiritual beings.

But then there is the secretion of urine. You see, this is not as noticeable as it is with sweat because sweat can do nothing but come out, and then it covers the skin. But if the skin had small sacs where the sweat is secreted inside, and if there were a fine skin to cover it, you would not notice it at all. It could be that you have small sacs inside the skin. The sweat goes in there, and at certain times – you could have fine muscles – you press the skin and the sweat could run off. Just as the sweat is secreted through the etheric body, so is the urine secreted through the astral body. But you don't realize that, for example, when you have more vivid feelings, more urine is secreted than when you have weak feelings, because the urine does not pour out immediately. You see, it's like this: If a person is filled with enthusiasm and remains so, regardless of whether it finds expression in external deeds or whether he is contemplating something, and if he did not have a urinary bladder, then he would have to pass urine continuously, especially when filled with enthusiasm. It would be a very bad arrangement. A person could not go to a museum, because when he sees the pictures there and becomes excited, there would have to be toilets nearby! It just so happens that human nature provides for this secretion. It accumulates in the urinary bladder and can be drained at certain times. But urine is secreted primarily by the astral body, and this fills the human being everywhere; urine comes from everywhere, collects in the kidneys and then goes into the urinary bladder.

And the secretions of the intestines are particularly under the influence of the ego – in animals they are also under the influence of the astral body, but in humans they are under the influence of the ego. And not only the intestines are activated for secretion, but the whole human being is activated. In the whole human being, secretion is constantly taking place. The intestines are only the drainage system. So you can say that it is precisely in the secretion that you can see that the etheric body is active in sweat, the astral body is active in urine, and the ego is active in the secretion of feces.

If you consider this, you will not think of the secretions as something so unimportant. Because let us assume that a person has normal urine. Yes, then the astral body in the person is also active in a normal way. But whether a person is healthy or sick depends on how the astral body is active. Everything in health and illness basically depends on how the astral body is active.

For example, when we eat eggs and the eggs are to be digested, the egg must first go into the mouth, then into the stomach; then it goes into the intestines, and there, as I once said, it is completely destroyed as an egg. The egg white is destroyed. But then, on the way into the liver, the destroyed egg white is rebuilt, and human egg white is formed from animal and vegetable egg white on the way from the intestines to the liver. The human egg white then enters the blood.

If you look at the human organism, here is the diaphragm (see drawing), here is the liver, and here is the heart; they are only separated by the diaphragm. What comes from the intestines into the liver is transformed from animal and vegetable proteins – I will color this yellow – into human proteins (a darker yellow). This is held together in the liver and then passes over into the heart.

The thing is this: when we eat protein, our astral body has to work to properly transform animal and vegetable protein into human protein. If the astral body is lazy, it cannot work properly, and the animal protein is not converted into human protein in the liver, but goes directly into the kidneys and is secreted in the urine. If you now examine the urine – which is what modern scientific medicine does – you will find protein in the urine.

Or imagine, gentlemen, you are eating potatoes. The potato is usually already converted in the mouth, because starch is an important food in general, it is not just there to starch shirts. The potato consists almost entirely of starch. On the way from the mouth to the stomach and into the intestines, the potato is now gradually converted into sugar. The potato starch first becomes dextrin and then sugar. Potatoes are only bad in the mouth; in the intestines they are extremely sweet because they are converted into sugar there. But when the potato starch has been converted into sugar in the intestines, and when the liver has converted potato sugar or any other sugar into human sugar, then it delivers this inner sugar to the entire body, which becomes warmer as a result, which has its inner warmth as a result. But for that to happen, the astral body has to work properly again. If it does not work properly, then the proper transformation into human sugar does not take place, but the animal and especially the vegetable sugar goes directly to the kidneys. The sugar is excreted, and the person becomes diabetic. You can see from the sugar content of the urine that the person is ill.

All of this is something that modern medicine also does and considers to be extremely important. That is the first thing that is done today: the urine is examined for protein and sugar. This immediately provides a clue as to whether the person may have this or that disease.

Or take the following: if we want to have a healthy head, which, after all, is not something entirely unimportant for the physical human being here on earth – people want to have a healthy head because they believe that the head organ in the human being; so they want to have a healthy head. If we want to have a healthy head, then we have to bring up a substance that is constantly being produced in us, namely clover acid, through the chest into the head. A healthy head must have a certain amount of clover acid. We produce the clover acid ourselves, as we also produce the alcohol we need. But for this, the head must work in the right way again, so that the clover acid, oxalic acid, is produced. If it does not work properly and it stays down, we get a head that is anemic, and the clover acid is passed into the urine and goes away.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that even today the most important diseases can be identified by means of the most ordinary chemical examination of urine. But this chemistry that we have today was not available in the past. And there was medicine even then!

Now the matter is this: suppose a person has a fever; I will take a drastic case. What does it mean when a person has a fever? It does not mean that his astral body has become weak and listless, sluggish, but rather that it is in a state of excessive activity, so that it affects the I. Then the I is as if whipped when the astral body is in excessive activity. But the I causes the blood to circulate. And an excessively active astral body, which wants to enter the organs everywhere and cannot, and therefore seethes within itself like a storm-lashed sea, produces fever within itself. Now the person has a fever from his whipped astral body. What will be the further consequence? The blood is rushed through the body too quickly. The Blur is not properly transformed. The blood does not have time to form the organs, but goes as blood from the heart to the kidneys and from there into the urine, and we get a urine that is very dark in color. Those who know how to judge the dark color of urine know that, under all circumstances, whether it is a little darker or very dark, the fever is flooding the human organism.

Suppose the astral body becomes very sluggish, it will no longer work properly. The blood passes very slowly through the body, the pulse becomes barely noticeable. You can feel it at the pulse, how the blood passes slowly everywhere. Everything in the body comes together. The body experiences pain in all sorts of places; the urine turns light yellow or even white. Now, between the urine being dark and the urine being white, there are all kinds of shades, color nuances. If you focus on these color nuances and take the urine and look at it through the light, you can see a wide range of things from the colors of the urine.

The blood is constantly trying to replace what is leaving the organs. As a result, the blood has a constant tendency to solidify. If the blood rushes through the organs too quickly, it cannot give anything to the organs. But it wants to solidify. When it comes out of the kidneys as urine, the urine becomes flaky in such blood. If you look through it again, you will see flaky urine. If the astral body is sluggish and the pulse weak, then you don't have cloudy urine, but rather urine that is almost as clear as water, pure urine.

So not only from the color, but also from this cloudiness or purity of the urine, one can conclude a lot. If the urine, when you look through it, looks like a stormy summer's day, with dark clouds and everything in it showing, where everything is bubbling in the urine, so if it is like a stormy summer's day, then the person has something that causes a strong fever. And if you can judge what is going on, you can draw conclusions about the illness. If the urine, when examined, looks delightfully clear like a bright summer's day when the sun illuminates everything, one can conclude that the person is ill on the other side, that he has a very slight tendency towards all kinds of perishing organs; one organ becomes inactive, another becomes inactive, and so on.

So you see, the thing is this: if you have specialized in the secretions of the urine, you can tell a great deal from it. But that is precisely the difference between today's newer medicine and the old one: the old medicine looked at the urine in the same way that one looks at a summer's day as a bright or storm-lashed summer's day, thus judging more in the rough, but, having trained itself, judged more from the facts. Today's more materialistic medicine chemically analyzes the urine, finding protein, oxalic acid, sugar and so on in it. So the difference is that one did it according to how it presented itself, and the other did it more according to chemistry.

Now, of course, in the early days, when this view was still given a great deal of consideration, people learned it properly and there were no charlatans. Today, most of those who do this are charlatans, although I am not saying that all of them are. A person can train himself so well that he can actually recognize all possible illnesses. But that requires a great deal of experience, and this experience must be applied.

Now the difference is: people today do not give much importance to the mind. The mind is almost about to be abolished. What chemistry offers can be learned by anyone. To examine a substance chemically, that is simply learned in the three, four, five, six years one spends at the university. Basically, any fool can do that, examine the substance chemically. And that is what they are striving for. The mind is to be abolished. Everyone is to be able to do the same. That was not the case in the past. In the past, the mind was highly respected. But you have to have a mind to be able to look at urine. That is the difference: in the past, people were made spiritual by being taught; today they are made into henchmen. The story is this: if you want to work, you need your hands, and your hands should be guided by your mind. Today there is much talk of manual labor and brain work, but the two should not be distinguished. Those who do manual labor should be given the opportunity to educate themselves spiritually so that they can approach the spirit just as much as the so-called intellectual workers. These distinctions can only be made among people by valuing real spiritual work. But today they want to do away with the spirit.

Well, gentlemen, you can see from this that earlier medicine placed more emphasis on looking at things directly. But that had another consequence. I don't know if you know that today's so-called scientific medicine makes rather high noses, well, you can't make them as high as today's doctor makes them, with which he looks down on the old “dirty pharmacy”, because in the past they made the remedies from all sorts of secretions. And they said to themselves: the human being secretes the secretions. If you bring them back into the body in the right way, they want to come out again. But what are they doing there? In this way, for example, they bring a sluggish astral body into regular activity or a sluggish ether body into regular activity.

Now you can say: If you find that a person's astral body has become lethargic, you could give them sweat as a remedy – you could say that. And you could say: Well, that's just the old dirty pharmacy, it really does have something like that! – Yes, the difference is not that great. If you were to look at the products used in remedies today, you would find that they are the same products found in sweat, only they are applied externally, in a mineral combination. The ancients used sweat directly. And in many ways it was more effective than what is only put together later, because, as I have shown you in many cases, nature is much cleverer than man. Man can synthesize in his remedies what nature synthesizes. The ancients did something very remarkable: they valued something that is no longer valued today. The ancients said: when a person really sweats, he actually has a whole sweat blanket around him (see drawing). — Now, that is the first thing. But a person secretes sweat all over his surface. If you could hold on to this sweat that a person secretes and take the person away – imagine what it would be like: here someone is sweating terribly; his body is covered with sweat all over the surface – imagine if I could take this person out and the sweat would remain here: That would be the whole imprint of the human being, the whole person would be there in the sweat! Very interesting, isn't it? So it is that the sweat constantly has the intention of imitating the human form.

The ancients did something else as well. They did not just look at sweat in this way, they also looked at urine in this way. Now, for example, they had a small glass of urine (see illustration on page 170). The ancients now had an even better mental image; and lo and behold: something like a ghost of a human being emerged from this urine! What sweat forms by itself, by being on the surface, emerged from the urine. In fact, in ancient times, if you had a vial of urine, you could see that. Yes, there emerged – I don't know if you know this legend, that the goddess Venus emerged from the sea foam? —a human astral specter arose from the urine. And in a person who was prone to a certain disease, let's say a person who was prone to wasting, this astral specter was thin and scrawny. In a person who, let's say, was prone to morbid fatness, this specter was swelling in all directions. Call it an illusion for my sake; it can be an illusion if you want that someone who sees a light-colored urine sees a different ghost than when he sees dark urine. But he sees it. And as an experienced doctor, he judged the illnesses accordingly.

And it was the same in the days when not only urine but also feces, the intestinal secretions, were examined. In the old days, these were particularly important for determining the diseases. Just imagine, someone had taken the intestinal secretions. You can find out that one person has a lot of sulfur in it, iron in it. Depending on what is in it, you can have more sulfurous intestinal contents. Dogs, for example, have a lot of sulfur in their intestinal contents, which then goes outwards. The more sulfur in it, the whiter and firmer the intestinal contents. The more carbon, carbonaceous matter, the softer and darker the intestinal contents; this is found in cats. Now, from the intestinal contents that come out, from the feces, you can deduce the disease much better than from the urine.

Even with intestinal contents, the ancients, shall we say, had a vision; they just had such visions. This is something very strange! With sweat, they said: When man secretes sweat, he envelops himself in his own ghost. When man secretes urine, there is his ghost in it, rising up. And in the case of intestinal contents, it is completely contained on all sides and has certain colors. And according to these - call it visions or dreams, as you like - but according to these dreams, diseases were often diagnosed in ancient times.

And in an unspecific, sometimes quite foolish way, people like the ones you mention do it by reading old books that are hard to understand today. There are also those who diagnose diseases based on feces; this usually doesn't yield much. But a person can gain a great deal of experience, and something may come of it. Only today's science doesn't pay attention to this because it prefers to examine everything chemically. But, as I said, urine analysis is just as important to today's medical science as it is to unscientific medicine, which is a remnant of ancient times.

If you leaf through old medical books, you will come across expressions that you will not usually understand. All kinds of mystics and people who always say that they have all the wisdom, not only science but also wisdom, will always tell you what they have read in old books. This is not of much value because they do not understand the old books. But if you read them, you will come across an expression. The expression mummy appears again and again. One is told: if the mummy is light, then the person is afflicted with all kinds of diseases that drive him to emaciation and so on; if the mummy is very dark, blackish, then the person is afflicted with fever, with feverish diseases. It is told everywhere what the mummy is like, and the diseases are judged by it.

What then is the mummy? If a person today reads this, they only know that these are the Egyptian mummies. Well, what do they make of it when they read that the mummy is light or dark? They don't even get what is meant. But what did the ancient people who wrote the old medical books mean? They called the form that is in the sweat and the form that emerged from the urine and feces “mummy.” The mummy was the spiritual human being. And the spiritual human being becomes visible through the secretions. And the ancients said: When the child is born, the afterbirth goes away, and the last remnant of the spiritual human being goes away. And if people could examine this today, they would find that when a small child is born, sometimes there is very little afterbirth and thus something supernatural. But there are also some where quite a lot goes away. The latter, where quite a lot goes away – there the spirit leaves at birth – they then become materialists.

And so it is, gentlemen: the spiritual activity in man, the astral and ego activity, has an extraordinary deal to do with the secretion. And when one speaks of the old dirt pharmacy, it just indicates that today one no longer appreciates what was once appreciated. Waste phenomena are no longer appreciated today. In some respects it is good not to value them too much, because all kinds of things happen. I knew someone who wanted to get rid of washing because he said – after hearing that the spirit lives in the secretions – that you should keep what is secreted, so you should also keep the dirt. And the result of that was that he came to value dirt extremely! Yes, gentlemen, all this sometimes seems foolish. But it is not always foolishness. Take horses, for example. Horses have hooves, and the hooves then merge into the soft part of the horse's toe. Dirt collects there. And if you constantly scrape away the dirt on a horse, it can become ill. You have to have an instinct for how long you have to leave the dirt so that the horse can keep up with creating it. So there you can see quite tangibly, I would say, how significant the dirt, the secretion, is. The matter is significant for the spiritual in man; it is also significant for health and illness. Health and illness can be found in the secretion. And the ancients called the spiritual in the secretion the mummy. If you find the word mummy in old writings, you will understand it from now on, because I have told you how the mummy actually comes into being: that it arises precisely from the secretion products.

As you can see, Mr. Müller's question involves a very large science, but one that can only be mastered if one delves into the spiritual. Otherwise, everything that is secreted is simply a product of secretion; no attention is paid to it. But in the secretion, the human being shows what kind of spirit he is. And that this is the case with feces is evident even from a superficial glance. Compare horse feces with cow feces. The cattle feces are larger, spread out. The horse feces are almost small heads, round. You can't help it if you have a sense of beauty – isn't it true, beauty doesn't lie in the fact that you only find odorless things beautiful – if you have a sense of beauty at all, you can't help saying when you see a cow pat: The whole cow! In it she is reflected with her broad appearance, with her casual activity, with her tendency to want to lie down; she is completely within the feces. And the horse, this jumper among animals, always wanting to get away from the earth, wanting to hop and jump out into the world – a horse's dung shows the whole horse! And so it is with the excrement of all animals, you can recognize the whole animal in them. And from this you can see what the ancients understood by mummy and what is simply astral. The supersensible animal, the supersensible human being, lives in the secretions.

With spiritual science, we can master these things. Of course, we must not allow the enemies to say that spiritual science deals with sweat, urine and so on, and that it is therefore actually a dirty science. That is what the enemies would like best!

So, gentlemen, by raising the question, I had to point out to you what is true. But you can also point out at every opportunity that it is not about any particular considerations of what is dirty, but what is spiritual. Because man becomes unconscious when the build-up in him is too strong. Then the growths arise in him when he only builds up. He must break down accordingly. He must break down. Man becomes unconscious, constantly unconscious and absent-minded, when a lump forms in the brain, because then there is only building up. The lump is built up when there is no proper breakdown in the brain. And the brain nerves arise as breakdown products, as spiritual breakdown products. Only when it gets too strong, then the blood comes in too strongly; inflammation develops. And there you have the difference between tumors and inflammations. If you have dark urine, you tend to have inflammations somewhere in the body. If you have light-colored urine, you tend to have tumors. That's one thing. But in this way you can draw conclusions about all diseases from the urine, if you only examine the urine correctly.

So, more on this on Wednesday.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone thought of anything for today?

Mr. Burle asks about the theory of relativity and how it is viewed today. He says that people used to read a lot about it, especially in the past. Now it may have been forgotten again; at least he doesn't hear as much about it as he used to.

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, the matter of the theory of relativity is a difficult one, and today you will probably have to be very careful and in the end you will have to say that even if you are careful, you are not familiar with it. But that is the case with many people who talk about the theory of relativity today. They talk about it in such a way that they often praise it as the greatest achievement of our time, but do not understand it. I will try to explain it as popularly as possible. As I said, it will be difficult today, but next time we will come to more interesting things.

Einstein's theory is based on the motion of a body. You know that bodies move by changing their position in space. So if we want to record a motion, we say: a body is at a location a and moves to another location b. If you are standing somewhere outside and see a train passing by, you will have no doubt at all that the train is rushing past you, moving, and you are standing still. But you can easily come to doubt it, at least for the moment, of course, if you are not thinking deeply, if you are sitting somewhere in a railway compartment and are asleep at first, then wake up and look out the window: a train is passing by. You have the distinct feeling that a train is passing by. That does not necessarily mean that it is true, however. Before you fell asleep, your train was stationary, and while you were sleeping, your train itself began to move. While you were sleeping, you did not notice that your train was moving, and the other train appears to be passing by. If you look more closely, the train standing outside is completely still, while your train is moving. So while you are moving, you believe that you are at rest, and the other train, which is really at rest, is moving. You know, it can also happen that you look out the window and believe that you are sitting quietly in the train you are currently on, while the whole train is moving in the opposite direction. That's how it looks to the eye. You can see that what we humans say about movement is not always true. You wake up and form the judgment: the train that is outside is moving. Immediately afterwards, you have to correct yourself: that is not true at all, it is standing still; I am moving!

Such a correction of judgment occurred once in a major way, or even more than once, in world history. We need only go back six or seven centuries, when everyone was of the opinion that the earth was stationary in space and that the entire starry sky was moving past. This view was corrected, as you may have heard, in the 16th century. Copernicus came along and said: All that is wrong; the sun, the fixed stars are actually stationary, and we with our Earth fly at breakneck speed through space. We believe to be at rest on Earth - just as one previously believed to be at rest in the railroad car and the other train was driving and have now corrected that. Copernicus corrected the whole of astronomy, saying: It is not true that the stars move; they are stationary. But the Earth, with people on it, rushes through space at a tremendous speed.

You have given the possibility that it is not immediately possible to tell from observation what is actually correct with regard to motion: whether one is at rest oneself and a passing body is really in motion, or whether one is in motion oneself and a body that one believes is passing by is at rest.

Don't you think so? When you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, a correction may be necessary for everything we recognize as movement. Take, for example, how long it took for all of humanity to correct its judgment regarding the Earth. That took thousands of years. When you sit in a train, it may take only a few seconds for you to correct your judgment. So it varies how long it takes to correct such a judgment.

This has led people like Einstein to say: We cannot know whether what we see in motion is really in motion, or whether we, who are standing still, are not somehow mysteriously in motion and the other in rest. So we draw the final conclusion from this uncertainty.

Well then, gentlemen, it could be like this: let us assume there is a car here (a picture is shown). In this car, one drives from Haus Hansi up to the Goetheanum. But who can say for sure that the car is really driving up? Who can say that with certainty? The car could be standing still, the wheels could be turning, and the whole Goetheanum that one is approaching could be moving in the opposite direction. We would only have to experience something like this for the Earth as Copernicus did for the Earth! (Laughter.)

Einstein took such things and said: We can never be certain whether one or the other body moves. We only know that they move in relation to each other, that they change their distances; that is the only thing we know. Of course, we know that when we travel to the Goetheanum, because we come closer to the Goetheanum; but whether we come to it or it comes to us, we cannot know. Now, you see, what we can say is that it is in real rest or real motion, that is absolute. So what is an absolute rest or an absolute motion? That would be a rest or motion of which one could say: In the universe, the body is at rest or the body is moving. But of course this is always a fatal thing, because at the time of Copernicus, it was still believed that the sun was stationary and the earth was moving around it. In relation to the earth it is correct, but in relation to the sun it is not correct, because the sun moves very fast, rushing at a tremendous speed through the starry universe, which is in the constellation of Hercules – and of course we are all with it. On the one hand we revolve around the sun, but with the rotation around the sun we rush with it through space. So we cannot say that the sun is at absolute rest in space either. And so Einstein and those who shared his view said: You cannot say at all whether something is at absolute rest or in motion, but you can only speak of things being in relative rest - relative, that is, with respect to each other - it appears to one to be at rest or in motion.

You see, gentlemen, during a course that was held in Stuttgart, someone once believed that we anthroposophists know nothing of note about the theory of relativity. And so, because he was or is a fanatical supporter of the theory of relativity, he wanted to make it clear to people in a very simple way how the theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, really applies. What did he do? He took a matchbox and said: “Here is a match. Now I hold the box very still and move the match towards it. It catches fire. But now I'm going to do a second experiment. Now I'm going to hold the match very still and move the box towards me. It catches fire again. The same thing happens. What has happened is that fire has been created, but the movement I have made is not absolute, it is quite relative. One time, when the box is there and the match is there, I move the match this way, the other time I move the box. For fire to occur, it does not matter whether the box or the match moves, but only whether they move relative to each other, in relation to each other.

But this can be applied to the whole world. You can say for the whole world: the thing is that you don't know whether one or the other moves, or whether one moves more strongly or weakly, or whether the other moves more strongly or weakly. You only ever know how they move in relation to each other, whether they come closer or further away from each other; you don't know more than that. And you don't know whether one body moves faster or slower than the other. Imagine you are traveling in an express train rushing by terribly fast, and a passenger train passes by outside, you look out the window. You can't judge what is actually going on, because at the moment when you are traveling in the express train and the passenger train is traveling in the opposite direction, you have the feeling that your express train is traveling much slower than it used to. Just try it. At that moment you have the feeling that now the train is moving slowly. In perception, so much of the speed is taken away from the fast as it approaches you. So you get a completely false judgment about the speed of the movement in your own train. If, on the other hand, someone is traveling more slowly next to you, you feel as if your train is traveling faster. So you never have a judgment when you see two movements and how they actually relate to each other, but you only ever get a judgment about how the two bodies relate to each other in terms of their distances.

Now you can stop at this point and say: Gosh, Einstein was a clever guy, he finally realized that in the universe we cannot talk about absolute motion at all, but only about relative motion. That is clever, and as you can see, it is also correct for many things. Because no one can say that when he sees a star at rest, it is a star at rest. If you move at a certain speed, the star appears to be moving in the opposite direction; but it could also be moving towards you. So you can't possibly conclude from looking at it that the star is at rest or in motion. It is necessary to know this, because the fact that we finally know this today means that we would have to change the entire terminology used in certain sciences. I will show you this with an example.

How do you get knowledge from the stars at all? You see, you can't get knowledge from the stars if you have the same view as the prince who went to the observatory. The astronomer naturally had to show him the observations he made of the stars because the prince was the ruler of the country. Well, he also let the prince look through the telescope, and they observed a star. When you point the telescope somewhere, you don't see anything at first. Then you wait a little; then the star comes into the telescope, as they say, and then it comes out on the other side. The prince watched this. Then he said: Yes, now I understand quite well that you know something about the stars, that you know where the stars are and how they move, I can see that quite well now. But how you, when you are so far away, come up with what the stars are called, I still can't understand. — With such views, of course, one cannot pursue astronomy. But how does it happen when you observe stars? There is the telescope; the astronomer sits there, and he looks in with his head from above, and there are crosshairs here; and when the star appears to move like this, you don't see anything yet, and when it is here, you see the star. If it is visible exactly where the threads cross, then you determine the location of the star.

Now, it was always thought that when observing, one could say: either the Earth moved, or the telescope was moved forward and the lens – that's what the glass that is far away is called; the glass that is close is called the eyepiece – was moved so far that the stationary star can now be seen inside. In the past, people believed that the star was moving. Today we have to say: We know nothing about the rest or motion of the star. We can only say: In the viewfinder, the crosshairs of my telescope coincide with the view of the star; the two overlap. We can say nothing more than what we have directly in front of us. We would be uncertain about the whole world as a result.

This has far-reaching consequences. It is important for our view of the motion not only of the heavenly bodies, but even of the bodies on our earth. And the conclusions that Einstein and those who think as he does drew from it are very far-reaching. They said, for example: Yes, if motion is only relative, if it is not absolute, then one cannot say anything real about anything at all, not even about simultaneity or different times. If, for example, I have a clock in Dornach and another in Zurich and the hands are in the same position, I am still not at all sure that, because they are far apart, in reality there is only one erroneous observation; perhaps there is no simultaneity at all!

So you see, the most far-reaching conclusions have been drawn from this. And the question arises: can we not get out of this at all? Can we not say anything at all today about the things themselves when they move? That is the important question. It is quite certain that nothing can be said from the observation of the movements. And in the broadest sense, it is also true that if I drive up to the Goetheanum in my car, it may just as well be that the Goetheanum comes towards me.

Yes, but there is one thing, gentlemen, that does happen. Even the example I gave you with the matchbox is not quite right. Because, you see, I would have liked to shout to the gentleman who made it so finely: “Why don't you nail the matchbox to the table and then try to move it back and forth!” You have to apply at least a great deal of force if you have to drive with the whole table back and forth. — So there must be a catch somewhere.

You can recognize this catch if you only approach the matter attentively. Suppose you drive from Dornach to Basel, and now you could say: It is not true that the car moves; rather, the car remains stationary, only turning the wheels, and Basel comes towards it. — Fair enough. But there is one thing that speaks against this: the car will be ruined after a few years. And the fact that the car is ruined can only be attributed to the fact that it is not the road that moves, but the car that moves and is ruined by what happens inside it. So if you don't just look at the movement, but look inside the body itself to see what the movement does, you will come to the conclusion that you cannot fully grasp Einstein's conclusion. So you can notice that the car is actually being ruined, not just the wheels, because they are turning. Now someone might say: Yes, they would of course also turn if a mountain were to come towards you or Basel were to come towards you, or otherwise the thing would wear out. But you can still say: maybe that's the way it is. With inanimate bodies, the matter cannot be decided at all, and for inanimate bodies one can only say that it is uncertain which way the one or the other moves. But the living organism! Imagine you are walking to Basel and someone else remains standing here in Dornach, remains standing for the whole two hours while you walk to Basel. Now, if it were not you who had moved but Basel who had come to meet you, you would have done almost no differently than the person who remained standing. But you became tired; a change took place in you. From this change that takes place within yourself, you can see that you have moved. And in the case of living bodies, it is possible to determine from the changes that take place within them whether they are really in motion or only in apparent motion, at rest.

But this is also what must lead us to recognize that we cannot form a theory from the external observation of the world, not even from something as clear as movement. Instead, we must form our theory from the internal changes. Well, there you have it again: with the theory of relativity, too, one must say that he who looks only at the outward side of things comes to nothing at all. One must look at the inner side. It is precisely this theory of relativity that leads one to at least begin with spiritual science, with anthroposophy, because anthroposophy points out everywhere that one must look at the inner side.

Einstein's theory has led to some extraordinarily strange consequences. The matter becomes particularly interesting, for example, when Einstein gives his examples. He gives an example in which he wants to prove that the change of location has no significance at all. Because it cannot be determined from the point of view whether a body changes its location or not, the change of location cannot have any significance. That is why Einstein says: If I hurl a clock that has a certain hand position out into space, so that it flies out at the speed of light and then turns around and comes back, this movement has had no significance for the inside of the clock. The clock comes back unchanged. That is how Einstein makes his examples: whether a body moves or not, we cannot decide. The clock is the same whether it is at rest or moving, it is the same for it. - Yes, but, gentlemen, you should just be invited to look at a clock that flies out into space at the speed of light and comes back again! The clock, yes, you won't see it at all anymore. It will be so pulverized that you won't see it.

But what does that mean? It means that you cannot think that way at all. You come to thoughts that are thoughtless. And so you find on the one hand that Einstein is a terribly clever person and that he draws conclusions and makes judgments that are terribly captivating to people. Not true, the ordinary people who are not very good mathematicians, they don't understand much of Einstein's theory; and then they start reading about Einstein's theory in some popular book, read the first page, then yawn; read half of the second page, then stop. And then they say: It must be something terribly clever. Because if it wasn't something terribly clever, then I would have to understand it. Besides, a lot of people say that it's something terribly clever. –That's where the judgment about the theory of relativity comes from. But there are also people who understand it. And it is among such people that Einstein finds his following, and that following grows larger every day. It is not, as Mr. Burle says, forgotten. A few years ago, when you spoke with university professors, they did not want to know anything about Einstein's theory. Today, everything is full of the erudition of Einstein's theory of relativity.

But people also come up with some very strange ideas in the process. For example, I once had a debate with university professors about Einstein's theory. Yes, you see, as long as you stay in the area that I have also discussed with you, Einstein's theory of relativity is correct; there is nothing you can do about it: it is like that with the train, with the solar system, with the movements of the whole world. So far it is quite correct. But now the gentlemen extend it to everything and say, for example: Relative is also the size of a human being; he has no absolute size, but only relative. That seems to me only that he is so high. He is so high in relation to — well, if we are here —, in relation to the chairs or in relation to the trees, but one cannot speak of an absolute size. You see, that applies as long as you remain a mathematician, as long as you are only concerned with geometry. The moment you stop being concerned with geometry, when you enter life, that's when the pleasure stops, that's when it's different! You see, if someone has no feeling, then he can carve a head out of wood that is a hundred times as big as your head. Then he has it. Yes, the one who has a feeling for it will never do that because he knows that the size of a human head is not relative, but is conditioned in the whole of space. It can be a little larger or a little smaller, but if someone is a dwarf, it is an illness; if someone becomes a giant, it is also an illness. It is not just relative, but the absolute is already visible. Within certain limits, of course, human height fluctuates. But in the universe, a person is definitely intended for a certain height. So again, one cannot speak of relativity. One can only say that man gives himself his own size through his relationship to the universe. There was only one of the college of professors with whom I had the debate who admitted that. The others were so twisted in their heads by the relativity theory that they said that human size is also only relative because we look at it that way.

You know, if you have a picture, it can be large; if you go further, it gets smaller and smaller according to the perspective. The size of this picture that you see is relative. The relativists believe that human size is only as it is because it is always seen against a background. But that is nonsense. Human size has something absolute about it, and a person cannot be much taller or much shorter than he is predetermined to be.

Now, people think all this up because they generally do not form any opinion about what is involved in a process or in a thing that happens on earth in our environment. From what I have already told you, you will be able to deduce the following: there is the earth; on the earth is some human being. Now you know, however, that the human being is not only dependent on the forces of the earth, but he is dependent on the forces that come from the universe. Our head, for example, reflects the whole universe. We have discussed this. If it did not matter how tall a person is, what would have to be there? Suppose Mr. Burles' head, Mr. Erbsmehl's head, Mr. Müller's head is formed from the universe. Yes, gentlemen, if the heads are three or four times different from each other, there should be an extra universe for each one. But since there is only one universe, which does not grow or shrink because of the individual human being, but is always there, remaining the same, the heads of people can only be approximately the same. It is only because people do not know that we live in a common world that also has a spiritual effect that people can believe that it is irrelevant how big a person's head is, that it is merely relative. It is not relative, but it is dependent on the absolute size of the universe.

So we come back to having to remind ourselves: it is precisely when you think correctly in relation to the theory of relativity that you enter into spiritual science, not into materialistic science.

And if you then look more closely at people, you see that people who think like Einstein run out of ideas when they come to life or to the spiritual. You see, when I was a boy, I was able to take part in the lively debates that took place about gravity. Gravity - when a body falls to the earth, it is said to be heavy. It falls down because it has weight, because it is heavy. But this force of gravity is everywhere in the universe. The bodies attract each other. If there is the earth and there is the moon (see drawing), then the earth attracts the moon, and the moon does not fly away, but moves in a circle around the earth, because the earth, when it wants to fly away, always pulls it back towards itself. Now, in the past, when I was a boy, there was a lot of debate about what this force of gravity is actually based on.

The English physicist Newton, whom I have told you about before, simply said: bodies attract each other, one body the other. That is not a very materialistic view, because if you imagine that a person should just touch something and draw it towards them, all sorts of things besides matter are needed to do so. If now the Earth is to attract the Moon, then this cannot be reconciled with a materialistic view. But materialism flourished precisely in my youth. One could also say that it dried up people, it withered, but one could also say that it flourished. So people said: That's not true, the Earth cannot attract the Moon, because it has no hands to attract it. That's not possible. So they said: the world ether is everywhere (see drawing). So what I am drawing in red here is the world ether; it also consists of nothing but tiny little grains. And these tiny little grains, they bump into each other here, bump into each other there, but bump more strongly there than they do in the middle. Now, when there are two bodies, the Earth and the Moon, and the impact from the outside is stronger than from the inside, it is as if they were attracted to each other. So the force of attraction, the force of gravity, was explained by the impact from the outside.

I cannot begin to tell you how much cognitive pain this caused me at the time. From the age of twelve to eighteen, I really agonized over whether the Earth attracts the Moon or the Moon is pushed to the Earth. Because, you see, the reasons given are usually not exactly stupid, but clever. But there is already a certain relativity theory in that. One wonders: is there anything absolute in it, or is everything relative? Is it perhaps really immaterial whether one says that the Earth attracts the Moon or that the Moon is pushed towards the Earth? Perhaps one cannot decide anything at all. Well, you see, people have thought about this a lot. And what I actually want to say is: At least they came up with the idea that there is an ether in addition to the visible substance. They needed the ether, because what is supposed to push if not the grains of ether! When Einstein first established his theory of relativity, everyone still believed that the ether had to exist. And Einstein then thought of everything he had described as relative motion as taking place in space, which is filled by the ether. But then he realized: Gosh! If motion is only relative, it is not at all necessary for the ether to be there. Nothing needs to push, nothing to pull. We cannot decide anything about this. So space can also be empty.

And so, over time, there are actually two Einstein theories. Of course, they are united in one person. The earlier Einstein described everything in his books as if the whole space of the world were filled with ether. Then his theory of relativity led him to say: space is empty. Only, the theory of relativity is not about saying anything about ether, because we don't even know if it is so. The examples he gives sometimes become quite grotesque. For example, Einstein says: If there is the earth, and there is some tree, I climb up; here I slip, fall down – this is an occurrence that you have probably also experienced; at least as a boy I very often experienced it when I climbed up a tree, that I slipped and fell down – then you say: Well, the earth is pulling me. I have a weight. This comes from gravity, otherwise I would have remained in the air, otherwise I would be wriggling if the earth were not pulling me. — But Einstein says you can't say any of that, because think of the following: There is the earth again, and now I am up there on a tower, standing; but I am not standing in a vacuum, surrounded by free space. Rather, I am standing in a box that is suspended at the top. If I were to fall out of the box from the tower, my relationship to the walls would always remain the same. I don't notice any movement, the walls go with me. Yes, by golly, now I can't tell whether the rope from up there, on which my box is hanging, will be lowered and I will arrive at the bottom of the box because someone is lowering me from above, or whether I can arrive, whether the box will slip because the earth is attracting me. I can't decide that. I don't know whether I'm being lowered or whether the earth is drawing me towards it.

But with this example, which Einstein chooses, it is just the same as with the other comparison that is always used in schools. There the children are already told how a planetary system is formed, that there is a nebula at first, out of this nebula the planets separate. In the middle, the sun remains. They say: That can easily be proven. You take a small oil droplet that floats on water, in the middle a sheet of card through which a pin is stuck, you put that in the water, start to turn it. Then small droplets split off from the large one, and a tiny planetary system is there. That's how it must be out there. Once there was a nebula; the planets split off, the sun remained in the middle. Who could possibly disagree with this, if you still see it in the fat droplet today! Yes, but one little thing has been forgotten, gentlemen: that I have to stand there and turn when I am the teacher in front of the children and show that! If I don't turn: nothing forms from a small fat planet system! So — the teacher would have to tell the children — there must be a great teacher, a giant teacher out there who once turned the whole story. Then the example is complete. And so Einstein, if he were to think in complete accordance with reality – if he even gets around to formulating such a thought – would have to assume that someone is directing the rope up there. That is necessary right away. Otherwise you cannot say: It makes no difference to me how I come down, whether someone lets me down or whether I tumble; there must be someone up there. So if Einstein were to elaborate on this example, he would immediately have to consider: who is there to hold the rope? He does not do this because contemporary materialism forbids it. Therefore, he devises examples that have no reality, that cannot be imagined, that are impossible to think.

And there is something else connected with this. Imagine, gentlemen, there is a mountain. There is Freiburg im Breisgau. On the mountain I set up a cannon so that you can still hear the shot in Offenburg on my account. But you hear the shot later. If someone notes on a clock when they heard the shot in Freiburg and when someone heard it in Offenburg, they will see that the times on the two clocks differ. The sound took some time to travel from Freiburg to Offenburg.

Now, you see, this story has also been used for the so-called theory of relativity. Because it is said: Let us now assume that I am not standing in Offenburg listening to when the sound arrives, but that I am initially standing in Freiburg. There I hear the sound simultaneously as it arises. Now I am traveling by train in the direction from Freiburg to Offenburg. Because I am traveling ahead, a little way from Freiburg, I hear the sound a little later than it occurs. Even further towards Offenburg, a little later again; even further towards Offenburg, a little later again.

But this only lasts as long as you drive slower than the speed of sound. If you drive just as fast as the speed of sound from Freiburg to Offenburg, what happens then? If you drive just as fast, at the same speed as the speed of sound: you arrive in Offenburg, and there it runs away from you, you still don't hear it. If you travel at the same speed, you will never hear it, because by the time you are supposed to hear it, it will have gone. You are supposed to hear it, but by then it is no longer there. Now people say: Gosh, that's right, you can't hear sound if you're moving as fast as sound itself! And if you move even faster than sound, what happens then? If you go slower, you hear it later; if you go just as fast, you don't hear it at all. If you move faster, you hear it earlier than it sounds! People say that this is quite natural, that this is quite correct. So if you hear the sound in Offenburg two seconds later when you move slower than the sound, you don't hear the sound at all when you move at the same speed as the sound. But if you move faster than the speed of sound, then you will hear it two seconds earlier than when it is released in Freiburg! I would just like to invite you to listen, really listen to the sound before it is released in Freiburg! You can see for yourself whether you hear it earlier, no matter how fast you are moving.

The other objection is that I would then like to ask you what you look like when you move so fast or even faster than sound.

What follows from this? It follows that you can think anything if you don't stick to reality. With this theory of relativity, you end up with the idea that you hear the sound earlier than the shot is released! (Laughter.) You can think of it quite well, but it can't happen. And that, you see, is the difference! People who do science today mainly want to think logically; and Einstein thinks wonderfully logically. But the logical is not yet real. You have to have two qualities in your thinking: first, the things have to be logical, but second, they have to be real. You have to be able to live in reality. Then you don't think up this box that is pulled up and down on a rope. Then you don't think of the clock that flies out into space at the speed of light and back again. Then you don't think of the guy there who moves faster than the sound and therefore hears the sound earlier than the shot takes place. Much of what you read in books today, gentlemen, as such considerations, is very nicely thought out, but none of it is in reality.

And so we can say: Einstein's theory of relativity is clever and it also applies to a certain part of the world, but you can't do anything with it when you look at reality. For from the theory of relativity one never comes to understand why a person tires so terribly when he goes to Basel, since he cannot say whether he is going into Basel or whether Basel is coming to meet him. The fatigue could not be explained if Basel were to come to him, and why I fiddle with my feet when I walk; I could stand still, wait for Basel to come to me! You see, all these things show nothing other than that it is not enough to think correctly and intelligently, but that something else is needed: one must be immersed in life and must judge things according to life.

That is what I can tell you about the theory of relativity. It has caused a great stir, but, as I said, people understand it only a little, otherwise they would already be thinking about these things.

So, see you next Saturday.

[ 1 ] We will continue our study of the Mystery of Golgotha. At the very outset it must be realised that happenings on the Earth are not determined by earthly conditions alone but by the whole Universe. It is difficult for the modern mind to grasp what this means, but without the knowledge that influences pour down unceasingly upon the Earth from cosmic space, no event of human life, however simple, can be understood. I have spoken about this on many occasions and I shall speak of it to-day in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 2 ] I told you that the Jews—I mentioned them as the fourth people in the evolutionary process ¹—experienced the reality of the fourth member of man's being, namely the “I,” the Ego. This fourth member, which the Jews conceived to be the divine, innermost core of the human being, they called Jahve. And they saw a connection between Jahve and the universe of stars.

[ 3 ] You know, of course, that Palestine was the birth place of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine, in a Jewish environment. The Jewish religion prevailed in Palestine and although the Romans were the political rulers, in those far-off lands they were not in a position to abolish the established religion. Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, grew up in the environment of the Jewish religion.

[ 4 ] It will be easier for you to understand the character of the Jewish religion if I say something about the peoples who were living in Mesopotamia, that is to say, further to the East, namely, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. These peoples were neighbours of the Jews and their religion was connected essentially with the stars—it was a Star Religion. One often ears it said that the Assyrians “worshipped” the stars. They did not worship the stars but the instinctive wisdom of those times enabled them to know much more about the stars than is known nowadays, despite the claims of modern scholarship.

[ 5 ] You may have read in the newspapers recently that this hitherto undisputed knowledge of the stars threatens to collapse as a result of the discovery that the Earth is not surrounded by empty, celestial space but that at a height of 400 kilometres there are solid crystals of nitrogen! It would seem, therefore, that science is finding confirmation of the “crystal heavens” spoken of in Greek antiquity. I mention this merely in parenthesis. Such things may bring home to scholars how little is really known about the world of stars.

[ 6 ] And now imagine a being inhabiting the planet Mars. If such a being were to look downwards without a powerful telescope, he would not see any human beings on the Earth: he would simply see the Earth radiating a greenish light into cosmic space. Yet the Earth swarms with human beings who are in turn connected with Spiritual Beings. And just as the physical forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, so too the spiritual forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, above all upon man. The ancient, instinctive wisdom of the East revealed the existence of Spiritual Beings in the stars and it was to these Spiritual Beings, not to the physical stars, that men looked with veneration. In this sense the religion in Western Asia in those early times was a Star Religion. It was accepted as a matter of course that Spiritual Beings belonging to Saturn, Jupiter and the other heavenly bodies have a certain influence upon men and upon their earthly life. [ 7 ] Now what the Jews had adopted from ancient religions was the teaching concerning the influence of the Moon; they paid little attention to the other heavenly bodies. Jahve or Jehovah was connected with the spirituality of the Moon. The Jewish religion in its earliest, original form taught that Jahve, or Jehovah, as a living reality within the human “I,” was connected with the spiritual forces of the Moon. [ 8 ] This is not a mere legend, neither is it an idea born of religious superstition; it relates to something of which there is scientific evidence. During the pregnancy of the mother—a period of great importance for earthly existence—when the human being is still an embryo, he is essentially dependent on the Moon. This dependency of the human embryo on the Moon has long been known and the period of pregnancy computed as ten lunar months. It is only comparatively recently that the ten lunar months have been changed to nine solar months. But these ten lunar months, which have rightly been connected with the period of pregnancy, are in themselves an indication that the embryonic human being in the body of the mother is dependent on the Moon. What does this mean? [ 9 ] In its earliest condition after fertilisation, the ovum really contains earthly substance that has been broken down, pulverised, and nothing whatever would arise from it if it were exposed to the influence of earthly forces alone! The development into a human embryo is only able to take place because influences from the Moon play down upon the Earth. It can truly be said that the forces of the Moon lead the human being into earthly life. And so in its veneration of Jahve as a Moon God, the Jewish religion was really pointing to this dependency of the human being upon the forces of the Moon when he is entering earthly existence.

[ 10 ] Now the peoples living further to the East, in Asia—the Babylonians, the Assyrians—recognised other planetary influences as well as those of the Moon. They said, for example: Whether a human being subsequently becomes wise or remains a dullard, depends to a certain extent upon the influence of Jupiter. But the Jews did not concern themselves with these other influences. They venerated the one God—a Moon God. The fact that the Jews turned from many Gods to one God is generally regarded as a great step forward in religious life.

[ 11 ] Jesus of Nazareth heard much of the one God, the God Jahve, for the Jewish religion was all around him and He was instructed in its teachings.

[ 12 ] You can understand why a people who venerated only the Moon God, the God whose influence upon the human being works above all during the period while he is in the mother's body, believed that a man brings the whole of his being with him when he comes to the Earth. And this found expression in the ancient Jahve religion. If an ancient Jew who had fallen sick were asked: Why has this befallen you?—he answered: It is the will of Jahve. If his house had been set on fire and he were asked: Why has your house been burnt?—again his answer would have been: It is the will of Jahve ... He attributed everything to the one God, Jahve, through whose power man is led into the earthly world, and he saw the will of Jahve in everything that happened. Hence there was a kind of frozen rigidity about the Jewish religion. Through the whole of his life a man felt that his existence was determined by what he had brought with him to the Earth.

[ 13 ] Other religious teachings, as well as those of the Jews, came to the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth. These other religions taught that many heavenly bodies—not only the Moon—have an influence upon the human being. There is an indication in the Gospels of a connection between the Star Religions of the East and the country inhabited by the Jews where Jesus of Nazareth was born. For the Gospels tell of the Wise Men from the East who had seen a star and were led by this star to the birthplace of Jesus.

[ 14 ] The story as it stands in modern versions of the Gospels gives rise to misunderstanding. The truth of the matter is that with their knowledge of the heavenly constellations the Wise Men recognised from the position of the stars that a momentous event was about to take place. And so at the very birth of Jesus of Nazareth we have the indication of a link with the Star Wisdom of Asia, of the East. And this link remained.

[ 15 ] The aim of Jesus of Nazareth was to enable man—while he is actually living on the Earth—to become aware of an inner reality of being, an inner selfhood. The Jews said: Everything comes from Jahve.—But in reality it is only until birth that the influence of Jahve holds sway, and once the human being is born, his life on the Earth is not simply a continuation of the Jahve impulse. The great truth brought by Christ Jesus was that during earthly life man is not like a rolling ball, impelled only by the impetus given by Jahve before his birth, but that he possesses an inner power of will by means of which he can ennoble or debase his own nature, his own personality. This was a truly epoch-making teaching. For the Star Wisdom had been kept very secret; nothing was known of it in Palestine, let alone in Rome. The Star Wisdom had been kept strictly secret and it was therefore profoundly significant that Jesus of Nazareth should have taught: It is not only from the Moon that influences pour down upon man; influences also pour down upon him from the Sun.

[ 16 ] This was a momentous teaching. But such things must not be regarded merely as theories; they must be studied in the light of reality. What is it that the influence of the Moon really brings about while the human embryo still rests within the body of the mother? The being of soul, the being of soul-and-spirit comes from the Moon-sphere and passes into the physical body. Man descends as a soul from the heavens by way of the Moon. When the Jews said: Jahve has an influence upon the human being in the womb of the mother—what did this really indicate? It indicated the view: The soul-and-spirit of man comes from the Moon; there, in the Moon, is the Creator of the soul. The physical, material constitution of man comes from the Earth; but the soul-and-spirit comes from the great universe, entering into man by way of the Moon.—The Jews, therefore, maintained that the soul entered into man by way of the Moon and received its endowments and gifts from the Moon God.

[ 17 ] Jesus of Nazareth taught that in truth man has the soul within him but that the soul can change, can be transformed in the course of his life because he has freedom of will.

[ 18 ] What underlay this teaching of Jesus of Nazareth? This question is profoundly significant and in order to find the answer we must consider the following:

[ 19 ] The Jews are always distinguished in a certain way from other peoples of the Earth. The difference is due to the fact that throughout the centuries the Jews have been brought up in the Moon religion and have refused to recognise any other influence. Real understanding of these things requires a knowledge of certain characteristics of Judaism. There is abundant evidence that the Jews have a great talent for music; but on the other hand they have no outstanding gift for sculpture, painting and arts of this nature. The Jews have a flair for materialism but little aptitude for acknowledging the reality of the spiritual world. And this is because their veneration has always been paid to the Moon and the Moon only; the rest of the super-earthly universe has hardly entered their ken. The Jewish character and the Greek character are in complete contrast. The talent and inclination of the Greeks lay above all in the direction of sculpture, pictorial art, architecture—architecture which embodied the art of sculpture. The Jews have always been, and are by nature, a musical people, a sacerdotal people; they unfold more particularly the inner activity which has its source in the talents bestowed during embryonic life. [ 20 ] At the time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, this tendency was very strongly marked. The Jews one meets in Europe to-day have of course been living among other peoples for a long time, and they have assimilated many traits from them. But anyone of discernment can readily distinguish the fundamental character of the Jews from that of other peoples. As I said, the hearts and minds of the ancient Jews were directed entirely to the Moon God. Therefore they developed the traits which are connected with the Moon, not those which are connected with the Sun. The Sun was completely forgotten. If Jesus of Nazareth had remained a Jew, even He could only have taught a Moon Religion. But a different impulse, a spiritual influence proceeding directly from the Sun entered into him in the course of His life.

[ 21 ] As a result of this, He was “born a second time.” Eastern religions all knew what it meant to be born a second time, but to-day it is nothing more than a tradition and is no longer understood. At a certain moment in His life, Jesus of Nazareth knew that he had been born again, that the soul with which he had been endowed by the forces of the Moon while still within the mother's body had been quickened and filled with new life by the Sun ... And from that moment, He who had been Jesus of Nazareth was known among the initiated as Christ Jesus. It was said: Like all other Jews, Jesus of Nazareth became a man through the forces of the Moon; but because at a certain moment in his life the Sun influence poured into him, He has been born a second time—as CHRIST.

[ 22 ] Obviously, an average man of to-day who cannot take these things in their spiritual sense, will never be able to make anything of them. Having no idea that the human being is united with his soul in the mother's body before birth, he thinks that the soul must come in some way from the external world. And he certainly can make nothing of the teaching that a Sun Being, a second “personality” as it were, entered into Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the first personality enters into the mother's body, so did the Sun Being enter into Jesus of Nazareth as a second personality.

[ 23 ] The words used in the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church make no reference to what I have just told you. But at any celebration of High Mass you will see on the altar the Sanctissimum, the Monstrance containing the Sacred Host, and here (sketch on blackboard) rays are depicted. It is a representation of the Sun and the Moon. The very form of the Monstrance tells us that Christianity originates from a religious conception which, unlike that held by the Jews, recognises not only the influence of the Moon but also that of the Sun. Just as the influence working in the process of the birth of a human being is that of the Moon, so the influence working in Christ Jesus is that of the Sun.

[ 24 ] Having heard this, you may imagine that it is possible for every human being to be born a second time and to receive the influence from the Sun during the course of his life. But the truth is rather different. What happened in the case of Christ Jesus was that the influence streamed directly to the “I,” the Ego. Upon which member of man's being does the Moon influence work during embryonic life? As you know, man is composed of physical body, ether-body, astral body, and the “I.” The Moon influence works upon the astral body: the astral body, of which a man is not normally conscious, is influenced by the Moon. But in Christ, the Sun influence poured into the “I”—the free and independent “I”!

[ 25 ] If the Sun influence had ever worked upon man in exactly the same way as the Moon influence, what would have been the result? Think of the following:—As individuals we have no very decisive influence upon our own birth; our birth dispatches us as it were into the world. If the Sun influence were of exactly the same character as the Moon influence, we should simply receive the Sun influence at, say, the age of 30, and we should have no more say in this than we have in our birth. At the age of 30 we should suddenly become different persons, we should actually forget what we had been doing before that time. Just imagine what it would be like if you were to be going about until your 29th year and then, at 30, were to be born again! After this second “birth” you might come across someone not yet 30, who greeted you as an acquaintance. You would say: I know nothing about you ... I have only been here since to-day and I do not know you. That is what would happen if every human being at the age, say, of 30, were actually to receive the Sun influence. All this may seem very questionable but it is true nevertheless. It has simply been forgotten because history has been so greatly falsified. An exactly similar process was at work in very ancient times, although not in quite as drastic a form as I have described to you now ... In the very distant past, about seven or eight thousand years ago in India, men were like new beings when they reached the age of 30, and they knew nothing about their earlier life. Then the people around took charge of them and sent them to some “official” (I am using a modern term) who told them their names and who they were. This transformation was less and less marked as time went on, but in those olden times it did indeed take place. Even the ancient Egyptians who had reached, say, the age of 50, did not remember back to their childhood but only to their thirtieth year; they were told by the people around them about their earlier life, just as we are told to-day what we used to do when we were babies of one or two years old. History says nothing about this change that has come about in the life of man, but it is a fact.

The last human being destined to receive the direct influence of the Sun was Jesus of Nazareth; for others this was no longer possible. There is a hint about this Sun influence in the Gospels but it is always misinterpreted. The Gospels tell us that when Jesus of Nazareth went to the Jordan to be baptised by John, a Dove descended upon Him from heaven. The Dove is the symbol of the Sun influence, of the Sun Being who entered into Jesus. But He was the last, the very last. The bodily constitution of other men in His day was such that they were not able to receive the Sun influence. Jesus was the last.

[ 26 ] In the ancient East, men could say with truth: The Sun influence comes to everyone in the course of his life, and when this happens he becomes a new being. This could no longer be said in the epoch when Christ Jesus lived, and the priests knew of it merely through tradition, not through their own vision.

[ 27 ] In the ancient past, before the days of the Jews, veneration was paid to the Sun, because the Sun was known to be the source of this all-powerful influence during life. When no such influence was received, men ceased to venerate the Sun. By whom, then, was the Sun replaced? By Christ Jesus Himself! Before the founding of Christianity there had been a Sun Religion in which the Sun itself was the object of veneration. Christ Jesus was the last to receive this Sun influence, and thereafter men could do no other than point to Christ, saying: There, within Him, is the Sun Spirit!

[ 28 ] Herein lies the great and fundamental change. It denoted a sheer revolution in thought to be able to say: Christ Jesus brought down upon the Earth that which was formerly in the Sun. In the first Christian centuries, Christ was always called the Sun and in the Gospels we still find the words: “the Sun, the Christ.” Later on, the meaning was entirely forgotten. At every High Mass the truth is visibly portrayed in the Monstrance; but if anyone says in so many words that what is represented there is a fact, he is denounced as a heretic. For the Christian Church has always considered it dangerous to proclaim truths which have to do with the Stars, and therefore also with the Sun.

[ 29 ] Why is this so? Here again we must go back to the ancient Mysteries and compare them with Christianity. You know that the Mysteries were not open to everyone. I told you about the different stages. The Initiates were known as Ravens, Occultists, Defenders, Sphinxes, Spirits of the People, Sun Men, Fathers.³ These men knew that influences come from the stars and the initiated priests were careful to ensure that the knowledge was in the possession only of those who had actually been received into the Mysteries. For knowledge is a power! True, it is often suppressed ... but when the authority of the priesthood is strong, knowledge is certainly a power.

[ 30 ] The Star Wisdom had, however, been lost. And now came Christ Jesus who brought it to life again—but in a new form—teaching that the Sun God must now have his place upon the Earth. If Christ's teaching had gained the victory, knowledge of the Sun influence and indeed of the ancient Star Religion in its entirety would again have been present in the world. Moreover in the early Christian centuries this was in many ways the case. There was a certain revival of the ancient Mystery teachings. But Christ Jesus had brought about the great and fundamental change in that He placed as a reality before all the world what had previously been guarded as a close secret in the Mysteries. Thereafter it would have been within the reach of all human beings, but no effort succeeded in spreading the knowledge.

[ 31 ] A certain Roman Emperor, Julian, called the “Apostate” tried to introduce the ancient Star Religion once again but he was murdered while on a journey to Persia

[ 32 ] What happened in Rome was this. The Star Wisdom that had in truth been brought again to the world by Christ Jesus was denounced as superstition—and not only as superstition but as a creed of the devil. The very means, therefore, of leading men to a real knowledge of the Spiritual was denounced and practically exterminated. People were expected to believe only in the external, historical event of the presence of Christ Jesus in Palestine—in the form in which the Church proclaimed it.

Consequently the Church became the supreme authority for all believers in the matter of how and what they should think. It was not by way of Rome that real Christianity came to Europe; what Rome brought to Europe was a changed Christianity—a Christianity which accepted only the outer event in Palestine and ignored the whole cosmic setting of that event.

Why did it happen so? [ 33 ] As I told you, Rome originated from a band of brigands who had once gathered together,² and echoes of their mode of life persisted for a very long time. Rome has always striven for power in worldly affairs and in the religious life at the same time. And in the course of the Middle Ages, the Pope took the place ... well, not of the ancient High Priest, the “Pontifex Maximus,” for it was only the name that continued ... the Pope assumed the position that had once been held by the Roman Emperors.

At one period—it was at the beginning of the eleventh century—an attempt was made by a certain German Emperor to achieve something in the same direction as Julian who had been called the Apostate. It is a very interesting story. Henry II was a good and faithful advocate of Christianity and was looked upon as a kind of saint. He reigned as Emperor from 1002–24. In history, too, he is known as Henry “the Saint” and he still figures among the saints named in the breviary of Catholic priests. Henry II was one who wished to point to the ancient wisdom, to preserve for Christianity the conception that in Christ Jesus there had lived the Sun Spirit. He wanted to establish an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that is to say, a Catholic Church that is not Roman. This attempt was made at the beginning of the eleventh century. Lutherism came considerably later. If Henry II's attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the whole cosmic setting of Christianity would have come to the knowledge of Europe and through the religious life men would have been led to a truly spiritual science. But Rome conquered—that is to say, semi-religious, semi-imperial Rome. No Ecclesia catholica non Romana came into being and the Ecclesia catholica Romana lived on. The aim of Emperor Henry II had been to separate the Catholic Church entirely from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 34 ] It would have been a momentous deed, for if it had succeeded, the subsequent, very widespread persecution of heretics and heresies would never have taken place. Such persecutions are simply the outcome of authority exercised over men's thoughts. But in reality, nobody can have permanent authority over thoughts. Authority over thoughts can only be exercised when a human being is subject to the sway of worldly power, when he is obliged to attend particular schools where certain doctrines are inculcated into him, when he is put into a certain class which influences his point of view, and the like. Thoughts, in reality, cannot be made to submit to authority. No Church could ever have worked harmfully without the help of the worldly dominion to which man is subject as a physical being. For the Church can only teach; the response must come from human beings themselves. That is the principle which Henry II tried to establish. But as I said, the victory was won by Rome—by the ancient, imperial power working in the person of the Pope. The power of worldly dominion was very great in the days of Henry II. And if the attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the teachings of the Church would have remained apart from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 35 ] Fundamentally, the Crusades were pursuing the same aim. It is commonly said that the Crusades were undertaken in the service of Rome, that because the wicked Turks had conquered Jerusalem the pilgrims there could no longer perform their devotions in safety. Then Rome intervened and sent Peter of Amiens out into Europe to preach. Numbers of men were urged to come together in a Crusade to the East, to Jerusalem, and a great band of Crusaders gathered as the result of this preaching under the leadership of Peter of Amiens and Walter the “Penniless.” (Perhaps you can guess why he was called the “Penniless.” He was like all of us here, for we could not raise enough money between us to pay the cost of a crusade to Asia!) But this whole band of Crusaders perished on the way and nothing was achieved.

[ 36 ] Then came others, under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon. These men were not in the service of Rome but their aim had certain points in common with that of Henry II. They wanted to do away with the element of worldly dominion. (Dr. Steiner makes a sketch on the blackboard.) Here is Italy, here Greece, here the Black Sea, here Asia, here Palestine, here Jerusalem. The aim of the first real Crusade was that Jerusalem, not Rome, should stand as the centre and citadel of the Christian religion. This was again an attempt to make the Ecclesia, the Church, independent of worldly dominion.

[ 37 ] None of these attempts succeeded. Roman princes and nobles again found their way into the later Crusades. The story can be read in any history book.

[ 38 ] And so this basic principle of Christianity, enshrining the great thought that in Christ Jesus the Sun Force itself was brought down to the Earth and that realisation of this makes every human being free ... “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free ...”—this whole conception has remained in oblivion through the centuries and true Christianity must be discovered again to-day through Spiritual Science. It is not surprising that the representatives of Christianity in the form it has now assumed, oppose the Christianity which genuinely adheres to Christ Jesus and teaches the same realities as He Himself taught. This is what Anthroposophy does. Again it is not surprising that those who only know Christianity in its present form often have an aversion to it. This aversion, however, it not to be laid at the door of Christianity itself. Christianity has brought about tremendous progress in the social life. Slavery was gradually abolished, for one thing. And without Christianity there would have been no science as we know it to-day. Most of the really epoch-making discoveries were made by monks (the air-pump produced by the worthy Burgomaster Guericke von Magdeburg is one of the exceptions). Copernicus was a dignitary of the Catholic Church; and the schools and academies of learning were all dependent upon the monks.

[ 39 ] But something else must also be remembered.—The monasteries were not, at first, welcome in the Church, because the monks had preserved a good deal of the ancient knowledge. Among the monks (only they were not allowed to speak) there did indeed exist knowledge of the ancient Star Wisdom. Ample evidence of this can be found by anyone who looks for it. It was through monasticism, not through any external regime that knowledge of the kind of which I gave you an example in the last lecture, had been preserved and it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it was completely swept away. The Middle Ages were by no means as “dark” an epoch as people generally believe. It is only what comes within the range of ordinary observation that is “dark.” In secret there was a great deal of wisdom, only it is not understood to-day.

[ 40 ] We can truly say: The greatest thought enshrined in Christianity is that the Sun Force in all reality came down upon the Earth.

[ 41 ] Not until then did history, as we know it to-day, really come to birth. For whereas in olden times men in the East possessed a glorious Star Wisdom, they attached no value to “history.” Those who were knowers and sages in the East always declared: It is there, in the Heavens, that the act of Creation takes place. They did not concern themselves to any great extent with the life and doings of human beings on the Earth.—True, something in the nature of history appears when the Jews come upon the scene, but it is history that begins with Star Wisdom—for the story of the “seven days of Creation” is pure Star Wisdom. Later on, events become chaotic, a medley. True history—and true history divides the whole process of evolution on the Earth into the pre-Christian and the post-Christian—really begins when Christianity is born.

• 1. See the lectures in the first volume of this series: The Birth of Christianity, and Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 3. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 2. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity; also Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

[ 1 ] Dr. Steiner: As I shall be away next week I wanted to speak to you to-day about the Easter Festival. Or have you some other question of importance at the moment?

[ 2 ] Questioner: I had a question but it has nothing to do with the Easter Festival.

An article in a recent Parisian newspaper stated that it is possible to be taught to read and to see with the skin. Would Dr. Steiner say something about this? I was very astonished by it.

[ 3 ] Dr. Steiner: A great deal of caution is necessary when information about a matter of this kind comes from a newspaper and careful investigation is called for. The article says that certain people ... the man really means everyone ... can be trained to see with the skin, to read with certain parts of the skin.

[ 4 ] Now this has been known for a long time. It is possible to train certain people to read with some part of their skin. But let me say at once that such a thing is really not so very astonishing. Human beings do not by any means learn everything that they could learn; they do not develop all their powers. Many faculties could be developed quite quickly by setting to work in earnest. Children, for example, could all be trained to read with their finger-tips by making them touch and feel letters on a piece of paper. In the blank spaces between the letters the paper is quite different to the touch. If you were to make letters which stand out a little from the paper it would be quite easy to read them! Letters made of wood could be read by touch with the eyes shut. It is only a matter of refining this faculty, making it more delicate.

[ 5 ] When I was a boy I trained myself to do something rather unusual, namely, to hold a pencil between the big toe and the next toe and write with it. All these things that one does not generally learn can be learnt and then certain faculties will develop. These faculties can become so delicate and sensitive that the result is quite astonishing. But it really need not be so; what has happened is that the power of touch has been greatly enhanced, and every part of the body has this power. Just as we become aware of a jab from a nail, so we can become aware of the tiny roughnesses caused by letters on paper.

[ 6 ] This, however, does not quite cover the case you mentioned, for the man claims that he can develop in everyone the faculty of being able to read with the skin. From the statement as it stands, the details could not all be put to the test and it would be better to wait for scientific confirmation before believing that if a page of a book were placed, say, over your stomach, you would eventually be able to read it. One must be able to discriminate whether it is a matter of a delicate and highly sensitive faculty of touch or whether there is something bogus about it—and this cannot be discovered from the newspaper report. I myself was not at all astonished at the statement because I can well imagine that such a thing might be possible; but what did astonish me was the stupid comment of the journalists, who said that if such a thing were really true, then it must have been discovered a long time ago.—I ask you, how can anyone say about the telephone, for example: If this is really true, then it must have been known for a very long time! This kind of comment astonished me far more than the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon itself is not so very astonishing because a human being can do a great deal towards developing his organs of feeling and touch. Seeing with the eyes is not everything. The fingers, for example, can be developed into most delicate organs of perception. And so reliable scientific investigation would be necessary in order to prove whether or not, after years of training, the man can make every part of the body able to see. I have read reports in German, English and French newspapers and I find it impossible to gather from them whether the man in question is a lunatic, a humbug or a serious scientist.

Now let us think about the Easter Festival in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. As you know, Easter is a movable festival—every year it is celebrated on a different date. Why is the date variable? Because it is determined, not by terrestrial but by celestial conditions. It is fixed by asking: When does spring begin? March 21st is always the beginning of spring and the Easter Festival takes place after this. Then there is a period of waiting until the Moon comes to the full, then another pause until the following Sunday, and Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the beginning of spring. The first full Moon can be on 22nd March, in which case Easter is very early; or the first full Moon can be a whole twenty-nine days after 21st March. If, for example, there is a full Moon on 19th March, spring has not yet begun and then after some twenty-eight days the Moon is again full; the Easter Festival in that year will fall on the next Sunday—quite late in April.

[ 7 ] Now why has the Easter Festival been fixed according to conditions in the heavens? This is connected with what I have been telling you. In earlier times men knew that the Moon and the Sun have an influence upon everything that exists on the Earth.

[ 8 ] Think of a growing plant. (Sketch on the blackboard.) If you want to grow a plant, you take a tiny seed and lay it in the soil. The whole plant, the whole life of the plant is compressed into this tiny seed. What comes out of this seed? First, the root. The life expands into the root. [ 9 ] But then it contracts again and grows, still in a state of contraction, into a stem. Then it expands and the leaves come and then the blossom. Then there is again contraction into the seed and the seed waits until the following year. In the plant, therefore, we see a process of expansion—contraction; expansion—contraction.

[ 10 ] Whenever the plant expands, it is the Sun which draws out the leaf or the blossom; whenever the plant contracts (in the seed or the stem) the contraction is due to the forces of the Moon. Between the leaves, the Moon is working. So that when we take a plant with spreading leaves and root, we can say, beginning with the seed: Moon—then Sun—again Moon—again Sun—again Moon, and so forth ... with the Moon at the end of the process. In every plant we see Sun forces and Moon forces working in alternation. In a field of growing plants we behold the deeds of Sun and Moon. I told you that the fashioning and shaping of the physical human being when he comes into the world, is dependent on the Moon; ¹ inner forces which make it possible for him to transform his own character, come from the Sun. I told you this when we were speaking about the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 11 ] In earlier times these things were known but they have all been forgotten. Men asked themselves: When is there present in spring the influence that does most to promote the thriving and growth of vegetation? It is when the influences of Sun and Moon together are at their strongest. This is the case when the rays of the first full Moon after the beginning of spring shine down upon the Earth, adding strength to the rays of the Sun. The influences of Sun and Moon are mutually enhanced when the springtime Sun at its strongest works in conjunction with the Moon which is also at its strongest when its cycle of four weeks has been completed. The time for Easter, therefore, is the Sunday—the day dedicated to the Sun—after the first full Moon of spring. The date of the Easter Festival was based on knowledge relating to the winter solstice and the subsequent beginning of spring.

[ 12 ] Now the Easter Festival did not begin in the Christian era before the rise of Christianity there was an old pagan festival—the Adonis Festival as it was called. What was this Adonis Festival? It was instituted by the Mysteries—those places for the cultivation of art, learning and religion which I have described to you recently. And Adonis was personified in a kind of effigy or image, representing the spirit-and-soul in man. It was known, furthermore, that man's life of spirit-and-soul is united with the whole universe. The ancient pagan peoples took account of spiritual conditions and celebrated this Adonis Festival in the autumn. The old Easter Festival—which in a certain way resembled our own—fell in the autumn.²

The Adonis Festival was celebrated in the following way.—[ 13 ] The image of the eternal, immortal part of man was submerged in a pond, or in the sea if the place happened to be near the coast, and left there for three days, to the accompaniment of songs of mourning and lamentation. The submerging of the image was the occasion of solemnities resembling those which might be associated with the death of a member of a very united family. It was essentially a ceremony which had to do with Death, and it always took place on the day of the week we now call Friday. The name “Karfreitag” originated when the custom found its way into the Germanic regions of Middle Europe. “Kar” comes from “Chara” (Old High German) meaning mourning. It was therefore the Friday of sadness or mourning.

[ 14 ] So little is known of these things to-day that in England this Friday is called “Good” Friday, whereas in olden time it was the Friday of Death, the Friday of mourning and lamentation. It was a festival connected with Death, dedicated to Adonis. And in places where there was no water, an artificial pond was contrived into which the image or effigy was plunged and taken out after three days, i.e., after the Sunday.

[ 15 ] The image was taken out of the water amid songs of jubilation and rejoicing. For three days, therefore, the people were filled with deep sorrow and after these three days with ecstatic joy. And the theme of their songs of jubilation was always: “The God has come to us again!”

[ 16 ] What did this Festival signify?—I must emphasise again that originally it was celebrated in the autumn. [ 17 ] On other occasions I have told you that when the human being dies, the physical body is laid aside. Those who have been bereaved mourn in their own way for the dead with solemnities not unlike those which accompanied the submerging of the Adonis image. But there is something else as well. For a period of three days after death, the human being looks back upon his earthly life. His physical body has been laid aside but his ether-body is still with him. The ether-body expands and expands and finally dissolves into the universe. The human being then lives on in the astral body and the “I.”

[ 18 ] The purpose of those who instituted the Adonis Festival was to make men realise that the human being does not only die but after three days comes to life again in the spiritual world. And in order that this might be brought every year to men's consciousness, the Adonis Festival was instituted. In the autumn it was said: Lo, nature is dying; the trees lose their leaves, the earth is covered with snow; winds are cold and biting; the earth loses her fertility and looks just as the physical human being looks in death. We must wait until spring for the earth to come to life again, whereas the human being comes to life again in soul and spirit after three days. Of this men must be made conscious! ... A festival of Death was therefore followed immediately by a festival of Resurrection!—But this festival took place in the autumn—the season when it is easy to realise the contrast between man and nature. Nature is about to consolidate her life; she will lie dead through the whole winter. But in contrast to nature, man lives on after death in the spiritual world. When nature sheds her leaves, is covered with snow, when cold winds blow, then is the time to make man conscious: You are different from nature, inasmuch as when you die, after three days you live again!

[ 19 ] It was a most beautiful festival, celebrated through long ages of antiquity. Men gathered together at the places of the Mysteries for the period of this festival, joining in the songs of mourning; and then, on the third day, the consciousness came to them that every soul, every “I” and every astral body come to life again in the spiritual world three days after death. Their attention was turned away from the physical world and their hearts and minds were drawn to the spiritual world. The very season of the year played a part, for in those days the festival did not take place in the spring when the people who lived on the land were occupied with other tasks. The old Easter Festival, the Adonis Festival, was celebrated when the fruit had been harvested and the grape picking was over, when winter was approaching. It was the appropriate season for an awakening in the Spirit, and so the Adonis Festival was celebrated. The name varied in different territories but the festival was celebrated in all ancient religions. For all ancient religions spoke in this way of the immortality of the human soul.

[ 20 ] Now in the first centuries of the Christian era itself, the Easter Festival was not celebrated at the time it is celebrated to-day; not until the third or fourth century did it become customary to celebrate Easter in the spring. But by that time men had lost all understanding of the spiritual world; they had eyes only for nature, concerned themselves only with nature. And so they said: It is not possible to celebrate resurrection in the autumn, when nothing comes to life!—They no longer knew that the human being comes to life again in the spiritual world, and so they said: In the autumn there is no resurrection; the snow covers everything. Whereas in the spring, all things burst into life. Spring, therefore, is the proper time for the Easter Festival.—This kind of thinking was already an outcome of materialism, although it was a materialism which still looked up to the heavens and fixed the Easter Festival according to Sun and Moon. By the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, materialism was already in evidence but at least it still looked out into the universe; it was not the “earth-worm” materialism which has eyes only for the Earth and has been described as such because the earthworms live under the soil and only come up when it rains. And so it is with the men of modern times; they look simply at what is on the Earth. When the Easter Festival began to be celebrated in the spring, even materialism still believed that the myriad stars have an influence upon human beings. But from the fifteenth century onwards, that too was forgotten. At the time when the Easter Festival was transferred to the spring, certain attempts were being made by the Christians to sweep away the ancient truths.—I mentioned this when we were speaking about the Mystery of Golgotha.—By the eighth or ninth centuries, men had not the remotest inkling that Christ's Coming was in any way connected with the Sun.

[ 21 ] In the fourth century there were two Emperors, one a little later than the other. The first was Constantine, the founder of Constantinople and an extremely vain man. He ordered a certain treasure that had once been brought from Troy to Rome to be transferred to Constantinople and buried in the ground under a pillar which had upon it a statue of Apollo, the old pagan god; then he sent to the East for wood said to have been taken from the Cross of Christ, and caused a wreath to be carved, with rays springing from it. But in the figure crowned with this wooden wreath, people were expected to behold Constantine! And so from then onwards, veneration was paid to Constantine, standing there on the pillar that had been erected over the precious Roman treasure. By external measures, you see, he brought it about that men ceased to know anything about cosmic secrets, about the fact that Christ is connected with the Sun.

[ 22 ] The other Emperor, Julian, had received instruction in the Mysteries which still survived, although under very difficult conditions. Later on they were exterminated altogether by the Emperor Justinian but for centuries already their existence had been highly precarious. They were not wanted; Christianity was their bitter enemy. Julian the Emperor, however, had received instruction in the Mysteries and he knew: There is not only one Sun, but there are three Suns³—This announcement caused an uproar, for it was a secret of the Mysteries.

[ 23 ] When you look at the Sun you see a whitish-yellowish orb or body—it is the physical Sun. But this Sun has a soul: it is the second Sun. And then there is the third Sun: the spiritual Sun. Like man, the Sun has body, soul and spirit. Julian spoke of three Suns and maintained that in Christianity men should be taught: Christ came from the Sun and then, as Sun Being, entered into the man Jesus.

[ 24 ] Now the Churches did not wish this knowledge to be in the possession of men. The Churches did not want the real facts about Christ Jesus to come to light, but only such knowledge as was authorised by them. Julian the Emperor was treacherously murdered on a journey to Asia, in order that the world might be rid of him. That is why Julian is always known as the Apostate, the heretic: Julian the Heretic! He desired that the connection between Christianity and the ancient truths should be maintained, for he thought: It will be easier for Christianity to make progress if it contains the truths of the ancient wisdom than if men are allowed to believe only what the priests tell them. So you see, at the time when the Easter Festival was transferred to the spring, knowledge that this festival is connected with resurrection still survived. Although knowledge of the resurrection of man had been lost, the resurrection of nature continued to be celebrated in a festival. But even that has been forgotten in places where Easter is still celebrated without any inkling of what it really signifies; and to-day people have come to the point of asking: Why need Sun and Moon have anything to do with the date of Easter? If Easter were always to fall on the first Sunday in April, book-keeping would be greatly simplified! The suggestion, therefore, is that the date should be determined by commercial considerations! ... As a matter of fact, the people who clamour for this are more honest than the others who insist that conditions in the heavens shall still be the determining factor, without having the slightest notion of what this means. Those who say from their own point of view that conditions in the heavens need not be taken into account are really the more honest. But the sad thing is that people can only be honest about this because they know nothing of the real connections. What we have to do to-day is to emphasise that the Spiritual must always be the decisive factor!

[ 25 ] And so in olden times men waited for the last full Moon after the beginning of autumn and celebrated the Adonis Festival on the preceding Sunday. Sun and Moon were taken into account but it was known that conditions are quite different, indeed the reverse, when snow will soon be falling from the heavens. The old Easter Festival, the Adonis Festival, always took place between the end of September and the end of October. This was the best time to be reminded of the resurrection of man, because at that season of the year there was no question of a resurrection in nature. This early festival, therefore, was known to be connected with Death and also with Resurrection ... but this knowledge too has been lost.

[ 26 ] It is important to be reminded of the ancient significance of these festivals, for we have again to find the way to the Spirit. We must not celebrate Christmas and Easter thoughtlessly but realise that such festivals have deep meaning.

[ 27 ] Now the world cannot be turned topsy-turvy; nobody would wish the Easter Festival to be transferred to the autumn. But it is good to be reminded that when a man dies, he lays aside his physical body and looks back upon his earthly life; then he lays aside the ether-body and comes to life again in the spiritual world as a being of spirit-and-soul. Such knowledge can greatly deepen our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Mystery of Golgotha presents in external reality what was always presented in an image at the Adonis Festival. The men of antiquity had an image; Christians have the actual, historical event. But in the historical event there are certain points of resemblance with the imagery used in olden times. At the Adonis Festival the image of Adonis was submerged and raised after three days. It was a true Easter Festival.—But then, what had once been presented as an image, came to pass as an actual happening. The Christ was in Jesus. He died and rose to life again. And at Easter now, this is all that is remembered.

[ 28 ] In a way, there is a good side to this. For why was an image always set before the people at the Adonis Festival? It was because they needed something that their senses could perceive. Although they still looked at the universe in a spiritual way, in the material world they needed an image. But when Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha there was to be no image; men were called upon to remember purely in the Spirit what had happened at that time. The Easter Festival was to be an essentially spiritual celebration. Men must no longer make a pagan image but perform the act of remembrance entirely within the life of soul. It was thought—and Mysteries still existed in the days of Christ Jesus—that the Easter Festival would in this way be spiritualised.

Think once again of the old Adonis Festival. It is impossible in present-day Europe to realise what such festivals meant to the ancient pagan peoples. You yourselves would say: This is only an image—and those at least who had been initiated in the Mysteries would have regarded it as such. But every year the statue of the god was displayed to large numbers of the people and then submerged. This gave rise to what is known as fetishism. A statue of such a kind was a fetish, an idol, a god; worship of such an object was called fetishism—and that of course is undesirable. And yet in a certain respect, an element of the same tendency has remained in Christianity, for the Monstrance with the Sanctissimum, the Sacred Host, is worshipped in Catholicism as the Real Christ. It is said that the Bread and the Wine are transformed, in the physical sense too, into the Body and Blood of Christ. This is a survival, not of enlightened pagan wisdom which beheld the Spiritual behind every sense-phenomenon, but of the fetish-worship in which the statue was taken to be the god himself.

[ 29 ] Nowadays—unless examples have occurred in one's own experience—it is almost impossible to picture the intensity with which people believed in these images of the god I myself once knew a very clever professor—all such men are clever, only modern science does not lead them to the Spiritual. The man was a Russian and he made a journey from Japan across Siberia. In the middle of Siberia he became aware of a deep uneasiness, he felt lonely and forsaken. And what did he do? Something that none of you, nor indeed any Westerner, would ever think of doing. But although this man was very learned, he was half-Asiatic. He made a figure of a god out of wood, took it with him on his further travels and prayed to it fervently. When I knew him his nerves were in a terrible state; the illness had come from worshipping his wooden god. It is difficult for you to conceive what it means to worship an idol of this kind!

[ 30 ] Now the Mysteries still existing at the time of the founding of Christianity were deeply concerned as to how men might be led to the Spiritual. And so what in earlier epochs had been presented before their eyes in the Adonis Festival was now to be revived in remembrance only, by prayer. [ 31 ] This was the intention ... but instead of becoming spiritual, everything became materialistic; it was all externalised, made formal. By the third and fourth centuries A.D. all kinds of emotions were aroused in the people on “Kar” Friday; the priests offered up prayers; and at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the hour at which Christ is said to have died, the bells stopped ringing. Everything was still. And then, outwardly again, just as in the old Adonis Festival, the Crucifix, a figure of Christ on the Cross, was buried; at a later period it was covered with a veil. After three days came Easter—the festival of Resurrection. But the manner and form of the celebration are the same, fundamentally, as in the old Adonis Festival. The form of the celebration indicates that little by little the souls of men were coming under the authority of Rome.

In many districts, for example in the place where my youth was spent—whether it happens here I do not know—it is customary on the Friday before Easter for the boys to gather around the Church with rattles and musical toys, singing the words:

[ 32 ] Wir rätschen, wir rätschen am Dom.
Die Glocken ziehen nach Rom.⁴

[ 33 ] Everything, you see, pointed towards Rome, especially at the time of the Easter Festival.

[ 34 ] Men of the present age must emerge from materialism into a life of spiritual knowledge; they must learn to understand things in a spiritual way, above all such things as the Easter Festival. Every year at the Easter Festival we can remind ourselves that the day of mourning, the Chara, commemorates the departure of the human being from the physical world; for three days after death he is still looking back on the physical world; then he lays aside his ether-body as a second corpse; but then in his astral body and “I,” he rises to life again in the spiritual world. This, too, is part of the act of remembrance, although it would be barbarous to expect songs of jubilation three days after a death has occurred. And yet we can be reminded of these songs of jubilation when we think of the immortality of the human soul and of how, after three days, the soul comes to live again in the spiritual world.

[ 35 ] There is a connection between the Easter Festival and every human death. At every human death our attitude should be that although mourning is inevitable, the Easter Festival is near, when we shall remember that every soul after death rises to life again in the spiritual world.—You know, of course, of the festival which commemorates the death of all human beings: it is called the Festival of All Souls and is still celebrated in the autumn. When the knowledge of its connection with the Easter Festival had been lost, the Day of All Saints, All Saints' Day, was placed before it in the calendar. But All Souls' Day should, in reality, be celebrated as the day of the Dead and the Easter Festival as the day of Resurrection. They belong together although they are separated now by the span of nearly half a year! From the calendar as it now stands it is often impossible to understand what really lies behind these festivals.

[ 36 ] But remember: everything on Earth is in reality directed by the Heavens. People are surprised if it ever snows at Easter because that is the time for the plants to be sprouting, not for snow. They are surprised because they feel that the Easter Festival is intended to commemorate the resurrection, the immortality of the human soul.

[ 37 ] This attitude and knowledge make the whole Easter Festival into a deep, heart-felt experience, reminding those who celebrate it of something that is connected with man himself and with his life as the seasons of the year run their course. The only kind of connection with the yearly seasons to which any thought is given to-day is that in the winter one puts on a winter coat and in the summer a summer coat, that one sweats in the summer and shivers in the winter—all purely material considerations. What is not known is that with the coming of spring, spiritual forces are actively at work drawing forth the plants from the Earth and that with the coming of autumn, spiritual forces are again in operation as forces of destruction. When this is understood men will see life and being in the whole of nature. Much of what is said about nature to-day is nonsense. People see a plant, tear it out of the soil and set about studying botany ... because they know nothing about the essentials. If I were to tear out a hair and proceed to describe it, this would be nonsense, because the hair cannot arise of itself; it must be growing on a human being or an animal. Nothing that you might apply to any part of a lifeless stone will make a hair grow from it. For a hair to grow, life must be at the source. The plants are like the hair of the Earth, because the Earth is a living being. And just as man needs the air in order to live, so does the Earth need the stars with their spirituality; the Earth breathes in the spiritual forces of the stars in order to live. Man moves over the Earth and the Earth moves through the Cosmos, lives in. the Cosmos. The Earth is a living being.

[ 38 ] This remembrance at least can still come to us at the Easter Festival—the remembrance that the Earth herself is a living Being. When the Earth brings forth the plants she is young, just as the child is young when the soft hair grows. The old man loses his hair just as in autumn the Earth loses the plants. It is only that the Earth's life runs its course in a different rhythm: youth in the spring, age in the autumn; youth again, age again—whereas in man the periods are much longer. Everything in the universe is alive. In thinking of the Easter Festival and with the spectacle of newly awakening nature before us, we can say: Death is not ever-present; beings have to pass through death but life is the essential reality. Life is everywhere victorious over death. The Easter Festival is there to remind us of this victory and to give us strength. If men gain this kind of strength it will enable them to set about the improvement of external conditions with insight and intelligence—not in the way that is usual at the present time. First and foremost we need Spiritual Science in order again to ally ourselves with the spiritual world—which is a world of life, not of death.

[ 39 ] In this sense I hope that the Easter Festival will be as full of beauty in your souls as are the spring flowers growing out of the Earth.—After Easter we shall meet together again and speak about scientific matters.

[ 40 ] At the Easter Festival, then, let us feel: Men can go to their work with fresh courage and with joy. Even if in these days there are not many opportunities of finding joy in daily work, perhaps here it is different! In any case I wanted to say these things to you to-day and to wish you a beautiful Easter in the sense of the knowledge born from Spiritual Science.

• 1. See the previous lecture.
• 2. Dr. Steiner spoke in similar terms in four lectures given at Dornach, 19th–24th April, 1924.
• 3. See the lecture: The Threefold Sun and the Risen Christ. Given in London, 24th April, 1922.
• 4. Approximate translation: We shake our rattles around the church ... but the bells draw us to Rome.

[ 1 ] Dr. Steiner: Have you any questions to-day?

[ 2 ] Questioner: What was the cause of the darkening of the sun for three hours at the time of Christ's death?

[ 3 ] Dr. Steiner: That, of course, is a most significant question and one which, as you may imagine, has occupied me very deeply. I can well believe that the questioner too considers it important, because it indicates that such things are really no longer credible to the modern mind. That is why the nineteenth century solved it simply by asserting: It is not true, it is only imagery and no great importance need be attached to it.—That, however, is wrong. Careful study of the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science leads to the discovery that at the time of Christ's death there was an eclipse of the sun, or at all events the sun was obscured to such an extent that when the death took place, darkness fell over the district. Such things should not be brushed aside and simply denied; quite obviously they call for explanation.

[ 4 ] Let me here remind you of something I have often mentioned in your presence. In ancient records you will everywhere find evidence that importance was attached to the time of the day, the time of the year, and so forth. No notice is taken of this to-day. In the New Testament a great deal is said about the miracles of healing performed by Christ, about the way in which He healed the sick. Emphasis is laid upon the fact that He adopted a definite practice in His acts of healing. In those days it was much easier to effect cures than it is to-day and this is a fact that is entirely ignored. Owing to the way in which humanity has developed—particularly in Europe—healing must start to-day from the body. But it was not always so. At the time when Christ lived on the earth, and above all in earlier epochs, it was still possible for healing to start from the soul. In a modern man the soul no longer has a very strong influence because as a result of upbringing and education his thoughts are entirely abstract. Thoughts of the kind that are universal to-day were absolutely unknown in those olden times. The human being was deeply and inwardly moved by what he thought. There was no such thing as “abstract, logical thinking.” Man's life of soul was quite different. To-day you may tell a human being something of supreme importance ... but it has no effect whatever upon his body because his soul is detached from the body. It is believed that the men of old were instinctively clairvoyant because they were not so closely bound up with their bodies, but this is simply not true; they were more deeply rooted in the body, they felt everything in the body itself and for this reason influences from the soul could work directly upon the body. When a particular name was uttered, a picture arose simultaneously before the soul. To-day ... well, a word may be uttered but no picture arises. In olden times a picture, definite and complete, arose before men and this picture would give them goose-flesh, cause a burst of laughter, or some other physical symptom; an immediate effect was produced in the body. Now this was made much use of in healing. But to be effective, the forces in the environment of a man must be used in the right way. That is why, when the Gospels are referring to Christ's acts of healing, we find the words: When the sun had set He gathered the sick and the suffering around Him. … “When the sun had set”—not, therefore, when the sun was shining in its full strength. If that had been the case, the words (which were addressed to the soul) would have been without effect. It was only when men came to Him in the evening twilight that the words could serve their purpose.

[ 5 ] Such things are ignored to-day but they are connected, nevertheless, with the life of man. Whether the sun is shining at the full, whether it is twilight, whether the season is spring, or autumn—all these factors have a mighty influence, And so it is, too, with other manifestations of nature. We see the life of Christ Jesus unfolding from the birth to the baptism in the Jordan and then through the three years until His death: everything drew to a climax. And the contributory factors were not the decree of the High Council alone, not the, revolution among the people alone, but also what was happening in the heavens and in the whole of nature!

[ 6 ] The Moon forces have an influence upon the human being during embryonic life which culminates in birth. Later on, the forces of the Sun and of other heavenly bodies have an influence upon him.¹ He is influenced by all the happenings of external nature.

[ 7 ] The attitude of people to-day to happenings in nature is really remarkable and is due to the fact that they never get away from their abstract thinking. It is known, for example, that after about eleven to twelve years, sunspots reappear in considerable numbers. But although it is known that a period of sunspots invariably coincides with unrest in some form on the earth, people cannot accustom themselves to take real account of the influence which plays down upon the earth from the super-earthly world and comes to expression in the sunspots. Nevertheless the influence is a reality! When it rains, human beings consciously abandon certain activities. When it is raining cats and dogs you cannot go on with gardening or work of that kind. There, you see, nature has an influence upon the conscious life of man. But upon his unconscious life, the whole surrounding universe of stars has a very great influence. Obviously, therefore, the effect of the sunlight upon man is by no means the same when the Sun is partly obscured.

[ 8 ] It cannot be said that in this way man's freedom is affected. But wherever deeper, spiritual laws come into consideration one must build on these in freedom, just as securely as a man, when he is on the first floor of a house, assumes that the floor will not develop a hole and precipitate him down to the ground floor. The laws of nature must be taken into account, also the great laws which rule outside in the universe.

[ 9 ] The deep sorrow caused in the hearts of certain men by what came to pass in Palestine at that time was accompanied by anguish in the world of nature. The anguish in human hearts and the anguish in nature were simultaneous. Just as the blood flows in the body and man's health is dependent on this blood, so do the living forces contained in the sunlight flow into the blood.

[ 10 ] Think of this.—A man dies on some particular day. Examination of his blood some two months or so before death would reveal to careful scrutiny that it is already on the way to becoming lifeless. Just as before the death of a human being the blood is gradually becoming lifeless, so—even at the time of Christ's birth—what lives in the light was already on the way to that condition of darkness which set in when the death actually took place. There was a close and intimate connection between happenings in nature and the life of Christ. And it may be said that just as Christ consciously chose twilight as the time for healing the sick, so His unconscious depths of soul chose the darkening of the Sun as the time of death. That is how one must picture these things in order to interpret them truly; their meaning can only be suggested in a delicate and intimate way for they do not lend themselves to crude explanation.

[ 11 ] Question: Have the Jews, as a people, fulfilled their mission in the evolution of humanity?

[ 12 ] Dr. Steiner: Discussion on this subject is unfortunately all too apt to lead to propagandism. But what must be said quite objectively on the subject has nothing whatever to do with propaganda in any shape or form.

[ 13 ] The way in which the development of the Jewish people proceeded in olden times was a most important preparation for the subsequent rise of Christianity. Before Christianity came into the world, the Jews had a deeply spiritual religion but, as I have told you, it was a religion which took account only of the spiritual law of nature.—If a Jew were asked: Upon what does the coming of spring depend?—he said: Upon the will of Jehovah!—Why is so-and-so an unrighteous man?—Because Jehovah wills it so!—Why does famine break out in a country?—Because Jehovah wills it!—Everything was referred to this one God. And that was why the ancient Jews did not live at peace with the peoples around them, whom they did not understand and who did not understand them. The neighbouring peoples did not worship this one and only God in the same way but recognised spiritual beings in all the phenomena of nature—a multiplicity of spiritual beings.

[ 14 ] These many spiritual beings are actually present in nature and anyone who denies their existence denies reality. To deny that there are spiritual beings in nature is just as if I were to say now that there is not a single person in this room!—If I brought in a blind man and you were not laughing loudly enough for him to hear, he might believe me. Deception in these things occurs very readily.—Friedrich Nietzsche's sight was very poor and when he was a professor in Basle only a few dilatory students came to listen to his lectures although they were extremely interesting. Nietzsche was always deeply sunk in thought as he went to the desk and proceeded to deliver his lectures. He lectured on one occasion when not a single person was present but because his sight was so bad he only noticed this when he was going out of the lecture-hall! In the same way a blind man could be made to think that a room is empty.—People disbelieve in spiritual forces and influences because they have been blinded by their education and all that happens in modern life.

[ 15 ] It is important for man to realise that he has a great deal to do with these myriad nature-spirits; but there is a power within him that is mightier than anything wrought by these nature-spirits. This is the basis of the conception of the ONE God, the Moon-God. The Jews came first to the recognition of this one God and repudiated all other spiritual beings in the phenomena of nature. They acknowledged the one God, Jahve or Jehovah. Jahve means, simply: I AM.

[ 16 ] Now this has been a very important factor in world-history. Think of it: veneration of the one and only Godhead is accompanied by the disavowal of all other spiritual beings ... Suppose two peoples are at war in spite of the fact that each of them recognises the one God; only one of the two peoples can be victorious. The victors say: Our God has given us the victory.—If the other side had gained the victory, the same would have been said. But if the same God has allowed the one people to be victorious and the other to be defeated, then this God has Himself been defeated. If Turks and Christians have the one God and both pray to this one God to bring them victory, they are asking the same God to defeat Himself. The real point is that one cannot, with truth, speak of a single Divine-Spiritual Being. In daily life, too, it is the same: somebody wants it to rain and prays for rain ... somebody else wants the sun to shine and prays for this on the selfsame day. Well ... it just doesn't make sense! If people noticed this there would be greater clarity about such matters—but they do not notice it. In the great things of life human beings often lapse into a thoughtlessness which they would not entertain in small things. Nobody, presumably, will put salt and sugar into his coffee at the same time; he will put in the one or the other, not both. Generally speaking, men are very lax about clarity of thought—and this lies at the root of the many disorders and confusions in life ...

The Jews introduced what is known as Monotheism, the belief that there is but the one God.

[ 17 ] I once said to you very briefly that Christianity thinks of three Divinities: God the Father, living in all the phenomena of nature; God the Son, working in man's free spiritual activity; and God the Holy Spirit, who awakens in man the consciousness of having within him a spirituality that is independent of the body. Three distinct spheres are pictured. If there were not three spheres it would have to be assumed that by the same resolve this one God allows the human being to die and then wakens him to life again. If there are Three Divine Persons, death belongs to the sphere of one Godhead, passage through death and beyond to another, and the awakening in spirit to yet another. Christianity could not do otherwise than picture the spiritual Godhead in three Persons. (In three Persons: this is not understood to-day but the original meaning was that of threefoldness, the Divine manifesting in three forms.)

[ 18 ] Now because Judaism conceived only of this one God, it could make no image of the Godhead but could only grasp the Divine with the innermost forces of the soul, with the intellect. It is easy to understand that this led to an intensification of human egoism; for man becomes remote from what is around him if he sees the Spiritual only in and through his own person. This has produced a certain folk-egoism in the Jewish world—there is no denying that it is so; but for this very reason the Jews are by nature adapted to assimilate what is not pictorial; they have less talent for the pictorial. If a Jew becomes a sculptor, he will not achieve anything very great, because this is not where his talent lies; he does not possess the gift of pictorial representation, nor does he readily develop it. But if a Jew becomes a musician he will generally be a very fine one, because music is not a pictorial art; it does not take visual form. And so you will find great musicians among the Jews but—at the time when the arts were at their prime—hardly ever great sculptors or painters. The style in which the Jews paint is quite different from that of Christian or oriental artists. The actual colour in a picture painted by a Jew has no very great significance; what it is that is being expressed, what the painter wishes to say by means of the picture—that is the essential. Judaism is concerned above all with the non-pictorial, with bringing into the world that which transpires within the human “I.”

But to maintain this adherence to the one God is not as easy as it seems, for if such adherence is not strongly forced upon them, men readily become pagans. It is among the Jews that this tendency has been least of all in evidence. Christianity, on the other hand, tends easily in the direction of paganism. If you observe closely you will find many indications of this. Think, for example, of how ceremonies are revered in Christianity. I have told you that the Monstrance actually depicts the Sun and the Moon. The meaning of this is no longer known but men unenlightened in this respect actually pray to the Monstrance, they pray to something external. Men are easily inclined to pray to something external. And so in the course of the centuries Christianity has developed many pagan characteristics, whereas in Judaism the opposite has been the case.

[ 19 ] This is most obvious of all in one particular field. Fundamentally speaking, Christians of the West—those who came from Greece, Rome and Central Germany—were almost incapable of continuing the principle of ancient medicine because they were no longer able to perceive the spiritual forces contained in the remedial herbs. But Jews who came from the East, from Persia and so forth, saw the Spiritual—that is to say their One Jehovah—everywhere. The Jews played a tremendously important part in the development of medicine in the Middle Ages; the Arabians were occupied more with developing the other sciences. And whatever medical knowledge came through the Arabians had been elaborated with the help of the Jews. That is why medicine has become what it is to-day. Medicine has, it is true, retained a certain abstract spirituality but it has assumed, so to speak, a “monotheistic” character. And if you observe medicine to-day you will find that with few, very few exceptions, all kinds of properties are ascribed to every sort of medicament! The exact effect which a particular medicament will produce is no longer known with certainty any more than Judaism knew how the myriad nature-spirits work. The abstract, Jehovah-influence has made its way into medicine and remains there to this day.

[ 20 ] Now it would be natural if the number of Jewish doctors in the different countries of Europe were proportional to the population. I am not for one moment saying—I beg you not to misunderstand me—that this should be adjusted by law. It would never occur to me to say such a thing. But in the natural course one would expect to find Jewish doctors in proportion to the number of Jews. This is certainly not the case. In most countries a relatively far greater number of Jews become doctors. This is a survival from the Middle Ages. The Jews still feel very drawn to medicine because it is in keeping with their abstract thinking. This abstract, Jehovistic medicine fits in with their whole mode of thinking. Anthroposophy alone, in that it takes account of the diverse nature-spirits, can recognise the forces of nature in the different herbs and mineral substances and so again establish this knowledge on sure foundations.²

[ 21 ] The Jews worshipped the one God Jehovah and men were thereby saved from wholly losing their way in polytheism. A natural consequence has been that the Jews have always kept themselves distinct from other men and so too—as always happens in such a case—have in many respects evoked dislike and antipathy. The right attitude to take to-day is that in the times to come it will not be necessary to segregate any particular culture in order to prevent its dissipation—as the Jews have been doing for centuries—but that this practice must be superseded by spiritual knowledge. The relation between the single Godhead and the multiplicity of spiritual beings will then be intelligible to men and no one people need be under the sway of subconscious impulses. That is why from the very outset I was apprehensive when the Jews, not knowing which way to turn, founded the Zionist movement. The attempt to set up a Jewish State denotes a decidedly reactionary drift, a retrogression that leads nowhere and runs counter to progress. A very distinguished Zionist with whom I was on friendly terms once told me about his ideal in life, which was to go to Palestine and found a Jewish kingdom there. He was, and still is, taking a very active part in the attempt to bring this about and he holds an important position in Palestine. I said to him: Such a cause is not in keeping with the times; what the times demand is something with which every human being can be allied without distinction of race, nation, class and so forth—that is the only kind of cause one can whole-heartedly support to-day. Nobody can expect me to join the Zionist movement, for there again one portion of humanity is being separated off from the rest. For this quite simple, natural reason, such a movement to-day cannot prosper in the real sense of the word—it is essentially retrogressive ... The advocates of such movements often use a remarkable argument. They say: But the course of history has shown that men do not really want the “human-universal”; they desire everything to develop on the basis of race.

[ 22 ] The conversation of which I have just told you took place before the Great War of 1914–18. And a factor leading up to that War was men's refusal to accept the great principle of the human-universal. The fact that men set their faces against this principle and wanted to separate from one another, to develop racial forces and interests, ultimately led to the outbreak of that War. Thus the greatest disaster of this twentieth century was due to an urge that is also present in the Jews.—And so one can say: Since everything that the Jews have achieved could now be achieved consciously by all human beings, the Jews would serve their own interests best if they let themselves be absorbed into the rest of mankind, be merged in the rest of mankind, so that Judaism, as a race or people, would come to an end. That would be in the nature of an ideal—but many Jewish habits and customs, and above all the hatred meted out to them, still militate against it. These are the kind of impulses that must be overcome and they will not be overcome if everything remains the same as it has been in the past. If the Jews feel hurt when they are told, for example: you have little talent for sculpture ... they can say to themselves: It is not necessary for every race of people to be sculptors; with their own particular faculties they can achieve something in a different domain! The Jews are not naturally gifted for sculpture. One of the Ten Commandments decrees: “Thou shalt make no graven image of thy God ...” it is because the Jewish people are averse to making any picture or image of the Supersensible. Now this is bound to lead back to the personal element.

[ 23 ] It is quite easy to understand this.—If I make an image or a picture, even if it is only in the form of a description as often happens in Spiritual Science, another person may impress it on his memory, learn from it, see truth in it, think what he likes about it. But if I make no image, my own personal activity must be in operation; the thought does not separate itself from me. For this reason it has a personal character. So it is in Judaism. Men must learn to perceive the Spiritual in their fellow-men. The Jewish world is still dominated by the racial impulse. The Jews marry among themselves, among their own people; their attention is still focused upon the racial, not upon the spiritual.

[ 24 ] Therefore to the question: “Have the Jewish people fulfilled their mission in the evolution of human knowledge?” the answer is: They have fulfilled their mission, for in earlier times the existence of a people who brought a certain form of monotheism into being was a necessity. To-day, however, what is required is spiritual knowledge. The mission of the Jewish people has been fulfilled. Hence this particular mission is no longer a necessity in evolution; the only right course is for the Jews to intermix with the other peoples.

[ 25 ] Question: Why was it that the Jewish people were destined to live in exile?

[ 26 ] Dr. Steiner: It is important to bear in mind the whole character of this “exile.” The Jewish people among whom Christ died were living at that time among people of quite a different kind, namely, the Romans. And now, suppose that the Roman conquest of Palestine had been complete; suppose they had killed everybody they wanted to get rid of and turned out the rest. Suppose that already at that time the Jews had intended or felt the urge to intermix with the other peoples ... what would have happened? Well ... the Romans would have captured Palestine and a number of Jews would have been put to death; others—as one says to-day in every country—would have been expelled and would have been able to continue their existence somewhere or other outside Palestine.

[ 27 ] But the Jews had neither the intention nor the urge to intermix with the other peoples; on the contrary, wherever they were, even when there were only a few of them, they always lived among themselves. They scattered far and wide; and only because they lived exclusively among themselves, intermarried among themselves, has it been noticed that, as Jews, they constitute a foreign element. The idea of an exile would otherwise not have arisen. It was this natural urge in the Jews that gave rise to the idea of their exile. It is all part of the intrinsic character of Judaism. And posterity is now astonished that the Jews were dispersed, were obliged to live as strangers. This has happened nearly everywhere. Other peoples intermixed and so were unnoticeable. By its very nature, Judaism has held tenaciously together. In this particular connection one is obliged to say that because human beings have held together, attention has been called to things that would not, otherwise, have been noticed.

[ 28 ] It is grievous and heartbreaking to read how in the Middle Ages the Jews lived in the ghettoes, in quarters of the towns where alone they were permitted to dwell. They were not allowed to go into the other parts of the towns; the gates of the ghettoes were locked, and so forth. But these things are talked about because it was noticed that the Jews in the ghettoes clung tenaciously together, lived entirely among themselves. Other men, too, have had equally terrible things to endure, although in a different way. The Jews stayed in their ghettoes, clung together there and people knew that they were not allowed to come out of their quarters. But just think of it.—Other men who were forced to work every day from early morning until late evening could not come into the towns either, although there were no gates to keep them out. Their sufferings, too, have been great. It must be admitted, therefore, that such things are often based solely upon their outer appearance ... they are based, as are many things in world history, upon outer appearance.

[ 29 ] The time has come when these things must be penetrated by the light of reality. And here we are led to the conception that when a destiny is fulfilled it is—to use an Eastern expression—karma, it is inner destiny. The characteristics of the Jews themselves has helped to give the story of exile the form it has assumed; the Jews are a tenacious people, they have held their own in foreign lands; and that is why in later times this has been so noticeable and is talked about to this day.

[ 30 ] On the other side, the natural result of all this is that the Jews are differentiated from other peoples and they are accused of all sorts of things of which the causes are not known. Does it not happen that if, in some district where people are superstitious, a man is murdered by an unknown hand and an unpopular Jew happens to live there, the whisper goes round that at Easter-time the Jews need human blood for their rites—therefore it is they who have killed the man ... The reason why such things are said is because the Jews are differentiated from the others; but the Jews themselves have done a great deal to cause this state of affairs.

[ 31 ] In considering these matters to-day it is essential to lay stress upon the human-universal, in contrast to the racial principle.

[ 32 ] Question: What was the significance in world-history of the seventy souls of the original family of Israelites?

[ 33 ] Dr. Steiner: Peoples of diverse character have lived on the Earth since ancient times. From the present age onwards, this diversity ceases to have real meaning, for as I have said, the human-universal must become the essential principle. Nevertheless if we study the earlier phases of the evolution of mankind we find the population of the Earth divided into all kinds of different peoples. The Spiritual is a living reality in the phenomena of nature; the Spiritual is also a living reality in the peoples of the Earth. In every people there is a guiding Folk-Spirit. As I have said in my book, Theosophy, “Folk-Spirit” is not merely an abstract term. When one speaks today of the French people and the rest, what does this suggest to the materialistic thinking of to-day? It suggests an accumulation of some 42 millions of human beings in the West of Europe—a pure abstraction; the traits and qualities of the people in question are a very secondary consideration. But it really is not so! Just as the seed lives in the plant, so something seed-like exists, which lives in the spirit of a people and then unfolds. A Spirit, a real Being, lives and works in the whole people.

[ 34 ] I have told you that the mission of the Jews in human history was to spread the belief in the One Godhead, and it will be clear to you that it was necessary for them, as a people, to be prepared for this. Therefore it came about that when the Jewish people originally came into existence, the several Folk-Spirits, each of whom worked individually in a particular people, all concerned themselves with the Jewish people. Thinking of the different peoples, we say: Indians—Indian Folk-Spirit; Egyptians—Egyptian Folk-Spirit; then Greek Folk-Spirit, Roman Folk-Spirit, and so on. Each Folk-Spirit had to do with a particular people. (Drawing on blackboard.) But if we take the Jewish people, then, in that corner of the Earth called Syria where the Jews had their home, the influences and will of all the Folk-Spirits operated in this one people.

[ 35 ] Let me try to make this clear by a simple analogy.—Imagine that each of you is in your own family circle, attending to its affairs. Each of you has a particular sphere of activity. So it was in the case of these Folk-Spirits.—But now, suppose you want to support, let us say, the cause and interests of the workers as a body: if that is so you will not remain in your own circle but you will hold a meeting and discuss among yourselves what proposal shall be put forward by you all, acting as a whole. And so we may say: In the peoples other than the Jews, each of these Folk-Spirits worked as it were in his own sphere; but what the Folk-Spirits achieved through the Jewish people was the outcome of a spiritual assembly. This influence worked with varying strength upon the members of the Jewish people. The Bible gives an indication of this when it speaks of seventy Folk-Souls entering into the people of Israel. All the Folk-Souls were in operation. This strong and potent influence has in a certain respect made the Jews into a cosmopolitan people and accounts for the tenacity that has remained characteristic of them. No matter where they might be, they were always able to gather together and preserve Judaism, simply because they had everything within them.

[ 36 ] It is very remarkable how Judaism has everything within it. In Orders or Societies of Freemasons, Oddfellows and the like, in which there is no new spiritual knowledge but an antiquated kind of knowledge they themselves no longer understand, you will find in the very words of the rites, elements deriving from all kinds of different peoples: Egyptian rites and words, Assyrian and Babylonian words and signs—but especially elements from the Jewish Kabbala and so forth.

[ 37 ] In this respect Judaism is truly cosmopolitan; it adapts itself to everything but also preserves its original impulse which is still alive within it. The same is true of the Hebrew language in which there is great richness of content, both spiritual and physical. Every Hebrew word is always full of meaning. It was a peculiarity with the Jews to write only the consonants; later on, the vowels were indicated by means of signs. The vowels themselves were not written; everybody might pronounce them in his own way, so that one man said: J-e-h-o-v-a ... another said: J-e-h-e-v-a ... a third said: J-e-h-a-v-e ... a fourth, J-o-h-a-v-e.—The vowel sounds were pronounced as they were felt. And that is why such a designation as the name “Jehova” which had been instituted by the priests in this particular form, was called the “unutterable Name” ... because it was not permissible to make arbitrary use of the vowels.

The very tenacity which characterised Judaism was an indication of the way in which the several Folk-Souls worked upon this one people. When you see the Jews in different countries you will need very keen perception to be able to recognise those Jews who have really mingled with the other peoples. You know, of course, that the most important statesman of the nineteenth century was a Jew. Jews who have really merged into the other peoples are no longer distinguishable from them. In a sentence spoken by a Jew, an experienced person will at once recognise the typical Jewish style—if, that is to say, there is no imitation which is a very common practice to-day. But the Jews seldom imitate. It is noticeable that a Jew invariably takes his start from something that is inwardly fixed or registered in a concept. This is very characteristic and it is connected with that assembly of the Folk-Souls and their co-operation. To this day, when a Jew makes a statement, he believes that it must be unconditionally valid. He proceeds on the basis of individual decision. It is really very interesting! Suppose a number of people—three, four, five—are together; one is a Jew, the other four are not. The men are representatives of a community of one kind or another. (I am not telling you about an imaginary situation but one which I have actually experienced) ... In this community, people have diverse views. Now these five men, of whom only the fifth is a Jew, begin to speak. The first says: It is very difficult to bring all these people into any harmony; the only thing to do is to bring persuasion to bear upon the minority and then upon the majority so that a compromise is reached. (That, after all, is how compromises are made—by people talking among themselves.) The second man says: Yes, but I have lived among the people, who compose the minority and I know how difficult it is to persuade them! The third, a representative of the minority, says: We don't want to have anything to do with it; it just won't work! The fourth man says: After all, one has to take one side or the other. When these four have spoken the Jew begins: All this is futile! Concept of compromise: compromise consists in balance being reached among different opinions and in certain people giving way.—You see, he comes out with an abstraction: “Concept of compromise”; he does not start from any particular point, but leaving out the article, begins: Concept of compromise ... thereby demonstrating his inborn tenacity. When somebody says: What, exactly, is this concept of compromise? ... he already has a mental picture of some kind. But the Jew does not begin in this way; he says: Concept of compromise!—This is an example of the Jehovistic conception: Jehovah says ... No thought is given to how it works out in a particular instance, but what has been registered and fixed in a concept is simply laid down as a principle. That is why the Jew always thinks he can develop everything out of the concept. As long as the Jews keep tenaciously among themselves, things will naturally remain as they are; once the Jews have merged into other peoples they will lose the habit of saying: “Concept of compromise!” ... and they will have to be in line with the others. All this is connected with the way in which the Folk-Souls have worked upon them.

• 1. See the previous lecture.
• 2. See: Spiritual Science and Medicine. Twenty lectures given by Rudolf Steiner to doctors and medical students. Dornach, 21st March to 9th April, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

Good morning, gentlemen! Anything come up today?

Mr. Dollinger: I would like to ask why it is that people who live near a cemetery are often not so lively and look pale? He gives an example that seems to prove this. I would like to know what the rhythm of their bodies is like – whether it could not also have a beneficial effect?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I think I can give quite a good answer to this question because I lived right next to the cemetery from the time I was eight until I was eighteen – so I must have looked terribly pale back then. It was a little bit true. According to the various details you have given, it would have been true in my case.

Well, the cemetery was the cemetery of a small town – the town had maybe six hundred inhabitants – so it was a moderately sized cemetery. But at least it was right next to the house and the train station where we lived. And the people lived quite close together, as was usual in such places. There was the church, surrounded by the cemetery, and then came the houses: you could always see the state of health of the people who lived around the cemetery. Well, you can say that there were already considerable differences among the inhabitants, and that, for example, the pastor who did not live very far from the cemetery was not pale and not scrawny either, but rather quite corpulent and also quite good-looking. That is my finding from back then.

But the view that one forms here is that if one otherwise establishes health conditions - and that happened in many places where cemeteries were around the churches - one cannot assume that this is terribly harmful. In those places, walnut trees were widespread everywhere at the same time. These walnut trees are such that they also have an extraordinarily strengthening effect on health due to the scent they spread. Now, you just have to assume that there were healthy instincts in those places where it was originally common practice; this has led to the fact that the churchyard is within the village and the people live all around, bringing chestnut or walnut trees, and especially lime trees, into the vicinity. Linden trees and walnut trees, which then have the opposite effect to the harmful effects of the cemetery, have a balancing effect.

Now, this must also be taken into account: If we look more closely at what Mr. Dollinger actually wants to know, namely the effect on the higher bodies, then we must be clear about the fact that actually of these bodies, which I have mentioned, only the physical body and the etheric body have an invigorating effect, while the astral body and the I do not have an invigorating effect, but essentially a paralyzing one; they act as soul and spirit. And from what I have already told you, you will see that the physical body and the etheric body are like a plant; they grow, and in the process the organs develop. If we only had these, the physical body and ether body, we would be constantly unconscious. Otherwise we would lead a sleeping life like plants, if it were not for the fact that there is a constant process of decomposition within us; only because there is always a process of decomposition within us do we not lead a sleeping life like plants. The astral body and the ego break down, which in turn atomizes. There is always a process of building and breaking down in the human being. And the astral body is the one that actually breaks down the most in our human being. And all these waste products that I have spoken of are actually broken down by the astral body and the ego. The etheric body only plays a small part. I have already explained this to you.

Now you see, gentlemen, the cemetery atmosphere that arises is related to what breaks down in the astral body in man, and this then supports the degradation. And man is more degraded when he lives near the cemetery than when he lives somewhere out in the forest. If he lives out in the forest, his constructive powers are stronger; if he lives near the cemetery, his destructive powers are stronger. But if we had no destructive powers, then, as I have already told you, we would remain stupid for life. We need these destructive powers. Then there is something else to consider. I told you: I can talk about this because I experienced it myself, and I experienced it at a young age when so many things are forming. I have always had a tendency to think carefully. Now, I am convinced that I owe this tendency to think carefully to the fact that fate allowed me to grow up near a cemetery. So that, in turn, is good, gentlemen. You also have to take that into consideration.

Isn't it true that the only harmful thing about a cemetery are the corpses in it? The corpses only continue the process of decomposition. When we die, the process of building and breaking down stops. The building process now stops. So the astral body is actually encouraged to think positively when it is near the cemetery. There is no denying that either.

In today's so-called Burgenland, where I grew up, the villages were all built in such a way that the cemeteries were in the middle. Burgenland is the one that has been the subject of so much dispute. There are a few larger towns, Eisenstadt and so on, but they are far apart, so that the villages are spread out everywhere, and the cemetery was in the middle everywhere. And so it is true to say that the people there had a certain rustic shrewdness. And it cannot be denied that this rustic shrewdness actually grew under the influence of the cemetery atmosphere. They kept the harmful things out by planting walnut and lime trees everywhere.

The area was also a wine-growing region. The atmosphere of the grapevine also has a certain balancing effect. The scent of lime blossoms, as you know, is a very strong scent, and the walnut tree also has a very strong scent; this has a more invigorating effect on the astral body. And the atmosphere of the grapevine has a more invigorating effect on the ego. So you already have a very strong effect on the higher bodies of the human being.

But of course, on the other hand, one must not deny how things change with the growth of civilization. Of course, at the moment when the villages become larger, when many houses are built around them and the effectiveness of the trees is impaired by the fact that houses are built around them, the cemetery begins to have a harmful effect, then, of course, there are these pale faces around the cemetery. This can no longer be balanced out and the result is that the cemetery then causes people to suffer from the cemetery atmosphere. This in turn led to a natural instinct: that when the villages had grown into towns, the cemetery was made outside the town.

Now, of course, there is something else to consider. This is the case when the effect goes even further, when it affects the etheric body. You see, everything that rises into the atmosphere as a fine haze affects the astral body and the I. So that also the subtle smell of corpses, which is always present around a cemetery, as well as the scent of walnuts, lime blossoms, horse chestnuts, which has a particularly invigorating effect, can actually only affect the higher bodies; these do not reach the etheric body so strongly.

But the situation with the etheric body is such that water in some area has a particularly strong effect on it. Water has a very strong effect. And the water in the vicinity of a cemetery is very easily permeated by what comes from the corpses. The water is drunk, the water is used for cooking. And if, in a village where the cemetery is close to the houses, the water is affected, no trees will help! Then nature helps very little. And the result of that is that people very easily become consumptive and suffer greatly from it.

You see, I was able to observe that very clearly. There was a place - it was several hours away from where I lived - a small place. Almost everyone lived around the cemetery. The people were very lethargic by nature; they just couldn't. They had flaccid muscles, flaccid nerves, everything about them was flaccid; they were pale. And then the thought occurred to me: where does it come from? And you see, that is very interesting: in our village of Neudörfl, the people who also lived around the cemetery were relatively healthy! Now, that is a big question for someone who really looks at the country in terms of the conditions that affect people. There was a village where the people lived around the churchyard and where they did nothing but plant nut trees; they also planted them, that was a very healthy instinct - but otherwise they often even took the water for cooking from the village stream! There was a row of houses (it is drawn), in between the village brook; there was the churchyard, there was the church; there we lived, there the pastor, there was the schoolhouse; then there was a row of houses, in between a brook, and there were nut trees everywhere. The people simply took the water from the little stream; in the stream, of course, were the remains and bacteria, the bacilli, of what seeped through from the cemetery. That was everywhere. The people, especially those who lived there, were not particularly clean: there were houses with thatched roofs and dung heaps right at the entrance, the pigsty right next to it – a nice connection between the pigsty and the dung heap – and again the descent to the village stream, so that when you came in, you waded in a brownish sauce. Well, you see, it was not exactly, as they say today, hygienically prepared! And yet the people were healthy! You couldn't help but say that they were healthy.

Now, firstly, if the people are healthy, the corpses in the beginning are not as bad as if the people in the village are infected. But that is of less importance. On the other hand, there was a big question: how come the people were healthy and the others were sick or weak and unable to live? - This can be explained by the following. Near this village was another, very small village, but a spa town: there was a spring of acidulous water, carbonic acid water. The whole village got its drinking water from this place. And the drinking water from this place, the carbonic acid water, in turn had a balancing effect on the contaminated water from the cemetery. The others, who lived far away from this acidulous spring, did not have that. So there one could directly study how the carbonic acid water, which, as I have explained to you once, has a particularly strong effect on the ego and on thinking, in turn has an effect on the ego and the etheric body, and in the etheric body in turn balances the destructive effect of what seeped from the cemetery into the village stream.

Of course, if the cemetery remains in cities, it is basically impossible to help transform the cemetery atmosphere, at least as long as spring water is not brought in from afar. If a town is situated in such a way that the cemetery is still in the middle of the town and the water is still drawn from wells, then of course the conditions for health are the worst, because then the etheric body is attacked; and the etheric body is that which cannot be further conquered by the astral body and the I.

You see, the sanitary and hygienic conditions are extremely interesting from this point of view. But of course it must not be forgotten that for people who live around the cemetery, if they are still religious people, if they have not yet lost their faith, the constant sight of the funeral ceremonies always has a warming effect! It has a balancing effect. It has an effect on the ego. It is certainly strengthening. It must be possible to look at this from a health point of view. It also has a balancing effect.

Is that more or less what you wanted to know? Perhaps someone else has something to add.

Well, gentlemen, then I will continue with this question from a completely different point of view. You see, we have already looked at a great deal; today, let us look at the following from the point of view of the insights we have gained.

If you look at the map, you may be interested in the map to the extent that you say: Well, this is where this nation lives, that nation lives there. We are interested in the various nations living side by side. But you can also say: I want to look at the map from the point of view of how humanity has developed. And then the map becomes really quite interesting.

Let us take a closer look at a small part of the map. I will only draw it very roughly. If we move over to Asia, for example, I have drawn it for you in terms of the human races: India, Hindustan; then Arabia; and here we have Asia Minor. Then Asia crosses over into Europe; we come to the islands that look towards Europe. There is Greece. Then we come to Africa. And there we have a river: that is the Nile; there is Egypt - today, as you know, completely dominated by the English -; that was once a free country. Now, you see, today the peoples live everywhere. In India, the Indians are living there, and they are really pulling themselves together. They were ruled by the English for a long time, and of course they still are, but today they are pulling themselves together, and anyone who is insightful enough in England is terribly afraid that the Indians might somehow gain independence. There is a great Indian movement today: the so-called Mahatma Gandhi stirred up such a movement in India and was then imprisoned, but has now been released for health reasons. Likewise, here in Arabia there are people who are more or less ruled by the British; that is still a rather inaccessible region, Arabia. You know, of course, that one of the main causes of the great world war was that they wanted to build a railroad through Turkey, over here, and they were looking for a route to India on one side and to Arabia on the other. Germany wanted to do this, and in doing so, Germany provoked the envy and jealousy of other nations in so many ways because it wanted to build the so-called Baghdad Railway through Turkey, all the way into Asia. - And Syria was there once.

You see, from the most diverse points of view, it is interesting to ask yourself: So there were peoples living everywhere since ancient times; they were very different in their lives. You only need to mention a few things to see how different these people were in their lives. In India, for example, there was a strict caste system, a caste system that makes what the European classes are actually only a shadow of. In India, you were born into a caste. The highest caste was the Brahmins. These were the people who performed the priestly services, who were allowed to learn. So in the oldest times, all the children of the Brahmins actually went to school. They were the ones who could write; that was the highest caste. Although the priests were taken from this caste, the kings were not. The kings were taken from the second caste, the warrior caste. But never could anyone ascend from the warrior caste to the Brahmin caste; that was strictly separated. The third caste were the agriculturists, the country folk; and the fourth caste were those who were actually considered to be manual laborers. Now there was a strict division between these castes. In ancient India, it was considered as bad luck if a person from one caste were to enter another as it would have been if a lion were to become a lamb! The castes were regarded as separate from each other as the individual species of animals are separate from each other. And so people took no offense at all. It would have seemed as strange to them if someone from the third caste had entered the first as if a lion had wanted to become a bull. So that was quite evident, it was an absolute matter of course for people. Now, that was also in India.

Let us now move on to Egypt: there were still castes there too. What I am going to tell you now, gentlemen, can be placed in the period about three thousand or three thousand five hundred years, or perhaps even four thousand years, before the emergence of Christianity. So we have to go back five to six millennia if we want to look back to the time of which I am now telling you. In Egypt, there were also castes, but they were not so strictly adhered to; one or the other could pass from one caste to the other. So it was not so strictly adhered to, but there were still castes in Egypt. On the other hand, in Egypt it was the case that the entire state structure emanated from the priesthood. The priesthood ruled everything. That was also the case in India, but there everything was predetermined by the caste system, whereas in Egypt the caste system was not so strict. But the rule was adhered to that everything that was to become law emanated from the priesthood.

And in a corresponding way, the other peoples who lived in Syria also lived in Asia Minor. They had their peculiarities, they were different.

Now, today, I would like to tell you something else about these very peoples so that you can see what role the things we have learned play in human history. Let us take four of these peoples: first the Indians, then the Egyptians, then those peoples who sat here. The Euphrates and Tigris flow into this gulf, and there was a people who later were called the Babylonians. We will consider these as the third.

And then you know that a people distinguished themselves here who later played a major role in history: the Semites, the Hebrews, the Jews. They moved over to Egypt, later moved back again and then lived here in Palestine – a relatively small people in terms of extent, but a people who played their great role in history. So we can look at them in succession: first the Indians, second the Egyptians, third the Babylonians, fourth the Jews. Let us look at these four peoples today.

You see, it is a particularly characteristic feature of the Indians that they actually look at the people who are there as separately as the animal classes and divide them into four castes. Added to this is the peculiar religion that the Indians had in ancient times. The Indians did not distinguish between the spiritual and material world; in the time when this Indian population first developed in India, they did not distinguish between spirit and body. A tree was not distinguished as it is by many other peoples: there is the physical tree, and there lives a spirit in it - nothing, that was not distinguished. The tree was a spirit at the same time, only a somewhat coarser spirit than man and animal. The animal was also not divided into body and soul for the Indians, but it was soul and so was man. There was no division into body and soul. And when the oldest Indian asked about the soul - and he knew that one breathes in, breathes in the air - there was the air that one breathed in, the spirit. And then he knew: the air is out there; that is the spirit that surrounds the whole earth. And when this spirit, which surrounds the whole earth, begins to flow, to blow, then he called the spirit that moves, that blows on the whole earth: Varuna. But what he had within him was also Varuna. When there was a storm outside, it was Varuna; inside: also Varuna. Today one often hears it said that these Indians had a nature service because they worshipped wind and weather and so on. But one can just as well say that they had a spirit service because they saw everything as a spirit. The Indians had no concept of the body at all. And because of that, every part of the human being was also a spirit for the Indians: the liver was spirit, the kidneys were spirit, everything was spirit. They did not distinguish between body and spirit. That is precisely the secret of ancient Indian wisdom: that no distinction is made between body and spirit. The liver was liver spirit, the stomach was stomach spirit.

Yes, you see, when we look at the stomach today, we find that something must be in the stomach if the stomach is to digest properly; we call the substance pepsin. If it is lacking, then digestion is not done properly; then we have to put in some hydrochloric acid. The Indian said to himself – he did not yet have the name, but he knew that there was a spirit – the stomach is constructed like this: that is the stomach spirit. And the name of the remedy has remained: “stomach spirit.” Of course, today you can take drops for the stomach, no longer “stomach ghost”, but named after the inventor “Hoffmann's ghost” or something like that; but you will still find where it is simply spoken that the ghost concept is still in the words.

So the Indians saw spirit everywhere. And that is why they did not take offense at the caste spirit, because they saw it as something spiritual, just as they saw the division of animals as something spiritual.

If you look at these Indian beliefs, it is interesting that the Indians had a very precise knowledge of all human organs. They saw them only as spirit. The human being was composed of nothing but spirits: lung spirit, stomach spirit, kidney spirit, and so on; they only looked at the physical body. So, looking at the Indians, we can say that they were imbued with a view that focused on the physical body. They saw the physical body as spirit.

1. Indian: physical body spiritual

This is very interesting, because now we have discovered a people who initially had a precise knowledge of the physical body.

Now we move on to the Egyptians. With the Egyptians it is a strange story. The Egyptians had the Nile. The Nile is actually, one could say, the nourishing father of the country. Every year, when July comes, the Nile rises out of its banks, and in October it goes back down again. So the ancient Egyptians actually knew nothing other than: The Nile contains the water; the water recedes during the cold season; the water comes out again, flooding the land and becoming a benefactor to the people. But when the water recedes in October, what remains - they don't need to fertilize! - a very fertile mud. In this mud, the cereals and so on were sown; they then sprouted and were harvested before the Nile flooded again. And so the Nile actually prepared the farmland for them every year. So the Egyptians were deeply imbued with the beneficence of water. They have dealt with what water is in nature in many ways. You see, we admire our engineering skills today because they can channel. Yes, thousands of years before us, the Egyptians were already very good at channeling! Of course, when the Nile overflowed its banks and flooded everywhere, it may have come to places where it shouldn't have been. So the Egyptians created Lake Moria in the most ancient of times – an entire lake! It did not exist by nature, but was created to bring the flooding into the right channels. What was superfluous water was collected in this Lake Moria. So actually artificially the Egyptians have ruled nature. But as a result, their attention was extremely drawn to the water.

Now, I have already told you in answer to Mr. Dollinger's question that water has an enormous influence on the etheric body of man. And with the instinct that the Egyptians still had, they developed the doctrine: Man does not consist only of a physical body, but he also has an etheric body. - It is interesting, you see: In the back of beyond in India were the oldest peoples; many of these oldest peoples came via Arabia and only then immigrated to Egypt. In Egypt there was a kind of old culture: everything came from India. When the Indians migrated to Egypt, they recognized the beneficial effect of water. But they said to themselves: This does not work on the physical body that we got to know in India, but on a still higher body of the human being. And so the Egyptians - the Indians too - mainly through what they experienced with water, actually discovered the etheric body.

The fact that the Egyptians discovered the etheric body is the reason why they developed their entire religion, because it is a religion of the etheric body. If you take the most important thing from the Egyptian religion, the following legend is the result. These Egyptians said - and this was something that the Egyptians told everywhere, as the stories of the Gospels were told in a certain period in Europe: There is a high God; they called this high God Osiris. This high God is the benefactor of mankind. He is actually the originator of everything that comes to man through the element of water. But he has an enemy. He works for the benefit of man; but he has an enemy. And this enemy lives in the hot wind that comes from the desert. There was the desert (pointing to the drawing). So they had two deities: Osiris and Typhon, Osiris and his enemy, Typhon. All that they saw in nature, they also saw in human life. But they did not ascribe it to the physical body, as the Indians did, but to the etheric body. Then they continued the saga: One day Typhon killed Osiris and carried him off. And Isis, the wife of Osiris, retrieved the body and buried the various limbs in different places. Monuments were then erected over them. And since then, Osiris has been ruler over the dead. Once he was ruler over the living, then he became ruler over the dead. The Egyptians were already thinking about death.

Now you know – I have already told you – a few days after death, the etheric body of the human being leaves; then the person gradually comes to consciousness again. This is expressed in the legend that Osiris leaves and is brought back by Isis. The human being regains consciousness after death.

So you can say: the Egyptians realized that man has an etheric body. - That's very interesting! The Indians, they still took the physical body as spiritual. The Egyptians, they came up with the etheric body and took that as spirit:

2. Egyptians: etheric body spiritual Osiris Typhon Isis

And everything the Egyptians believed in, everything they worked for, was actually for the etheric body. That dominated their entire view.

You see, gentlemen, you have at least seen one thing in the Egyptians: their mummies. I mentioned them to you the other day; I said: When medieval physicians spoke of mummies, it was something spiritual; I explained that to you. But today, when people speak of mummies, they only mean these Egyptian mummies. The corpses were embalmed, finely embalmed, and preserved. Yes, but why was that? The Egyptians knew only of the etheric body and kept the physical body so that when the person lives again, he will find his physical body again. If they had already known about the astral body and the ego, they would not have believed that one must keep the physical body. They only knew the etheric body, which is very spiritual. If they had known about the ego and the astral body, they would have said: They are building their own physical body. But they only knew the subtle etheric body, so they believed that you had to preserve the physical body so that the person could find it again when they returned. So the Egyptians discovered the etheric body.

Now we come to the third, the Babylonians. They developed something very large and strong, namely, well-developed thinking, so that much of the thinking of the Babylonians is still preserved today; but what they developed particularly strongly was astronomy. They built their great stargazings from which they observed the stars. And there they saw that man does not only depend on what is on earth, but depends on what is in the stars. They particularly sought the influences of the stars on people and, above all, made their observations about how the year was divided. The year, in turn, has a great influence on people through the stars. The Babylonians were the first to leave the earth and develop astronomy, the knowledge of the influence of the stars on people, into a particular science. And that's how they came up with the idea of dividing everything into sixties and twelves and so on.

They divided money into sixty and twelve, for example. The decimal system only came later. But today you can still find this old Babylonian division into twelve in the English shilling. So this numerical division was first brought down from heaven by the Babylonians. Now, what does the world of the stars have a particular influence on in humans? On the astral body, gentlemen. The astral body is completely under the influence of the world of the stars. But because today's star science wants nothing to do with the astral body, it does not seek to observe the stars in their influence on man. What is calculated in today's astronomy really has no particularly strong influence on man. But the Babylonians had a fine star science. And through this they discovered the astral body of man. That is the wonderful thing. So that we can say that the Babylonians discovered the astral body spiritually.

3. Babylonians: spiritual astral body.

The astral body even got its name from this. First, the Babylonians discovered it. And because they discovered it from the stars, from the astral - astrology, astronomy, star science, star knowledge - it was called the astral body. So you see, the successive peoples discovered one after the other out of the spirit: the Indians the physical body, the Egyptians the etheric body and the Babylonians the astral body.

If you look at what the Babylonian legends are based on, you find that they are all based on the stars. You just have to not be deceived by today's science and its books. There is one scholar who says: Originally, all religions originated from a star service. Therefore, one must see the star service as the origin of all religions. Another comes and says: Oh no, religions all originated from nature worship. The wind and weather were worshipped. A third says: Religions all originated from the elements, from water and its effects. Yes, gentlemen, but why do people say that? The person who tells you that religion comes from serving the stars has studied nothing but the Babylonian period. Now he believes that what was true of the Babylonians was true everywhere. The person who tells you that religion comes from the elements has studied nothing but the Egyptians. Now, in turn, he is Egyptianizing everything. And he says: All religions have arisen from the worship of wind and weather. This is due to the fact that people are limited, that they only study individual things. Religions arise from the most diverse.

Now there is something else, I told you, a small people there in Palestine: the Hebrews, the Jews. You see, they lived among these other nations, and they were not satisfied by the other nations at all. You can read in the Bible, in the Old Testament, how the Jews are unsatisfied everywhere and how they come up with a completely invisible, spiritual essence. The physical body is, of course, completely visible. The etheric body expresses itself in the floods, in the water effects of the Nile; they are there. The astral body of the Babylonians is no longer visible on earth, but if you study the stars, you will find the astral body. The Jews no longer wanted any of this, but only an invisible God. This invisible God, what is he? He is the one who has an effect on the human ego. So:

4. Jews: I spiritual (Yahweh)

The Jews came upon the ego as a spiritual being and called it Jahve.

And now you have history! You can read as much as you like in history books: you will not understand how the ancient peoples progressed. You are told about all kinds of things, about all kinds of wars and kings, which creates a motley chaos in the human mind; you don't know what it actually is. Then, at most, religions are still told about, but you don't know where they come from. But if you now know that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, and that these have been discovered one after the other by people, and that their views of life depended on it, then you will find out in this respect: the Indians discover the physical body, the Egyptians the etheric body, the Babylonians the astral body, the Jews the ego. Little by little it comes out that man has these different bodies. This did not just fall from the sky, but people discover it according to their living conditions.

The Indians, through whom many peoples have passed, so that they are racially diverse, come into the physical body. The Egyptians, who had a lot to do with water, come to the ether and thus to the etheric man. The Babylonians, who took over everything they needed for the astral body from the other peoples, where the priests came up with the idea of building high towers: they came up with astronomy. And the Jews, who were always wandering – you can follow this in the stories of Abraham, Moses and so on – were reluctant to worship anything visible in the heavens and the earth: they came up with the invisible Yahweh, who is the creator and enforcer of the human ego.

That's when you start to make sense of it all! That's when you see how, little by little, man discovers himself. Then it continues. We also want to look at that. So, gentlemen, today is Saturday – we'll see each other again next Wednesday.

Well, gentlemen, has anyone thought of anything else today?

Questioner: I have a question about the purpose of carnival. Is there anything we can hear from Dr. Steiner about that? Where does the carnival celebration come from, what does it mean?

Dr. Steiner: So you mean, what is the purpose of carnival? Well, you see, the carnival festival cannot be understood by asking about its purpose, because, at least according to the way it is celebrated today, you will admit that after all, humanity could do without carnival over the years. So you can say that, from today's point of view, the carnival festival is basically pointless. But it no longer has its original meaning either. It has gone with such things as carnival festivals, just as it has gone with the medals, with the robes and so on. They used to have their good sense; little by little they have lost that sense. Well, it is not true that the other festivals of the year are also gradually disappearing; little by little, if they are no longer revived in their meaning, they lose their significance. Not much has been done yet to restore the significance of Carnival. In fact, Carnival would have a profound impact on all of social life if it regained the original meaning it had, for example, in ancient Rome, where it was celebrated a little earlier.

If we go back to ancient Rome, we find the following. People back then were also divided up, if one may say so, as they are here in the present day: one was a civil servant, the other was a warrior, the third was a laborer, and so on, and the division was even harsher then than it is today, at least in a social sense. For a slave could even be bought as a human being! So one can say that the differences between people in ancient Rome were still very, very significant. But the awareness that one had this or that position should be lost, at least for a few days of the year. Isn't that right? Today we talk about democracy and mean, at least initially and more in the theoretical sense, that all people are equal. Now, the Romans did not believe that at all, but for them, the one who was born into any higher class was only a real human being. You know that even in our times, the saying still applied to certain people: “A man only begins with a baron.” So those who are below the baron are not human.

In ancient Rome, this was of course extremely pronounced. Even if the nobility was not introduced in the same way as it appeared later – because that is a medieval institution from the so-called feudal period – there was still a great difference between the classes in ancient Rome. But now, for a few days a year, people were supposed to be equal, democracy was supposed to prevail. Of course, it was not possible for people to come with their ordinary faces, otherwise they would have been recognized; so they had to wear masks. Then they were what the masks were. There was also a person who was the carnival king. During these days he could do whatever he wanted. He could give orders when otherwise he only received orders. And the whole of Rome went mad for a few days, out of place; and people could also behave differently towards their superiors, did not need to be polite to them - so for a few days, to make people equal! And this institution naturally led to people not exactly weeping and mourning during these days; for it pleased them to be able to live like that for a few days. The carnival revelry then developed out of this joy: People only played crazy tricks when they were freed for a few days. And so the whole carnival merrymaking came about.

The result of this was that, because people liked it very much, it has been preserved. But things are preserved without people knowing the original meaning. So carnival remains only as the time when you do crazy things – because you were allowed to do crazy things. Then the church decided that it was necessary to have Ash Wednesday immediately afterwards, so that people would feel that they were guilty, that they were not allowed to do everything they wanted, and so on. And since Christianity, at least in earlier times, had developed the custom of making people do without, Lent was established. And it was naturally expedient to attach Lent to the carnival season, because then people did without the least; they did everything they liked as well as they could. Afterwards it is much worse not to eat the things one has eaten before. It was then as if time had not gone forward. And so these festivals came together.

The only thing was that in Rome, Carnival was much earlier, around our present-day Christmas time, because everything was moved a little to a later season. That is how we got today's carnival. I believe that the date of the carnival in all other areas is based on the Easter season. But that, as I hear, only leads to it being celebrated twice!

Well, that is what needs to be said in answer to this question. It can be said of many things in humanity that they originally had a meaning but then later lost that meaning. Then one wonders: Why all this?

Well, maybe someone has something else to ask today.

Questioner: I would like to ask the doctor if he would perhaps continue the story from last time.

Questioner: I would like to ask Dr. whether it is possible for people to insult another person or cause him pain, that is, to influence others? Mrs. A had a three-year-old child who always saw entities coming in through the door and windows. The child often had restless nights, and especially when the woman had washed her underwear – the woman borrowed things in the house – the child always became restless. Finally, there was nothing left; then the woman died later. I would like to ask Dr. Steiner if something like this would be possible?

Dr. Steiner: These are, of course, things that touch on all kinds of areas in which superstition can play just as strong a role - because people are gullible - but also the facts. You just have to be clear about the fact that there are connections in the world that cannot be easily traced physically. I will start from very simple connections.

Look at it this way: take a grape harvest. You harvest the grapes and press them, prepare them, put them in barrels, store them in the cellar. Now, you will notice that when the next wine is ready - when the time comes for the wine to ferment again - it becomes restless. He remains, without having a physical connection, still in contact. This is a simple fact that shows you that there are such connections in nature itself that cannot easily be followed with the eye and so on.

Now, as you know, there is already a way to bridge the ordinary visibility. You only need to remember that even in inanimate nature there are devices today that overcome the ordinary visible – not the finer visible, but the ordinary visible. You only need to think of radiotelegraphy! What is radiotelegraphy based on? It is based on the fact that you have an electricity exciter somewhere; initially, no wire connects to it, but it stands alone. Somewhere else, without any connection to it, there is an apparatus that contains certain fine discs that can be set in motion. Such an apparatus is called a coherer. At first glance, they have no physical connection at all, but when you excite electricity here, it causes the signs to move there; and if you connect it to a device, you can receive the messages there, just as you can receive electricity through the wires. Of course, it is based on the fact that electricity propagates, but you just can't see it; it propagates without a gross physical connection. So even in inanimate nature you have a connection that is such that you can say: at least to a certain extent, the visible is overcome.

Now we can take the matter further. Imagine certain twin brothers or sisters. When they reach a later age, even twin brothers and sisters who are not physically connected can be in touch with each other. One may be here and the other there. Nevertheless, it can be observed that at a particular time one of the twins may fall ill, for example, and the other, who is further away, also! Or one of them will become saddened by something at a certain time; and so will the other. All such things show you that there are effects in the world that cannot immediately be explained as physical influences.

But if you now approach the animal kingdom, you soon realize that there are perceptions in animals, for example, that humans do not have. Suppose, for example, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption occurs in some area that is very damaging to people. People just sit there quietly; you can sometimes see the animals moving away and leaving the area for days beforehand! From this too you can see that there can be a sense of something for the animals that you do not perceive physically. If one were to perceive it physically, then man would also be able to perceive the matter.

From all this you can see that there are connections that are possible in the world outside the physical. Now, when we look at such finer connections, we come to the fact that sometimes people feel something inside them that they certainly could not have perceived physically. For example, I will say: There is a person somewhere - these things have happened in hundreds and thousands of cases - who suddenly flinches and sees something in front of him like a picture - it is of course only a dream - and he cries out and says: My friend! But the friend may be far away; he may be experiencing it in Europe, or he may be in America. My friend! Something has happened to him! It turns out that he has died. So these things do happen. Once again, we can see how such effects can take place without there being any physical connection.

Yes, but it must be said that it is good for our human race that these things are not all too widespread; because just think, if your head were capable of perceiving everything that one person or another thinks or says about you, for example, then it would be a terrible story! Isn't it true, you know, if you have a telegraph device, then the device must first be set up, the wire must first be switched on, and then the transmission takes place. Likewise, in wireless telegraphy, this must be in order, must not be disconnected (pointing to the drawing), then the transmission takes place. Now, in general, in the case of a fully healthy person, it is so that the person is not connected to all the currents that are going on; he is disconnected; but in special cases it can certainly happen that one is connected to something.

Take for example – I cannot go into your case in detail for the good reason that you probably do not know how strongly it is attested; but I will go into a similar case, and then you will be able to explain this too. I only want to talk about things that are absolutely authenticated, because otherwise it is very easy to end up with mere talk. You probably did not experience the case yourself, but read about it or heard it related? So I will only go into what is well authenticated. Suppose: A woman A had an argument during her pregnancy with a woman B who lives in the neighborhood. It does happen, doesn't it, that people argue with each other. Now perhaps this woman B, who lives in the neighborhood, cursed woman A very strongly, and woman A was terribly frightened when woman B shouted and swore. As a result, the child that is born may become somewhat dependent on Ms. B, but Ms. B may also become somewhat dependent on the child. It may well be that the child becomes receptive to what Ms. B gives it as underwear or the like when she washes it. But on the other hand it can also be important for Mrs. B to receive underwear; she then needs, because she does have a little remorse about what she did to Mrs. A, to have something from this house to continually reassure her; and in the moment when she is then deprived of it, she seeks to get it in every possible way. People who want to get something like that, without being thieves by nature, can steal all kinds of things. They become thieving only for these things; otherwise they do not steal, but seek to get these things in every way. Then it can even happen that, when these things are withdrawn from them, because there are also spiritual and mental influences on a person's health, they suffer from a kind of inner wasting away, from a wasting fever and die, or let us say, even from a heart or nerve attack. That is entirely possible.

So you can say: These things happen in the world, and these things can be explained, because, even without a physical connection, an influence is exerted by one person on the other under certain circumstances. But then you always have to be able to go into the cause. It could have been a completely different cause in this case you mentioned. But if, for example, there had been a row between the two women during pregnancy, this could be the cause of an intervention between this woman and the child at a later stage. Now, gentlemen, it was requested that I speak a little further about what I said the other day. I showed you how people in ancient India lived under very different conditions four to five thousand years ago. And it was precisely through this special Indian nature and the way the peoples were together that these ancient Indians developed the view of the physical human body.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, who had their country entirely under the influence of the Nile, who owed everything they were, so to speak, to the Nile, they have, because man also becomes aware of the ether through this, developed the view of the etheric body of man.

The inhabitants of Assyria and the Babylonians, because the particularly pure air and the high altitude made it easy for them to observe the stars at certain times of the year, developed the astral body as a concept.

And the Jews, who actually had to wander in their early days, who were never settled close to anyone, only later settled, who thought and felt more out of the inner nature of man, they developed the view of the human ego.

Thus, the conception of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I has gradually developed. You see, the word Yahweh means nothing other than: I am the I-am. That is the meaning of the word. Since Yahweh is considered the supreme God, this confession of the supreme God clearly points to the human ego.

If we follow the development of the story, we find that all these peoples have actually expressed more in their thoughts and feelings what they have experienced. The Indian has experienced a fertile, rich nature - everything is in a state of perpetual bloom and growth: a rich, lush nature. So he actually perceived the richness of the physical, and he developed the view of the physical body from his own view. The Egyptian, on the other hand, saw that only the Nile, which you can see, can help him; so he developed the doctrine of the ether, and so on. But all these people actually developed everything they experienced.

In contrast to this, there was another people. We can say (a drawing is being made): here is ancient India, here Arabia; here then Egypt, there flows the Nile. Now it goes over here, and here we have a land facing Africa, which then connects to Europe. Here again would be Assyria, as I told you last time, here Egypt, here India; here would be Palestine, where the Jews settled; and here we have Greece. In this Greece, peoples settled who had immigrated from the most diverse areas of Asia and Europe, and who thus mixed with each other there. They also found original inhabitants when they immigrated, but the Greek people gradually developed on this peninsula of Europe. These Greek people were actually the first, one might say, to open their eyes and see something of the world that was not only experienced from within. The Indians experienced nature from within; the Egyptians experienced the effects of the ether; the Assyrians experienced the astral body in the stars; the Jews experienced their ego. The Greeks were actually the first, as I said, to turn their eyes outward and look at the world. The others did not really look at the world. So one can say: The Indians and the Egyptians, nor the Babylonians nor the Jews, had a particularly developed view of nature; they did not know much about nature because they did not open their eyes and look out. It was only with the Greeks that an understanding of nature arose, because the Greeks opened their eyes and looked outwards. And so it was only in Greece that man really became aware of the external world.

You see, the Indians knew very well: this physical world here is part of the whole world, and I came out of the spiritual at birth; I go back into it after death. The Egyptians believed that the mummies had to be preserved so that people could come back; but they also paid particular attention to the spiritual. The Babylonians saw the will of the spirits in the starry sky that they observed, in the astral. So they also believed in spirits. And you know that the Jews were of the opinion that Jehovah, Yahweh, would lead them back to those ancient times when the patriarchs lived. So basically they also looked to what connects man to the spiritual world.

With the Greeks, it became different. They were actually the first to have become attached to the external world. The earlier peoples did not care much about the external world. The Greeks were very interested in the outer world; and there is a Greek saying that says: It is better to be a beggar in the upper world, that is, he means in Greece, on earth, than a king in the realm of shadows, that is, of the dead. So the Greeks, above all, have grown fond of the world and have thereby also gained a view of nature for the first time.

The other peoples, for example, developed a view of man. Among the Indians, in particular, there was already a certain view of man in the most ancient times. But they did not gain this view of man by taking dead people to the dissecting room and cutting them up! If the Indians had to do that, they would never have gained their view of man. Rather, they sensed how the liver and lungs behave in the individual parts of the human body - this was still possible in those days. They knew this through inner knowledge. This is what led the Indians to their great wisdom: they knew through inner sensing and feeling how the liver works and so on. Today, people only know how a piece of meat tastes in their mouths. The Indians knew how a piece of meat behaves in the intestines, what the liver does, what the gall bladder does, through inner experience, just as people today feel the pieces of meat they eat in their mouths.

The Egyptians developed geometry because they needed it. They had to determine again and again where the fields were located; after all, the Nile flooded everything every year. This is also something that can be invented out of the head. The Babylonians developed astrology, the knowledge of the stars - again something that has nothing to do with the earthly; they had no strong interest in the earthly. And the fact that the Jews have no strong interest in the earthly is shown by the fact that a Jew is more likely to have an interest in anything than in what is actually in the world of the senses around him; he is good at thinking, but he has no real interest in what is in the world of the senses around him.

The people who are most interested in what is in the sensory world around them are the Greeks. If you do some research, it is interesting to note that they saw the whole world differently from the way we see it today. That is very interesting. Today we see the sky as blue. The Greeks did not have the same impression of the color blue as we do, but saw the sky as much darker, almost blackish, with a slightly greenish tinge. They perceived red particularly strongly. With our dull perception of red, we can no longer imagine the strong impression that the red color made on the Greeks! It is precisely because humanity has gradually developed a sense of blue that humanity has in turn moved away from the sensual impression. So the Greeks first became particularly attached to what existed outside of them. And that is why the Greeks were particularly skilled at developing what we today call mythology. The Greeks worshipped a whole pantheon of gods: Zeus, Apollo, Pallas Athena, Ares, Aphrodite; they saw gods everywhere. They worshipped a whole pantheon of gods because what they loved as external nature seemed to them to be everywhere still alive and spiritualized. Not as dead as it is with us, but everywhere still animated and spiritualized, it seemed to them. So they worshiped the gods everywhere in the nature itself that they had come to love.

But as a result, during the Greek era, all those people who had become dependent on Greek civilization, Greek culture, and Greek intellectual life forgot what the Indians, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians had actually experienced in spiritual terms.

Now you will know, gentlemen, how great an influence Greece actually had on the whole development of mankind. This continues to this day! Anyone who can send their son to grammar school today still has him learn Greek. But in the past it was much more widespread. In the past, you were a donkey, so to speak, if you couldn't speak Greek or at least read Greek writers and poets. Greece has had an enormously strong influence on the world because it was the first to take an interest in this external world.

Now, while this interest in the external world was developing in Greece, the important thing happened in Asia, that from there the mystery of Golgotha developed, that is, when Greece was already overcome, when everything was actually already under Roman rule. But what does this Roman rule mean? It was, after all, completely imbued with the Greek spirit. The educated Romans had also all learned Greek, and anyone who was educated in Rome knew Greek. Greek had gained the greatest influence everywhere. While Greek was spreading in this way, in a little-known Roman province in Asia – at that time Palestine, the Jews had been overcome, Palestine had become a Roman province – a man appeared, Jesus of Nazareth, who said something completely different from anything that people had ever said before. And as you can imagine, because he said something so special, he was not immediately understood by others either. Therefore, at first he was understood only by a few.

What did this personality, Jesus, actually say when he appeared in Palestine? Well, this personality, Jesus, said in the way he was able to express it at that time: Yes, people today believe – that was the “today” at that time – everywhere that man is an earthly creature. But he is not. He is a being that comes from the spiritual world and when it dies, returns to the spiritual world. Today, when Christianity has been in effect for almost two thousand years, one is surprised that such a thing was said at the time. But at that time it was not so. The Asian and African conceptions of the spirit were little known or widespread in Greece. There, people were more turned towards the world. And so, especially against the worldly Hellenism that existed in Rome, what Jesus of Nazareth taught in the first place was something tremendously significant.

But in doing so, he would not have done anything different from resurrecting what earlier peoples, the Indians, the Egyptians and so on, had already said. Only what I have just told you would have been resurrected; only what was already there would have come back. But that Jesus of Nazareth not only revived what was already there, but he also said the following. He said: Yes, if I had only listened to what people could tell me today, I would not have come up with the teaching of the spirit at all, because people no longer really know anything about the spirit. That came to me from outside the earth. And so he realized that he was not just Jesus, but that an entity had emerged in his soul that was the Christ. To him, Jesus was the one who was born of the mother's womb on earth. The Christ was the one who entered his soul only in later times. The truth has emerged in his soul from the fact that people are spiritual by nature.

Now we must ask ourselves: How were the various ancient teachings cultivated in India, in Egypt, in Babylonia and also among the Jews? If you look around at the spiritual life today, you will find the church on one side and the schools on the other. At most, the rulers of the church argue with the rulers of the schools about the extent of the influence of the one on the other; but they are separate from each other. This was not the case with these ancient peoples, neither with the Indians nor the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor even the Jews. Everything that was connected with religion in those days was at the same time connected with schools; it was one and the same thing to serve both the church and the school. Much of it has, of course, been transplanted into our time; but it is not the same as it was in ancient times, when the priest was also the teacher. The priest was the teacher both in India and in Egypt, Babylonia and so on. The priest was the teacher. And where did he teach? Well, he taught where the service was also performed, where the cult was held. The cult was generally connected with teaching. These were the mystery schools. They did not have churches and schools, but they had such places, that is, such institutes, which were both at the same time, and which we call mysteries today. But the general view was that one must be careful with everything that could be learned there.

You see, gentlemen, that was an old view: that a person should only be mature enough to receive certain knowledge. This has been completely lost today. And so everywhere you had those who held the highest dignity in the mysteries, called “fathers”. This is still reflected, for example, in the Catholic Church, where certain priests are called fathers. In ancient times, among the Indians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on, everywhere those who were actually initiated into the knowledge, who had insights, were called “fathers”. And when these fathers had taught those who had been accepted by them, whom they believed could make them mature, then they also had them, just as they had been called “fathers,” called them “sons.” And all the rest of the people who did not enter into the mysteries, who were not accepted, were called the “children” of the fathers; or they were also called sons and daughters. Now, you can understand that a certain view has emerged. This view consisted in the fact that people, who were much more devout then than they are today, really felt that those who were in the mysteries were their fathers in a spiritual sense as well; they gladly regarded them as their fathers, as their spiritual fathers. And above all, they believed that these spiritual fathers were in closer contact with the gods than they were outside; they outside must first receive the message, the knowledge, from the fathers. And so, gradually, people became very dependent on the fathers. The state that the Catholic Church would like to restore today, I believe, wholeheartedly, was a matter of course in the ancient times. It was like that everywhere. No one rebelled against it. People simply said: If you want to be a real human being, then you either have to be a father yourself, then you communicate directly with the gods, or you have to learn something about the gods from the fathers. So you are a human being because those who are in the schools, in the mysteries, tell you something. This is how the distinction between children of God and children of men, between sons of God and sons of men, came about. Those who were in the mysteries were called the sons of God because they, in turn, looked up to the gods as to their fathers. But those who lived outside, to whom only what was in the mysteries was proclaimed, were called the children of men or sons of men. And so people were divided into sons of God and sons of men or human children. Today this seems even ridiculous to people, but in those days it was quite natural. Today, people do make distinctions – admittedly not in Switzerland, but I don't know whether something similar is gaining a little ground there; but in neighboring countries, right away – now it has ceased somewhat, but it wasn't long ago that one distinguished excellencies from ordinary people, the barons from ordinary people; this was more taken for granted. But in the old days it was simply taken for granted that a distinction was made between the sons of the gods, the children of the gods and the children of men.

The one who then called himself Christ Jesus, who was so named, said: A son of God, a child of the spirit, is not acquired through another human being; rather, everyone becomes one through God Himself. It is only a matter of becoming aware of it. The old man said: The Father from the Mysteries must make one aware of this. - The Christ Jesus said: One already carries the seed of the divine within oneself, and one can, if one only makes the right effort, bring it out of oneself.

But with that, Christ Jesus taught that which makes people all over the world the same in their souls. And the greatest difference that has been overcome by Christ Jesus is that between the Sons of God and the sons of men.

People have misunderstood this in all sorts of ways – the ancients because they did not want the idea to arise that it was no longer possible to distinguish between the Sons of God and the children of men, and the later generations because they no longer knew what was meant by it. Just as the later generations no longer knew the carnival, they also no longer knew what was meant by “sons of the gods” and “sons of man”. That is why the Bible, the New Testament, continually adds that Jesus Christ is sometimes called the Son of God and sometimes the Son of Man, while all the passages that speak of the Son of God and the Son of Man actually mean that both can be used in the same sense; that is why they are spoken of alternately. But if you don't know that this has led to that, you can't really understand the Gospels at all. And they are actually being understood today in a very bad sense, especially by those who profess to do so.

In this way you have presented emotionally what actually came into the world through Christ Jesus. And if I first deal with the external things today, I must say: You see, there were also other great differences between people everywhere. One need only think of ancient India. There were distinctions, like the animals or classes of animals: the Brahmins, the priests, the country people, the laborers. The Egyptians, on the other hand, had a whole army of slaves. The castes were not so strictly separated from each other, but they were still present to a certain extent. Yes, even in Greece and Rome there was still the difference between freeborn and slaves. These external differences have only been wiped out in modern times because the difference between the children of the gods and the children of men has been wiped out. So there was also an enormous influence on the whole social life of humanity from what happened in Palestine through Christ Jesus.

But now one can actually ask about everything: Yes, is it the case that it can be found out where the spiritual actually comes from outside of the earth into the human being? You see, in this respect it is even very difficult to talk today, because today everything is actually only considered materialistically. For example, let us say, language. You know that different languages are spoken in different areas, different countries of the world; but still, the languages all have a secret similarity. The similarity does not have to be as striking as, say, in Germany and England, in Germany and in Holland. But still, it is the case that the languages, despite being different, have a certain similarity. One can find that, for example, the language spoken in India, even if one does not understand it immediately, if one engages with it, the individual word images are similar to those of the German language.

And what do people say when they want to explain something like this today? They say: Well, such a language originated in one place on earth - because everything should only come from the earth - then the peoples migrated, carried the language somewhere else, and it changed a little. But it all comes from one language.

This is the greatest scientific superstition that has emerged in modern times. Because, you see, gentlemen, this scientific superstition is exactly the same as the following: Imagine a person lives in India and he gets warm when the sun shines. Now, the view is formed: man can get warm. - Now, later, people in Europe discover that they also get warm in summer. They also get warm. Now they don't use their intellect to help them, but their senses. They say: “You can't explain getting warm from the present; but in ancient India, people got warm; they emigrated to Europe and transplanted the property of getting warm to Europe.” Yes, gentlemen, if someone says that, then of course he is crazy. But the philologists say the same thing! They do not say, when a language in Europe is similar to a language in India, that the same influence from outside the Earth has worked in India as in Europe, but they say: the language has migrated! If in two regions a person gets warm, one will not say that the property of getting warm was brought here by migration, but one looks up to the common sun, and it warms both those in India and those in Europe. When two languages are found that are similar in distant places, it is not because the language has migrated, but because the common influence, just as the influence of the sun is there for the whole earth, the common influence of extraterrestrials is effective on the peoples of the most diverse areas of the earth. But because men definitely do not want to admit that an extraterrestrial influence takes place in the spiritual, they think up all kinds of things, which one just does not notice are crazy, because they are so learned. If people were not afraid of being thought crazy, they would deny everywhere that the sun warms, but they would say: In primeval times the property of becoming warm arose once, and that has been transplanted over the whole earth. They would deny the influence of the sun, if that were not crazy! This is something that must be taken into account if one wants to understand the origin of Christianity.

It's already too late to answer any further questions today; we can talk about it next Saturday.