The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Life and Form are the two principles that must guide us through the labyrinth of the manifested world, in multitudinous forms, life is forever changing, coming to expression in manifold variety. Life could not manifest outwardly or present itself in the world if it were not to appear in constantly new forms. The form is the revelation of the life. But all life would vanish, would be lost in the rigidity of form, were it not ever and again to become seed for the building of new forms out of the old. The seed of the plant grows into the developed form of the plant and this plant must again become seed and give a new form existence. So it is in nature everywhere and so it is in the spiritual life of man. In the spiritual life of man and of mankind the forms also change; life maintains itself through forms of infinite variety. But life would lose all power were the forms not perpetually renewed, were not new life to spring forth as seed from old forms. Just as the epochs change in the course of human history, so also do we see life changing in infinitely diverse forms during these epochs. In the lecture on Theosophy and Darwin¹ we heard of the diverse forms In which the civilisations of mankind have come to expression. We heard something of the forms that existed in the ancient Vedic civilisation of India, changing perpetually through the ancient Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian, the Greco-Roman and finally through the Christian civilisation until our own time. But the significant point about spiritual development in our own time is that a common life flows more and more into external forms, for this reason it may be called the epoch of forms, the epoch when on every hand man is taught to devote his life to form.

Wherever we look we see the predominance of form. Darwin is the most brilliant illustration of this. What was it that Darwin investigated and bequeathed to humanity in his theory? The origin and change of the forms of animals and plants in the struggle for existence. This confirms that the attention of science is directed to the outer form, And what did Darwin openly declare? He asserted that the plants and animals live out their lives in the most manifold forms but that originally, according to his conviction, there were forms into which life was breathed by a Creator of worlds. This is what Darwin himself says. His eyes are directed to the evolution of forms, of the outer form, and he himself feels that it is impossible to penetrate into what imbues these forms with life. He takes this life for granted and does not attempt to explain it. He pays no heed to it, the question for him being merely the shape and form which life assumes.

Let us consider life in another domain, in the domain of art. I will mention one characteristic phenomenon only, in its most radical form. What a storm of dust was raised in the seventies and eighties of last century by the catchword Naturalism! I do not mean this in any derogatory sense, for this catchword is entirely in keeping with the character of our time. Naturalism emerged again in its extreme form in Zola, the Frenchman. His descriptions of human life are powerful and magnificent. Yet for all that his gaze is not focused upon human life itself but upon the forms in which it manifests. How life comes to expression in mines, in factories, in city districts where immorality is the undoing of men, and so forth. Zola describes all these various manifestations of life, and fundamentally speaking, all naturalists do the same. Their attention is focused, not upon life itself, but upon the forms in which life takes expression.—And now think of our sociologists who are concerned with giving details about the forms which life has assumed and ought to assume in the future. Catch-phrases about the materialistic conception of history and about materialism are much in evidence. But what is the approach of the sociologists? They do not concern themselves with the soul of man, with his inmost spirit. They study external life as it presents itself in the field of economics, how trade and industry prosper in one district or another, and how the human being is obliged to exist as a result of these configurations of life. That is how the sociologists study life. They say: Ethics and the idea of morality are no business of ours! Create better outer conditions for human beings and the standard of living will automatically improve.—in terns of Marxism, modern sociology has declared that the external forms of the economic life, not the forces of ideas, are of paramount importance in human life.

All this indicates that we have reached a phase of evolution when attention is focused primarily on the forms of outer existence. If you think of the greatest writer at the present time you will perceive how his gaze is riveted on the forms of outer existence because, since he is also filled with the warmest feeling for the life of the soul, for a free inner life, he has been reduced to despair by these outer forms of existence. I refer to Henrik Ibsen.² He is one who depicts life in most diverse forms, who shows us how life in form always evokes obstacles, how souls go to pieces and are destroyed by the forms which life assumes. The way in which he concludes the poem When We Dead Awaken, is symbolic of the prevailing forgetfulness of the soul find spirit. It is as though Ibsen wished to say: We men, of modern civilisation are completely caught up in the external form of life we so often censure ... and when we awaken, how does the life of soul present itself to us in the tightly knit forms of society and thought in the West?—That is the fundamental trend in Ibsen's dramatic works.

Certain flashlights have now been thrown on the form-culture of the West. In considering Darwinism we saw how this culture is bound up with the outer, mechanical life of nature and how the soul is yoked to rigidly circumscribed forms of life and of society. We saw how this state of things has been reached by slow degrees, how our Fifth Race (the Aryan Race), starting from the spirituality of the ancient Vedic culture which recognised by direct Vision that life is filled with soul, has passed through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian culture-epochs and then through Greco-Roman culture with its view—shared even by the Greek philosophers—that the whole of nature is ensouled. In the 16th century Giordano Bruno still recognised the life that fills the whole of nature, the whole universe and the great world of stars. But in later times, life has become wholly entangled with external form. This is the lowest standpoint. Again I do not say this in a derogatory sense, for every standpoint is necessary. What makes the plant beautiful is the external form, that which comes forth from the seed. Our cultural life has become externalised in every possible way. It is inevitably so, and least of all would it be fitting for theosophists to censure. Just as a culture imbued with spirit and with life was once necessary, so is a form-culture necessary for our age. In science we have the Darwinian view, in art the naturalistic, and in sociology a culture of form.

At this point we must pause and ask ourselves: According to the principles of spiritual science, what must happen when a form is actually present? It must be renewed, must again be imbued with new germinating life!

Those who from this point of view study Zola's contemporary, Tolstoy, attentively and without bias, find in Tolstoy the artist, the observer of the various types among the Russian people—the type of the Russian soldier, the martial type described in War and Peace, and later in Anna Karinina—a keynote quite different from that prevailing in the naturalism of the West. Tolstoy looks everywhere for something else. He describes the soldier, the official, the human being belonging to some class of society, family or race ... but everywhere he is looking for the soul, for the living soul that comes to expression in one and all, although not in the same way. He portrays the simple, straightforward workings of the soul—but at different stages and in different forms. What is life in its diverse forms, in its thousand-fold variety?—this is the basic question running through Tolstoy's works. And then he is able to understand life even when it seems to annihilate itself in death. Death is still the great stumbling-block for the materialistic view of the world. How can a man who regards the outer material world alone as real, grasp the meaning of death, how can he get the mastery over life when death stands at its end like a barrier, filling it with anxiety and terror? Even as an artist Tolstoy has surmounted this standpoint of materialism. In the novel The Death of Ivan Ilyitsch you can see with what artistry materialism in its roost extreme form is transcended, how in this figure of Ivan Ilyitsch there is complete inner concordance. We have a sick man before us, not one who is sick in body, but in soul. In everything Tolstoy says, one thing is clear: he is not of the opinion that there dwells within the body a soul that has nothing to do with the body; it is obvious from his words that he regards the constitution of the body as the expression of the life of soul; the soul, when it is itself sick, causes sickness in the body; it is the soul that pours through the veins of the body. This is a portrayal of how life comes to its own. And here we find a remarkable understanding of death, not as theory or dogma but in the life of feeling. This conception of the soul makes it possible to think of death not as an end but as an outpouring of the personality into the universe, a merging into infinitude, and the rediscovery of the self in the great primal Spirit of the world. The problem of death is here solved by the artist in a wonderful way. Death has become a blessing in life. a dying man feels the metamorphosis from the one form of life to the other.

As a contemporary of the naturalists in the domain of art, Leo Tolstoy was one who sought for life, who enquired into the riddle of life in its different forms. This riddle of life—in its scientific as well as in its religious aspect—lay at the very centre of his soul, at the very core of his thinking and feeling. He strove to fathom this riddle, seeking for life wherever it encountered him. Hence he has become the prophet of a new era that must supersede our own, an era that in contrast to the trend of natural science will again experience and know the reality of life. In Tolstoy's whole judgment of Western culture we see the expression of a spirit who represents fresh, childlike life, a spirit who strives to imbue this life into evolving humanity, a spirit who cannot rest content with a mature, nay an over-mature culture manifesting in external forms. This indicates the nature of Tolstoy's antagonism to Western culture. It is from this point of view that he criticises the forms of society and of life—indeed everything else—current in the West; this is the point of view on which his judgment is based.

In Darwinism, as we heard, Western science succeeded in grasping the forms of life. But Darwin himself declared that he was not able to understand anything of the life he postulates as a given reality. The whole of Western culture is founded on the observation of form—external form in the evolution of mineral, plant, animal, man.—Open any book on Western science and you will find that it is form which is everywhere brought into prominence. Western researchers have themselves declared that they are confronted by the riddle of life and are unable to fathom it. Ever and again, when information about life is expected from scientists, we hear the words: Ignoramus, ignorabimus (we do not know, we shall never know). Science is able to say something about how life is expressed in forms, but knows nothing about the operations of life itself. It despairs of being able to solve this riddle and merely says: Ignorabimus we shall never know. Tolstoy discovered the true principle for contemplation of life. I will read an important passage from his essay On Life,³ which will show you how he emphasises the principle of life as contrasted with all science of the forms of life.—

“The false science of our day” (i.e. in the West) “assumes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know the one thing we really do know. A man with this false knowledge assumes that he knows all that presents itself to him in space and time, and that he does not know what his reasonable consciousness tells him.

Such a roan imagines that good in general, and his own good in particular, are the most unknowable of all things for him; his reasonable consciousness seems to him almost equally unknowable, he himself as an animal seems rather more knowable, animals and plants more knowable still, and inanimate and infinitely diffused matter seems to him the most knowable of all.

Something similar happens with regard to man's sight. A man always unconsciously directs his look first to objects that are farthest away and which therefore seem simplest in colour and outline: the sky, the horizon, the distant fields and woods. The farther those things are away the more definitely and simply do they present themselves, while the nearer an object is the more complex are its outlines and colour.” ... “Is it not the same with man's false knowledge? What is indubitably known to him, his reasonable consciousness, appears to him unknowable because it is not simple, while what la certainly incomprehensible to him—illimitable and eternal matter—seems to him to be the most knowable of all things because its very remoteness from him makes it appear simple*

In reality it is just the reverse.” (p. 53)

The Western scientist looks first and foremost at immobile, lifeless matter. Then he perceives how plants, animals and human beings are built out of this as the result of the working of chemical and physical forces, be perceives how lifeless matter is stirred into movement, conglomerates and finally gives rise to the movements of the brain. Only he cannot grasp how life itself comes into being, for what he is investigating is nothing but the form in which life is manifesting. Tolstoy says in effect: Life is our immediate concern, we are within life, nay we are life; if we think that we shall understand life by investigating and observing it in form, we shall never do so. We need only contemplate life in ourselves, we need only experience life—and then we have grasped it. Those who believe that it is impossible to grasp the reality of life itself do not understand it at all.—Tolstoy investigates what the human being is able to apprehend as his life, although the overcomplicated mode of thinking cannot grasp it in the broad outlines of simple thought.—If you would truly understand form, you must look into its innermost essence. If you are willing only to investigate the laws of nature in their outer expression, how can you hope to discover how life that is subjected to reason differs from life that is not? Organisms are healthy and become sick in accordance with identical laws; the sickness and the health of a human being are governed by exactly the same laws.—Again Tolstoy speaks significant words in his essay On Life:

“However strong or rapid a man's movements may be in his death struggle, in madness, in delirium, in drunkenness or even in a paroxysm of passion, we do not recognise life in him, we do not treat him as a living man, we only admit the possibility of life in him. But however weak and motionless a man may be, if we see that his animal personality is in subjection to reason, we recognise life in him and treat him accordingly.” (p. 62)

Tolstoy means that the outer form has significance only when we do not merely study it from outside but grasp that which is not form, which is only spirit—the inmost essence. If we try merely to understand the form we can never penetrate to the actual life; but we shall understand the forms if, starting from life, we then pass to the form.

But Tolstoy did not approach his problem from the scientific side alone; he approached it from the moral and ethical side as well. How, as human beings, do we reach this true life with its law that extends into the outer form? Tolstoy asks himself: How do I, how do other men satisfy the needs of our own well-being? How can I achieve the satisfaction of my own personal life? If his starting-point is that of animal life, a man has no other question than: How do I gratify the needs of the external form of life?—This is an inferior viewpoint. A somewhat higher one is held by those who say: It is not a matter of the gratification of the needs of an individual; the individual has to lend himself to the common weal, to be a member of society—moreover to care not only for what satisfies the form of his own external life but to see to it that the needs of this form of life among all living beings are satisfied. We must be members of a community, we must make our needs subordinate to its needs. Subordination of the needs of the individual to those of the community—this is regarded as the ideal by many moralists and sociologists in Western culture. But—says Tolstoy—this is not the highest viewpoint, for what have I still in mind except the external form? How one lives in the community, how one participates in it—this, after all, is a matter only of the external form. And these external forms are perpetually changing. If my own personal life is not to be the aim, why should the life of the many be the aim? If the welfare of the single individual's form of life is not an ideal, no ideal of common welfare can be produced by an accumulation of individuals. The ideal cannot be the welfare of an individual, nor can it be the welfare of all, for this is a matter only of the forms in which life is contained. Where is life to be recognised? To what are we to put ourselves in subjection, if not to the needs dictated by our lower nature? If not to what common welfare or humanity prescribes?

That which in the individual and in the community alike craves for well-being and happiness is the life itself in the most manifold forms. It therefore behoves us not to shape our ethical, our innermost, ideal according to external forms, but according to what is vouchsafed as the ideal to the inmost essence of the soul itself by the indwelling God. That is why Tolstoy reaches out again for a higher kind of Christianity which he regards as the true Christianity.—Seek not the kingdom of God in outer manifestations—in the forms—but within you. What your duty is will become clear to you when you knowingly experience the life of the soul, when you allow yourself to be inspired by the God within you, when you give ear to the utterances of your soul. Let not the forms engross you, great and impressive though they may be! Go bade to the original, undivided life, to the divine life within you yourself. When a man does not take the ethical ideals, the cultural ideals, into himself from outside, but lets that which arises in his heart, that which the Godhead has imbued into his soul, stream forth from his soul, then he has ceased to live only in form; then he is moral in the true sense. This is inner morality, and inspiration.

From this standpoint Tolstoy strives for a complete renewal of all conceptions of life and of the world in the form of what he calls ‘original Christianity.’ In his view, Christianity has been externalised, has adapted itself to the diverse forms of life produced by culture and civilisation in the different centuries. And he awaits an era when form will be vibrant with new, inner life, when life will again be apprehended in direct experience. Therefore he is never tired of exhorting in ever new connections that it is a matter of experiencing the simplicity of the soul's existence, not the complex existence which all the time is trying to learn something new. The ideal prescribed by Tolstoy is that the simplicity of the soul must be maintained, that the intricacies of external science, of external artistic presentation, the luxury-adjuncts of modern life. must be resolved Into the simplicity inherent in the soul of every human being, no matter in what form of life and society he is placed. And so Tolstoy is a stern critic of the various forms of Western European culture, of Western science. He declares that this science, like theology, has little by little stiffened into a body of dogmas and that Western scientists give one the impression of being outright dogmatists, filled with wrongly directed intellect. He passes stern judgment on these scientists, above all on the ideal striven for in these forms of science, and on those who regard the final goal of all endeavour to be our material welfare. For centuries past mankind has been at pains to make forms preeminent, regarding external possessions, external well-being as the highest goal. And now—we know that this should not be censured but regarded as inevitable - well-being must not be limited to particular ranks or classes, but shared by one and all.—Certainly there is no objection to be made to this, but it is against the form in which Western sociology and Western socialism endeavour to achieve it that Tolstoy directs his attacks. What does this socialism proclaim? Its aim is the transformation of the external forms of life. Material culture itself is to lead men to a higher level, to a higher standard of life. And then, so it is believed, those whose conditions improve, whose, prosperity increases, will also have a higher ethical standard. All ethical endeavour on the part of socialism is directed toward revolutionising the outer form of the conditions of existence.—

It is this attitude which Tolstoy attacks, For the obvious result of the evolution of culture has been the development of the most manifold differences of rank and class. Can you possibly believe that if you make this culture of form preeminent, you will actually produce an ideal civilisation? No, you must take hold of the human being where he himself creates form. You must enrich his soul, imbue his soul with divine-moral forces, and then, acting from the very source of life, he will change the form. That is Tolstoy's socialism and it is his view that no renewal of moral end ethical culture can ever arise from any metamorphosis of the form-culture of the West, but that this renewal must be brought about by the soul, from within outwards. Hence he is not a preacher of dogmas but the champion of a complete transformation of the human soul. He does not say: Man's ethical standard is raised when the outer conditions of his life improve ... but he says: It is just because you have based yourselves on outer forms that you have brought upon yourselves the wretchedness of your existence. Not until you transform the human being from within will you be able to surmount this form of life. In sociology, as well as in Darwinism, we have the last offshoots of the old form-culture. But then we have, too, the preliminary factors for a new culture of life. Just as in the former case we have the line of descent, here we have the line of ascent. As little as an aged man who has already attained his settled form of life is capable of complete self-renewal, as little can an old culture produce a new form of life. It is from the child with its fresh forces of growth that the new form of life springs—inwardly quickened—from what is as yet undifferentiated and able to unfold into infinite diversity. Hence in the Russian people Tolstoy sees a people not yet entangled in Western forms of culture; it is within this people that the life of the future must germinate. From his observation of the Slav people who still regard the European ideals of culture—European science as well as European art—with apathetic indifference, Tolstoy declares that in this people there lives an undifferentiated spirit which must become the bearer of the future ideal of culture. It is there that he sees the hope of the future. His judgment is based on the great law of evolution, on that law which teaches us the principle of the change of forms and the perpetually new, germinal up-welling of life,

In the tenth chapter of his essay On Life, he says:

“And the law we know in ourselves as the law of our life is the same law by which all the external phenomena of the universe are ordered, only with this difference, that in ourselves we know this law as that which we must ourselves fulfill, while in external phenomena we know it as the law by which things take place without our participation.” (p. 47)

Thus Tolstoy himself bears witness to life that is evolving, that is eternally subject to change. We should be very poor representatives of spiritual science were we unable to understand such a phenomenon aright and were only to preach ancient truth. Why do we study the ancient wisdom? Because this ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its depths, because it reveals to us how the Divine manifests ever and again in an infinite variety of form. Anyone who becomes a dogmatist, who speaks only about the ancient wisdom without ears or words for happenings of the immediate present, is anything but a worthy representative of spiritual science. The ancient wisdom is not taught to us in order that we shall repeat it in words but in order that we shall live it, and learn to understand what is round about us. The development of our own race, which has been separating into different forms from the time of the ancient Indian civilisation up to our own, is accurately described and portrayed in that ancient wisdom, which speaks, too, of the development to come in the future, in our own immediate future. It tells us that we are standing at the starting-point of a new world-era. Our reason, our intelligence, have developed as this result of the passage through the different domains of existence. The powers of our physical intellect have attained their greatest triumph in the form-culture of our time. Intellect has penetrated the natural laws of form and has achieved mastery of them in the stupendous advances made in applied technology, in the standards of our life. We stand now at the starting-point of an epoch when something must pour into this intellect, something that must lay hold of and mould the human being from within outwards. That is why the Theosophical Movement has chosen as its guiding principle and aim, the establishment of the kernel of universal brotherhood among men without distinction of creed, class, sex or colour: it is the life that is to be sought in all these forms. The spiritual ideal hovering before us is an ideal of Love, an ideal which the human being, when he becomes conscious of divinity, experiences as the other divine principle that is within himself. The culture of intellect, of the spirit, is called by Theosophy, Manas; Buddhi is the principle that is inwardly pervaded by love, the principle that arrives only for such wisdom as is filled with love. And just as our race has produced a culture founded on intellect the next stage will be a culture where the individual, filled with love, acts out of his inner, divine nature, without losing his bearings in the chaos of the external world, be it in the domain of science or the social life. If we have this conception of the spiritual ideal we may claim to have understood it rightly—and then we shall not fail to recognise a personality who, living among us, is striving to instill into the evolution of humanity the Impulse of a new life.

Much of what Tolstoy says about the essential nature of man is in perfect accord with this. Let me read just one more passage that is particularly characteristic of his ethical and moral ideal:

“The whole life of such people is directed to the supposed increase of the welfare of their personality. And the good of their personality appears to them to consist in the gratification of its needs; and these needs are all those conditions of individual existence to which their attention is directed. The needs of which they are conscious—those to which they have directed their attention—always grow to infinite proportions as a result of this attention, and the gratification of these overgrown needs hides from them the demands of their true Life.” (pp. 82/3)

Tolstoy therefore says in effect: The reasoning consciousness is not enclosed within the confines of the personality. Personality is a quality of the animal and of man as an animal. Reasoning consciousness is an attribute of man alone. Not until man learns to become impersonal, to let the impersonal life hold sway in him, will he grow out of a culture of form into a culture of life—despite the continuing development of outer form. Man learns to live on rightly into the future when his being is steeped in the eternal, the imperishable. The culture based on intellect must be superseded by Buddhi, the culture based on wisdom. The most important factors here are those forces which operate in life itself.⁴

It behoves us to recognise and understand such a truth. The greatness of Leo Tolstoy lies in this: he has shown that the ideals are not to be found outside, in the material world, but can spring forth from the soul.

See also: The following passage is from Lecture VI of the Course The Gospel of St. John in relation to the other three Gospels, especially the Gospel of St. Luke:

“... Such a thinker merits the very greatest respect, above all in the West, where whole libraries are filled with lengthy philosophical dissertations on the same thing which Tolstoy expounds with greatness and power in a single work such as his essay On Life. There are pages in Tolstoy's writings where with an elemental force, certain deep knowledge of theosophical truth is set forth.”

See also: Tolstoy and Carnegie. Lecture given 28th Jan. 1909.

• 1. Berlin, 27th Oct., 1904. German text in Nachrichtenblatt, Vol. 23 (1946) Nos. 10 – 12, also in Gegenwart, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (April, 1956)
• 2. See also Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Vol. II, lecture XVI.
• 3. All the quotations are from Tolstoy's work On Life and essays on religion. Translated by Aylmer Maude. O.U.P. 1934.
• 4. At the end of a lecture given in Berlin, 30th September, 1905, (the fifth of the so-called “Thirty-one” Lectures, Dr. Steiner says: “Buddhi-Manas must now be developed. Man must learn to do something more than mere speaking. With his speaking he must combine another force, such as is found in the works of Tolstoy. What Tolstoy actually says is of less importance than the fact that behind what he says there is an elemental force which has in it something of Buddhi-Manas. The reason why Tolstoy's writings make such a strong impression is that they contain, in contrast to Western European culture, something new and rudimental. The element of uncouthness in Tolstoy's writings will be leveled out as time goes on. Tolstoy is merely an instrument of a higher spiritual force which was also behind the Gothic Initiate Wulfila. This spiritual force uses Tolstoy as its instrument.”

The spiritual evolution of mankind must be brought into a living connection with the whole surrounding world. For many men to-day a great deal has become dead and prosaic; and this is true even of our religious festivals. A great section of mankind has only the smallest notion of what Christmas, Easter and Whitsun signify; it has almost entirely lost that overwhelming richness in the life of feeling which in earlier times men possessed through their knowledge of their connection with the spiritual worlds. Yes, even the festivals have for many men to-day become dead and prosaic. The pouring down of the spirit has become a mere abstraction, and this will change only when men come again to a real spiritual knowledge.

Much is said nowadays about the forces of nature, but little enough about the beings behind these forces. Our forefathers spoke of gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, but to see any reality in such ideas is regarded to-day as sheer superstition. It doesn't matter much, in themselves, what theories people hold; it only begins to be serious when the theories tempt people not to see the truth.

When people say that their ancestors' belief in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders and the like was all nonsense, one would like to make a rather grotesque reply, and say: “Well, go and ask the bees. They could inform you: the sylphs are no superstition to us; we know well enough what we owe to the sylphs.”—Anyone investigating spiritual forces can find out which force it is that draws the bee on towards the flowers; he sees actual beings leading the bee to the flowers: amid the myriads of bees which fly forth in search of nourishment are the beings our predecessors called sylphs.

It is especially where the different kingdoms of nature come in contact with each other that certain elemental beings are able to reveal themselves. Where moss is growing on the rocks, for example, such beings can establish themselves; or again, in the flowers, in the contact of the bee with the flowers, certain beings have the chance to show themselves. Another possibility arises where man himself comes into touch with the animal kingdom. This does not happen, however, in the ordinary run of things, as for example, when a butcher slaughters an ox or when a man eats meat. It does occur, however, in less usual circumstances, where the contact between the two kingdoms is the result of something more than the mere fact of life. It occurs particularly where a man has that kind of relationship to animals which involves his own feelings, his own concern of soul. A shepherd, for example, may sometimes have such a special relationship to his sheep. Connections of this sort were very frequent in more primitive cultures in earlier times; they resembled the relationship which an Arab has to his horse. And such soul-forces as play over from one realm into the other—as they do between the shepherd and his lambs, or when the forces of smell and taste stream over from the flowers to the bees—these give to certain beings the possibility of incarnating themselves. The spiritual investigator perceives something like an aura around the blossoms, which arises as the bees thrust their way into them and taste what they find there. A kind of flower-aura streams out, and this provides nourishment for certain spiritual beings.

The question why there are beings just here and nowhere else, does not arise for anyone who understands the spiritual world. If opportunities are provided for such beings, then they are there; give them that on which they can live and they are there. It is just as when human beings let evil thoughts stream out from themselves, certain beings then incorporate themselves in his aura; they are there because he allows nourishment to stream to them. The opportunity is given for certain spiritual beings to incorporate themselves wherever different kingdoms of nature come into touch with each other. Where metal is found in the rocks, the miner as he hacks away sees certain tiny beings which were compressed together into quite a small space and now scatter in all directions. These are beings in some ways not unlike man himself; they have the power of reason, but it is reason without responsibility; and so, when they play some mischievous prank on a man, they in no way feel they are doing anything amiss. They are the beings our forefathers called gnomes; they prefer to take up their abode where metal and stone come together. There was a time when they did men good service, as in the early days of mining; the way to lay out a mine, the knowledge of how the strata ran—this was learnt from such beings.

Mankind will land itself in a blind alley if it fails to acquire a spiritual understanding of these things. As with the gnomes, so with the beings we may call undines; they are found where the plants come into contact with the mineral kingdom. They are bound up with the element of water, they incorporate themselves where water and plant and stone come together.—The sylphs are bound to the element of air, and lead the bees to the flowers. Now everything science has to say about the life of the bees is riddled with error from top to bottom, and nowadays the beekeepers are often misled by it; in this direction science proves itself unusable and again and again beekeepers have to come back to old practices.

As for salamanders, these are still known to many people. When someone feels that this or that element of soul is streaming towards him, this mostly arises through the salamanders. When a man relates himself to animals in the way the shepherd does to his lambs, the salamanders are then able to embody themselves; the knowledge the shepherd has in regard to his flock is whispered to him by these beings.

If we take these thoughts farther we shall have to say: We are entirely surrounded by spiritual beings; we are surrounded by the air and this is crowded with these spiritual beings. In times to come, if his destiny is not to be of the sort that will entirely dry up his life, man will have to have a knowledge of these beings; without such a knowledge he will be unable to make any further progress at all. He will have to put the question: Whence do these beings arise? And this question will lead him to see that, through certain steps taken by the higher worlds, that which is on the downward path to evil can through a wise guidance be changed into good.

Here and there in life we meet with the products of decay with waste products. Thus for example, manure is a waste product, and in agriculture it is used as a basis to further plant growth. Things which have apparently fallen away from a higher course of development are taken up again by higher powers and transformed. This happens with the very beings of whom we have been speaking.

Let us consider how the salamander, for example, originates. Salamanders, as we have seen, are beings who require a special relationship between man and animal. Now the kind of ego man has to-day is only to be found in man, in the human being living on the earth; every man has his ego enclosed within himself. It is different with the animals: they have a group-ego, a group-soul; that is to say, a group of animals with the same form have a common group-ego. When the lion says ‘I’, its ego is up above in the astral world. It is as if a man were to stand behind a wall in which there were ten holes, and then to stick his ten fingers through them. The man himself cannot be seen, but every intelligent observer would conclude that someone is behind, a single entity who owns the ten fingers. It is the same with the group-ego. The separate animals are simply the limbs: the being they belong to is in the astral world. We must not imagine the animal-ego to be like the human being of course, though if we consider man as he is as a spiritual being, we can then certainly compare the animal group-ego with him.

In many animal species the group-ego is a wise being. If we think of how certain kinds of birds live in the north in the summer and in the south in the winter, how in spring they fly back to the north—in this migrating flight of the birds there are wise powers at work; they are in the group-egos of the birds. Anywhere you like in the animal kingdom you can find the wisdom of the group-egos in this way. If we turn back to our schooldays we can remember learning how modern times gradually arose out of the Middle Ages, of how America was discovered, and how gunpowder and printing were invented, and later still the art of making paper from rags. We have long been accustomed to such paper, but the wasp group-soul invented it thousands of years ago. The material of which the wasp's nest consists is exactly the same as is used in making paper out of rags. Only gradually will it become known how the one or the other achievement of the human spirit is connected with what the group-souls have introduced into the world.

When the clairvoyant looks at an animal, he sees a glimmer of light along the whole length of its spine. The physical spine of the animal is enveloped in a glimmering light, in innumerable streams of force which everywhere travel across the earth, as it were, like the trade winds. They work on the animal in that they stream along the spine. The group-ego of the animal travels in a continual circular movement around the earth at all heights and in all directions. These group-egos are wise, but one thing they have not yet got: they have no knowledge of love. Only in man is wisdom found in his individuality together with love. In the group-ego of the animals no love is present; love is found only in the single animal. What underlies the whole animal-group as wise arrangements is quite devoid of love. In the physical world below the animal has love; above, on the astral plane, it has wisdom. When we realise this a vast number of things will become clear to us.

Only gradually has man arrived at his present stage of development; in earlier times he also had a group-soul, out of which the individual soul has gradually emerged. Let us follow the evolution of man back into ancient Atlantis. Mankind once lived in Atlantis, a continent now lying beneath the Atlantic Ocean. At that time the vast Siberian plains were covered with immense seas; the Mediterranean was differently distributed, and in Europe itself there were extensive seas. The farther we go back in the old Atlantean period, the more the conditions of life alter, the more the sleeping and the waking state of man changes. Since that time consciousness during the sleeping condition has darkened, as it were, so that to-day man has, so to say, no consciousness at all in this condition. In the earliest Atlantean times the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so great. In his waking state at that time man still saw things with an aura around them; he did not attain to any greater clarity than this in his perception of the physical world. Everything physical was still filled out, so to say, with something unclear, as if with mist. As he progressed, the human being came to see the world in its clear-cut contours, but in return he lost his clairvoyance.

It is in the times when men still saw clairvoyantly what was going on up above in the astral world that all the myths and sagas originate. When he was able to enter into the spiritual world, man learned to know the beings who had never descended into the physical world: Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Loki.—These names are memories of living realities, and all mythologies are memories of this kind. As spiritual realities, they have simply vanished from the sight of man. When in those earlier times man descended into his physical body, he got the feeling: “Thou art a single being.” When he returned into the spiritual world in the evening, however, the feeling came over him: “Thou art in reality not a single being.” The members of the old tribal groups, the Herulians, the Cheruskans and the like, had still felt themselves far more as belonging to their group, than as single personalities. It was out of this condition of things that there arose such practices as the blood-feud, the vendetta. The whole people formed a body which belonged to the group-soul of the folk.

Everything happens step by step in evolution, and so it was only gradually that the individual developed out of the group-soul. The accounts of the patriarchs, for instance, reveal quite other relationships which confirm this fact. Before the time of Noah, memory was as yet something quite different from what we know. The frontier of birth was no real frontier, for the memory streamed on in those through whom the same blood flowed. This onstreaming of memory was in earlier times something quite different from what we possess; it was far more comprehensive. Nowadays the authorities like to have the name of each individual recorded somewhere or other. In the past, it was what man remembered of the deeds of his father and grandfather that was covered with a common name and called Adam or Noah; what was remembered, the stream of memory in its full extent, was called Adam or Noah. The old names signified comprehensive groups, human groups which extended through time.

Now we must put ourselves the question: Can we compare the anthropoid apes with man himself? The vital difference is that the ape preserves the group-soul condition throughout, whereas man develops the individual soul. But the ape group-soul is in a quite special position to other group-souls. We must think of a group-soul as living in the astral world and spreading itself out in the physical world, so that, for instance, the group-soul of the lion sends a part of its substance into each single lion. Let us suppose that one of these lions dies; the external physical part drops away from the group-soul, just as when we lose a nail. The group-soul sends out a new ray of being, as it were, into a new individual. The group-soul remains above and stretches out its tentacles in a continual process of renewal. The animal group-soul knows neither birth or death; the single individual falls away and a new one appears, just as the nails on our fingers come and go.—Now we must consider the following:—With the lion it is entirely as we have said, that every time a lion dies, the whole of what was sent out by the group-soul return to it again. It is not at all so, however, with the apes. When an ape dies the essential part does return to the group-soul, but a part does not; a part is severed from the group-soul. The ape detaches substance too strongly from the group-soul. There are species where the single animal tears something away from the group-soul which cannot return to it. With all the apes, fragments are detached in each case from the group-soul. It is the same with certain kinds of amphibians and birds; in the kangaroo, for example, something is kept back from the group-soul. Now everything in the warm-blooded animals that remains behind in this way becomes an elemental being of the kind we call a salamander.

Under entirely different conditions from those on the earth to-day, the other types of elemental beings have detached themselves in the past. We have here a case where cast-off products of evolution, as it were, are made of service under the wise guidance of higher Beings. Left to themselves, these would disturb the Cosmos, but under a higher guidance the sylphs, for example, can be used to lead the bees to the flowers. Such a service changes the harmful into something useful.

Now it could happen that man himself might entirely detach himself from the group-soul in becoming an individual and find no means of developing further as an individual soul. If he does not accept spiritual knowledge in the right way, he can run the risk of complete severance.

What is it that protects man from an isolation which is, without the direction and purpose which, earlier on, the group-soul had given him? We must clearly recognise that man individualises himself more and more, and to-day, he has to find a connection once again with other men out of his free will. All that connects men, through folk, race and family, will be ever more completely severed; everything in man tends more and more to result in individual manhood.

Imagine that a number of human beings on the earth have come to recognise that they are all becoming more and more individual. Is there not a real danger that they will split away from each other ever more completely? Already nowadays men are no longer held together by spiritual ties. Each one has his own opinion, his own religion; indeed, many see it as an ideal state of affairs that each should have his own opinion. But that is all wrong. If men make their opinions more inward, then they come to a common opinion. It is a matter of inner experience, for example, that 3 times 3 makes 9, or that the three angles of a triangle make up 180 degrees. That is inner knowledge, and matters of inner knowledge need not be argued about. Of such a kind also are all spiritual truths. What is taught by Spiritual Science is discovered by man through his inner powers; along the inward path man will be led to absolute agreement and unity. There cannot be two opinions about a fact without one of them being wrong. The ideal lies in the greatest possible inwardness of knowledge; that leads to peace and to unity.

In the past, mankind became free of the group-soul. Through spiritual-scientific knowledge mankind is now for the first time in the position to discover, with the utmost certainty of purpose, what will unite mankind again. When men unite together in a higher wisdom, then out of higher worlds there descends a group-soul once more. What is willed by the Leaders of the spiritual-scientific Movement is that in it we should have a society in which hearts stream towards wisdom as the plants stream towards the sunlight. In that together we turn our hearts towards a higher wisdom, we give a dwelling-place to the group-soul; we form the dwelling-place, the environment, in which the group-soul can incarnate. Mankind will enrich earthly life by developing what enables spiritual beings to come down out of higher worlds.

This spirit-enlivened ideal was once placed before humanity in a most powerful way. It was when a number of men, all aglow with a common feeling of fervent love and devotion, were met together for a common deed: Then the sign was given, the sign that could show man with overwhelming power how in unity of soul he could provide a place for the incarnation of the common spirit. In this company of souls the same thing was living: in the flowing together, in the harmony of feeling they provided what was needed for the incarnation of a common spirit. That is expressed when it is said that the Holy Spirit, the group-soul, sank down as it were into incarnation. It is a symbol of what mankind should strive towards, how it should seek to become the dwelling-place for the Being who descends out of higher worlds.

The Easter event gave man the power to develop these experiences; the Whitsun event is the fruit of this power's unfolding. Through the flowing of souls together towards the common wisdom there will always result that which gives a living connection with the forces and beings of higher worlds, and with something which as yet has little significance for humanity, namely the Whitsun festival. When men come to know what the downcoming of the Holy Spirit in the future can mean for mankind, the Whitsun festival will once more become alive for them. Then it will be not only a memory of the event in Jerusalem; but there will arise for mankind the everlasting Whitsun festival, the festival of united soul-endeavour.

It will depend on men themselves what value and what result such ideals can have for mankind. When in this right way they strive towards wisdom, then will higher spirits unite themselves with men.

As awakeners of ancient memories, festivals turn our thoughts and feelings to the past. Through what they signify they awaken in us thoughts that link us to all that our souls held holy in distant ages. But other thoughts also are roused through the understanding of the content of these festivals, thoughts which turn our eyes to the future of mankind, which, for us, means the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened which lend us the enthusiasm to live on into the future, and inspire our wills with strength so to work that we may grow ever more and more adequate for our future tasks.

It is with this backward and forward vision that we become able to describe, in the deeper sense of the word, the nature of the Whitsun festival. What it signifies for Western humanity is put before us in a mighty picture which speaks to the very depths of our soul. It is a picture we all know well. The Founder and Inaugurator of Christianity, after having accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha, dwelt for a time among those who were able to perceive Him, in that bodily form which He assumed after the Mystery of Golgotha. The events which followed that period are brought before our souls in a most significant series of pictures. In a mighty vision, known as the Ascension, His closest disciples visibly beheld the dissolution of that bodily form which He had assumed. Then ten days later there followed what is expressed for us in another picture, speaking powerfully to all hearts which have the will to understand it. The disciples of Christ are gathered together, those who were the first to understand Him. Deep in their hearts they feel the mighty impulse which through Him has entered into the evolution of humanity, and, after the promise given to them of the happenings they were to experience in their very souls, they are waiting in utmost expectation, gathered together in deepest devotion on the Day of Pentecost, the time-honoured festival of their people. First there takes place that which is presented in the picture of the “rushing mighty wind.” Through this their souls are lifted up into higher vision. They are summoned as it were to turn their gaze on what is yet to come to pass, on what will await them when, with the fire-impulse they have received into their hearts, they live on this earth in incarnation after incarnation in the future.

There is next portrayed before us the picture of the “tongues of fire” which descend upon the head of each of the disciples, and here another tremendous vision reveals to them what the future of this Christ Impulse is to be. For gathered together, and beholding in spirit the spiritual world, these men, who were the first to understand the Christ, feel as if they were not speaking to people near to them in space or in time: they feel their hearts borne far, far away, among the different peoples of the earth-sphere, and they feel as if something lives in their hearts which is translatable into all languages, and which can be brought to the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision of the future of Christianity which rises before them, these first disciples feel themselves as though surrounded by future disciples out of all the peoples of the earth, and as if they will, one day, have the power to proclaim the Gospel in words that will be understandable, not only to those directly near to them in time and space, but to all who live on the earth as human beings conscious of their destiny. This it was which was born out of the first Christian Pentecostal festival as the inner content of soul and feeling of these earliest disciples of Christ.

Let us now consider the interpretation of these pictures in their deepest esoteric Christian meaning.—The Spirit, also rightly named the Holy Spirit—for so he is—sent his forces down to the earth in the first descent to the earth of Christ Jesus. He next manifested himself when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. Now, once again, this same Spirit, in another form, in the form of many single, shining, fiery tongues, descended upon each single individual of the first Christian believers.

We are told about this Holy Spirit at the Whitsun festival in a quite special way, but we must get clear in our minds the meaning of the words “Holy Spirit,” as they are used in the Gospels. In the first place, how was the Spirit usually spoken of in ancient times, the times preceding those of the Gospel? In olden times the Spirit was spoken of in many connections, but in one connection particularly. Through the new knowledge which Spiritual Science gives us, we are enabled to say that when a man passes through birth into his existence between birth and death, the body in which the individuality is incarnated is determined in two ways. Our bodily nature has actually a double function to fulfil: it makes us a human being, but it also makes us members of this or that people, this or that race or family. In the ancient times which preceded Christianity, little as yet was experienced of what can be called world-wide humanity, of that feeling of human fellowship which in ever greater measure has lived in human hearts only since Christianity was proclaimed, and which says to us: Thou art fellow-man with all the human beings of the earth! On the other hand, that feeling was all the stronger which makes each man a member of a particular people or tribe. This indeed is expressed in the age-long religion of the Hindus in their belief that only one who is such through his blood, can be a real Hindu. In many directions—despite exceptions to the principle—this was also firmly held by the old Hebrew people before the coming of Christ. According to their view, a man belonged to his people only because his parents, themselves belonging to it and so blood-related, had placed him into it. But they were also always familiar with another feeling, which was more or less felt by all peoples in olden times, namely, that one was a member of one's family, a member of one's own folk, and nothing more. The further we go back into antiquity the more intense this feeling is, the more the human being feels himself as a member of his folk, and not in any way as a single individual. Gradually, however, there awoke the feeling of oneself as a single human being, a single human, individuality with individual human qualities. Thus these two principles were felt to be present in the outer nature of man: membership of a people, and awareness of oneself as a single personality.

Now the forces inherent in these two principles were ascribed in a different way to the two parents. The principle by virtue of which one belonged more to one's folk, by virtue of which one was related to the general race-community, was ascribed through heredity to the mother. When men felt according to this idea, they said of the mother: “In her the Spirit of the folk holds sway. She was filled with the Spirit of the folk and has passed on to the child the qualities common to her people.” But of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle which gave rather the individual, personal characteristics of the human being. Thus it could be said when a man came into the world through birth—and this was also the view of the old Hebrew people in pre-Christian times—that he was an individual personality through the forces of his father. The mother, however, through that which was special in her whole nature, was felt to be filled with the Spirit which held sway in the folk, and this she had handed on to the child. Thus it was said of the mother, that the Spirit of the folk dwelt in her, and it was in this connection that the Spirit was spoken of who sent his forces down out of spiritual realms into humanity—that he let his forces stream down into the physical world, into humanity, by way of the mother.

Through the Christ Impulse, however, a new conception had come—a conception which said that this Spirit of which men had previously spoken, this Spirit of the folk, was to be replaced by one which, though certainly related to it, worked at a far higher level, a Spirit which is related to the whole of mankind, as the earlier Spirit had been related to a particular people. This Spirit was to be given to man and to fill him with the power to say: “I feel I belong no longer only to a part of humanity, but to the whole of it; I am a member of the whole of mankind, and will become a member of it ever more and more!” This force, which poured a universal human quality over the whole of mankind, was attributed to “the Holy Spirit.” Thus the Spirit which was expressed in the force which flowed from the folk into the mother was raised from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

The One who was to bring mankind the power to develop this universal human nature ever more and more in earthly life, could dwell—as the first Being of this nature—only in a body bequeathed through the power of the Holy Spirit. This the mother of Jesus received in the Annunciation. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we hear of the consternation of Joseph, of whom it is said that he was a ‘righteous’ man. This word was used in the old sense, and meant that he was one who could only believe that any child of his would be born out of the Spirit of his people. Now he has discovered that the mother of his child is filled, is penetrated through and through (for this is the right meaning of the original word in our language), by the power of a Spirit that was not merely a folk-Spirit, but the Spirit of universal humanity! And he did not feel that he could live with a woman who might one day bear him children, when there dwelt in her the Spirit of humanity as a whole and not the Spirit he held to in his righteousness. Accordingly he wished as it says, to put her away privily. It was only when he also had received a communication out of the spiritual world, that he received the strength to decide to have a son by that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of this Holy Spirit.

Thus we have seen that this Spirit was creatively at work, first of all in letting its forces stream into human evolution in relation to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and again in the mighty act of the Baptism in the Jordan. Thus we now understand what the power of the Holy Spirit is: it is the power which will raise each man ever more and more above all that differentiates and separates him from others, and makes him a member of the whole of humanity on the earth, a power which works as a bond of soul between each and every soul, no matter in what bodies they may be.

It is of this same Holy Spirit that we are now told that at the Whitsun festival it streams, through another revelation, into the individualities of those who first accepted Christianity. In the Baptism by John there stands before us the picture of the Spirit as the dove; now, however, another picture appears, the picture of the fiery tongues. It is in a single dove, a single form, that the Holy Spirit manifests itself in John's Baptism: it is in many single tongues that it manifests itself at the Pentecostal festival. And each of the single tongues brings inspiration to an individual, to each of the individualities of the first disciples of Christianity.

What meaning, then, for our souls, has this Whitsun symbol? After Christ, the bearer of the universal-human Spirit, had completed His work on the earth, after He had suffered the last earthly sheaths of His being to disperse into the universe and His whole sheath-nature had departed as a single entity into the spiritual being of the earth, then, did it first become possible that, in the hearts of those who first understood the Christ Impulse there should arise the power of speaking about the Christ Impulse, of working in the significance of the Christ Impulse. As regards its manifestation in its outer sheaths, the Christ Impulse had vanished at the Ascension into the undivided totality of the spiritual world: ten days later it came forth again out of the hearts of the single individualities of its first followers. And because the same Spirit which had worked in the power of the Christ Impulse now reappeared in multiple forms, the first disciples of Christianity became the bearers and preachers of the Christ message.

Thus at the very beginning of Christian history was set up the powerful sign of this event, which says to us: “Just as the first disciples received each one the Christ Impulse into themselves, just as it was granted to them to receive it in the form of tongues of fire inspiring their own souls, so can you men, all of you, if you bestir yourselves to understand the Christ Impulse, receive its power, individualised, into your own hearts, the power which can develop in you ever more and more, which can become for you ever more and more complete.”—An all-embracing hope can well forth for us out of this sign, which was thus set at the starting-point of Christianity. The more a man perfects himself, the more can he feel that the Holy Spirit speaks out of his own inner being, in the measure that his thinking, feeling and willing are permeated by this Holy Spirit, which through its manifold division is also an individual Spirit in each single human individuality in which it works.

In regard to our future growth therefore, this Holy Spirit is for us men the Spirit of development into free manhood, into the free human soul. The Spirit of freedom holds sway in that Spirit which poured itself out over the first understanders of Christianity in the first Christian Pentecostal festival, the Spirit whose most significant characteristic was indicated by Christ Himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” Man can become free only in the spirit. So long as he is dependent on that bodily nature in which his spirit dwells, so long does he remain its slave. He can become free, only when he finds himself again in spirit, and from out of the spirit becomes lord over that which is in him. “To become free” presupposes the discovery of oneself as a spirit within oneself. The true spirit in which we can make this discovery is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the Pentecostal power of the Holy Spirit entering into us, and which we must bring to birth in ourselves and allow to come to manifestation.

Thus the Whitsun symbol is transformed for us into the most powerful of our ideals, the free development of the soul of man into a self-enclosed, free individuality. They had some dim feeling of this who, through inspiration, and not, of course, in clear consciousness, had to do with appointing for the Whitsun festival its special day in the year. This outer ordering is in itself remarkable; for whoever cannot detect an all-ruling wisdom even in the fixing of a festival day understands very little of the world. Let us consider from this point of view the three festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. As a Christian festival Christmas falls on a particular day in the year; it has been fixed once and for all for a particular day in December, and every year we celebrate Christmas on the selfsame day. It is otherwise with the Easter festival. Easter is a movable feast, which is determined by the constellations in the heavens; it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the Spring equinox. For this festival we must direct our gaze into the heights of heaven, where the stars go on their way and proclaim to us the laws of the cosmos. Easter is a movable feast, just as in each human individuality that moment is movable in which, in order to become free from the ordinary human lower nature, there awakens the power of the higher man, with a higher consciousness. Just as in one year Easter falls on this day, in another year on that, so with each man, according to his past and the strength of his endeavour, the moment comes sooner or later in which he becomes aware: “I can find the power in myself to let a higher man arise out of me.”

Christmas, however, is an immovable festival. It is the festival where man has left behind him in the course of the year the waxing and waning of nature, the joy of nature's upwelling, streaming forces. Man now beholds nature in a state of sleep, into which she has carried down within herself the force of the seeds. The world of nature has withdrawn herself, with all the birth-forces within her. When to the external world of sense the revelation of these forces is at its lowest; when the earth herself shows how at a given time her spiritual forces withdraw in order to wait for the coming year; when outer nature is at her most silent; then it is, in the Christmas festival, that man must let the thought rise in him that he may hope that he is not only united with the earthly forces, which now at this Christmas time are silent, but also with forces which are present not only on earth but also in spiritual realms. This hope must rise up in his soul because he has seen the earth as it were sink into sleep; it must well up out of the deepest, inmost part of the soul itself, and then it will become spiritual light, when outer physical nature is at its darkest. Through the symbol of the Christmas festival man must thus remind himself that, in the first place, he is just as much bound with his ego-forces to his earth-body, as that which reveals itself around him is bound to the yearly life of the earth. In keeping with the falling asleep of the earth, which takes place at the same time each year, the Christmas festival is also placed at the same time, so that at that time man shall remember that while he is bound to a body, yet he is not condemned to be united only with this, but may hope to find the power to become a free soul within himself. What we see as the meaning of the Christmas festival will thus remind us, both of our connection with the body and also of our hope to free ourselves from this body.

It depends, however, on our own efforts, whether it is earlier or later that we unfold those powers for which we may hope, and which lead us up again into the spiritual, heavenly world. To this thought the Easter festival must bring us. The Easter festival reminds us that we have not only at our disposal those forces which the body gives us, and which are themselves, of course, divine-spiritual forces, but it also reminds us that as men we can raise ourselves above the earth. Hence it is the Easter festival that speaks to us of that force which sooner or later must be brought to its awakening in us. Easter, as a movable festival, is determined according to the constellations in the heavens. So man must waken the recollection of what he can become, by turning his gaze to the sky so as to see how he can be freed from earthly existence, how he can lift himself above all such existence. In the force which comes to us in this way lies the possibility of inner freedom, of inner release. When we feel inwardly that we can raise ourselves above ourselves, we shall then strive to achieve this ascent in all reality; we shall then have the will to make our inner man free, to pull him clear, as it were, from his bondage to the outer man. We shall, of course, be dwelling in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual power, we shall be conscious of the inner man.

Furthermore, it depends upon this moment, at which, in this inner Easter festival, we grow aware that we can free ourselves, whether we also attain to the Whitsun festival, when we may fill the spirit, which has found itself within itself, with a content that is not of this world, but of the spiritual world. This content comes to us out of the spiritual world, and this alone can make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Christ said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” It is for this reason that the Whitsun festival is dependent on the Easter festival, because it is a consequence of the Easter festival. Easter is determined according to the heavenly constellations; Whitsun is an event which must follow it as a necessary result, after the lapse of a certain number of weeks.

Thus, even in the way in which the times for these festivals are determined, we see, on deeper reflection, an all-ruling wisdom; we see that these festivals are of necessity placed just where they are in the course of the year, and that each year they bring before us what, as men, we have been and are—and what we can become. When we know how to think of these festivals in this way, then they become for us festivals which unite us with all that is past, and they become an impulse implanted in humanity to carry it forward into the future.

The Whitsun festival in particular, when we understand it in this way, bestows confidence, strength and hope, when we know what we can become in our souls through following those who, as the first to understand the Christ Impulse, made themselves worthy to have the fiery tongues descend upon them. When we understand the Whitsun festival as a festival, not only of that moment, but of the future as well, then there is magically brought before our spiritual eyes the expectancy of receiving the Holy Spirit. But then we must learn to understand this Whitsun festival in its truly Christian sense. We must learn to understand first of all what the mighty tongues, the mighty Whitsun inspiration, said. What was it which sounded forth with trumpet-tones from the ‘rushing mighty wind,’ of which we are told in that picture which is placed before our souls as the Whitsun picture of the first Christian Pentecostal festival? What kind of voices were these which proclaimed in the wondrous music of the spheres: “You have experienced the power of the Christ Impulse, you who are the first to understand. And the power of the Christ in you has become a power of your own souls, in such a way that each one of you, now that the Event of Golgotha has been accomplished, has become able to see the Christ now, in this present time. With such strength has the Christ Impulse worked upon each one of you!”

The Christ Impulse, however, is an impulse of freedom; its true activity does not reveal itself when it takes place outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse does not appear until it takes place within the individual human soul itself. So it was that those who first understood the Christ felt themselves called through the Whitsun event to proclaim what was in their own souls, what, in the revelation and inspiration of their own souls revealed itself to them as the content of the Christ-teaching. In that they were aware that the Christ Impulse had worked in that holy preparation which they had undergone before the Whitsun festival, they felt themselves called, through the power of the Christ Impulse working within them, to let speak the fiery tongues, the individualised Holy Spirit within them, and to go forth and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. It was not simply what Christ had once said to them that those first disciples recognised as words of Christ, not only those words He had already spoken. They recognised as Christ-words that which comes out of the power of a soul which feels the Christ Impulse within itself. [Cp. I Cor. VII, 25 and 40.]

To this end did the Holy Spirit pour itself in individualised form into each single human soul, so that each one might develop the power, in itself, to feel the Christ Impulse. Then for such a soul the word becomes new: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Those, therefore, who are earnestly at pains to experience the Christ Impulse may also feel called on, by what the Christ Impulse arouses in their hearts, to proclaim afresh the word of Christ, even though it may sound forth ever new, ever different in each epoch of mankind. It was not that we might cling to the few words of the Gospels spoken in the first decade of Christianity's foundation, that the Holy Spirit was poured down on men: it was poured forth so that for ever the Gospel of Christ may relate new things and again things ever new. As the souls of men progress from epoch to epoch, from incarnation to incarnation, new things must always be spoken for these human souls. Should these souls, advancing from incarnation to incarnation, be told to accept as the proclamation of Christ only the words which were spoken when they were incarnated in bodies contemporary with the temporal appearance of Christ on the earth? Within the Christ Impulse dwells the power to speak to all men, until the end of the time-cycle of the earth. That this may be, however, there must be added that which makes it possible for the message of Christ to be made known in each age to the ever advancing souls of men, in a way appropriate to them. So when we feel the full strength and power of the Whitsun impulse, we should feel that it is laid on us to listen to the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth's cycle of time!” And when you fill yourselves with the Christ Impulse you can hear continually through all the ages the Word, stirred into life at the founding of Christianity by the Founder Himself, the Word that Christ speaks in every age because He is with men in every age, the Word which all can hear who have the will to hear it.

Thus we understand the power of the Whitsun impulse as that which gives us the right to regard Christianity as something which is ever growing, always bestowing on us new and again ever new revelations. We know that in the Spiritual Science of to-day we are proclaiming the Christ-Word itself, ringing through to us from out of the heavenly choirs, and we say to those who would preserve Christianity only in its original form: “We are those who understand the Christ in truth, for we understand the real meaning of the Whitsun festival!”

Whenever we feel ourselves thus called to bring forth ever new wisdom-teaching out of Christianity, we must bring forth just that wisdom which is fitting for men's souls at that stage of their progressive development from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is endlessly full, endlessly rich; but this endless fullness and richness was not always available to man in the centuries in which Christianity had first to be proclaimed. What presumption it would be to say, even at the present time, that mankind is now mature enough to understand Christianity in its infinite fullness and its infinite greatness! That alone is true Christian humility which says: The scope of Christian wisdom is without end, but the receptivity of man for this wisdom was at first limited; it will become ever more and more complete.

Let us look at the first Christian centuries, right up to our own day. A great and mighty impulse, the greatest ever given in the earthly evolution of man, was given with the Christ Impulse. This is something of which everyone can become conscious who learns to understand the process of the evolution of the earth. But one thing must not be forgotten: only a small part of what the Christ Impulse contains has been understood up till now. For the past, close on two millennia of Christian development, what was given in esoteric Christianity could be a teaching only for those to whom Christianity was brought, and could not be embodied in outer, exoteric life.

For example, there could not be embodied what can be taught in our present epoch as a Christian truth, namely, the fact of the re-embodiment of mankind, or reincarnation. When we, in Anthroposophy, teach reincarnation to-day, we are fully conscious, in the light of the Whitsun festival, that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be made known exoterically to-day to a humanity which has become more mature, but which could not be made known to the immature souls of the first Christian centuries. Little is done by attempting to show, by citing single instances, that the thought of reincarnation is also to be found in Christianity. One can discover from those opponents of Spiritual Science who call themselves Christian, how little is known in exoteric Christianity of reincarnation. The only thing they know is that Spiritual Science teaches something or other about reincarnation, and that is enough for them to say it is Indian or Buddhistic. They little know that it is the living Christ, from out of the spiritual world, who is the living teacher of reincarnation to-day. People regard reincarnation, as also the doctrine of karma, as things which up till now have not been able to penetrate into exoteric Christianity. But it is little by little, in one age after another, that the fullness of truth which lies in Christianity has had to be given to mankind. With the Christ Impulse itself, which is not a teaching or a theory, but a real force that has to be experienced in the innermost depths of the soul, with this Impulse itself something is actually imparted to us. What is this? It is just when we bring the Christ Impulse into connection with the teaching of reincarnation that we can understand what is given in it.

We know that a few centuries before Christianity began, another teaching, a formal teaching, was given, for the most part in Eastern lands, namely, the teaching of the Buddha. While the power and the impulse of Christianity were spreading from the Near East into the West, the Far East witnessed a widespread expansion of Buddhism. Of this teaching we know that it contained the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those who know the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final product of the teachings and revelations which had preceded it. Accordingly it contained in itself all the greatness of antiquity; it put forward something like a final conclusion of the primeval wisdom of mankind in which was contained the doctrine of reincarnation.

But how did Buddhism clothe this doctrine in its revelations? In such a way that man looks back at the incarnations which he has passed through, and forward to the incarnations which he has still to experience. That man passes through many incarnations is an entirely exoteric teaching in Buddhism. It is quite wrong to speak of an abstract similarity between all religions. In actual truth, mighty and far-reaching differences exist between them, as, for example, between Christianity, which for centuries harboured no thoughts of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in such thoughts. In this connection it is entirely useless to put together mere abstractions; rather must one recognise the world of reality. It is an utter certainty for Buddhism that man always returns to the earth; the Buddhist, however, looks on this in the following way. He says: “Combat the urge to descend into these incarnations, for thy real task is, as quickly as possible, to free thyself from the thirst to go through them, so as to live in freedom from all earthly incarnation in a spiritual realm!” It is thus that the Buddhist regards the sequence of human incarnations, striving to acquire all the forces he can in order to withdraw from these incarnations as soon as possible. One thing Buddhism has not got—and this is plain in its exoteric teaching. It does not contain anything that can be called an impulse strong enough to grow ever more towards human perfection. That would enable the Buddhist to say: “By all means, let the incarnations come! Through the Christ Impulse we can so shape ourselves that we can extract ever more and more from them. Through the Christ Impulse we possess a force which can give these incarnations an ever loftier content. Permeate Buddhism—or what is found in it of the true doctrine of reincarnation—with the Christ Impulse, and you have a new element which gives the earth a new meaning in the evolution of mankind!”

On the other hand, Christianity has the Christ Impulse, and that as something exoteric. But how has it regarded this Impulse in earlier centuries? Undoubtedly the exoteric Christian sees in it something infinitely perfect, that should live in himself as the great ideal which he himself approaches ever more and more. But how presumptuous it would be for the Christian to think that in a single earthly life he could have enough power to bring to fulfilment the seed which can be kindled into life through the Christ Impulse! How presumptuous it would be for the exoteric Christian to believe that in one life he would be in the position to achieve anything adequate for the unfolding of the Christ Impulse. Accordingly the exoteric Christian says: “We go through the gates of death. Then in the spiritual world we shall have the opportunity to develop further and to unfold the Christ Impulse further in that world.”—And so the exoteric Christian conceives of a spiritual life after death from which there is no return to the earth.

Does, however, an exoteric Christian who believes that an existence in a spiritual world is thus added to the life on earth, understand the Christ Impulse? He does not understand it in the least. For if he did, he would never believe that what the Christ Impulse has to give him can be achieved in a spiritual life beyond death, without any return to the earth. In order that the Deed on Golgotha could take place, in order that this victory over death could be achieved, the Christ Himself had to descend into this life on earth; and this indeed He had to do in order to accomplish something which can be experienced and lived through only on our earth. The Christ came down to earth because the power of the Deed of Golgotha had to work upon men in the physical body.¹ Hence also the Christ-power can work at first only on men in the physical body. What man has received of the power of the Mystery of Golgotha in the physical body, this can then work further, when he goes through the gate of death. But only as much of the Christ Impulse as man has taken into himself in the life between birth and death works on. Man must strive on to the further completion of that which he has already received, when he comes again to the earth, and only in his successive earthly lives to come can he learn to understand all that lives in the Christ Impulse. Never could man understand the Christ Impulse, if he lived only once on the earth. This Impulse, therefore, must lead us through repeated earth-lives, because the earth is the place for the discovery of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so Christianity is only complete when one replaces the assumption that one could live out the Christ Impulse in one incarnation, by the other thought, that only through repeated earthly lives can man so perfect himself that he may live out in himself the Christ Ideal. What he has experienced on earth in connection with it he can then bring up into the spiritual world. But he can only bring as much as he has grasped on the earth of that Impulse, which itself had to be fulfilled on the earth, as the most important event of all earthly happenings. Thus we see that the thought which must next be added to Christianity out of spiritual revelation is the thought of reincarnation, born from out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall see what it signifies for us to-day, in the sphere of Spiritual Science, to be conscious that we fashion ourselves out of the Whitsun revelation. It signifies for us that we are right in listening to the revelation, in seeing a renewal of the revelation of that power which was in the “fiery tongues,” which descended upon those who first understood the Christ.

In this way, a great deal of what has been said recently in our Movement can come before us to-day with new meaning. We see the fusion of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism; we see them flow together in the spiritual. And through the right understanding of the Christian Whitsun thought we can justify the flowing together of these two greatest religions of the earth to-day. But it is not through merely external impulses that we can unite these two revelations; that would be to stop at mere theorising. Anyone trying to take what Christianity and Buddhism have provided up till now and to weld them together into a new religion would not create a new spiritual content for mankind, but only an abstract theory, incapable of warming a single human soul. If this is to happen, new revelations are necessary. And that, for us, is what resounds to-day as the proclamation of spirit-knowledge—audible, it is true, only to such as have matured themselves in spiritual-scientific schooling: “Let the Christ, who is always with us, speak in us.”

We know that we live in an important time of human evolution: that already before the close of this century new forces will develop in the human soul which will lead man to the unfolding of a kind of etheric clairvoyance, whereby, as if through a natural development, there will be renewed for certain human beings the event which Paul experienced at Damascus; and that in this way, for the heightened spiritual powers of man, Christ will return in an etheric garb. Ever more and more souls will share in what Paul experienced at Damascus. Then it will be seen in the world that Spiritual Science is the revelation, heralding a renewed and transformed truth of the Christ Impulse. Only those will understand the new revelation who believe that the fresh stream of the spiritual life into which Christ poured Himself will remain living for all ages to come. Whoever will not believe that, may preach a Christianity which has grown old. But whoever believes in the Whitsun event and understands it, will also bring to mind that what began with the Christian evangel will develop ever farther and farther and will speak to men in ever new tones; that there will always be present the individualised soul-worlds of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongues, and that in ever-renewed fire and impulse the human soul will be able to live with and live out of the Christ Impulse.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when in very truth we understand the Whitsun thought. And then there comes before us the mighty picture, with a force that works like a force present in the soul itself. Then do we feel the future, as the first understanders felt it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, if only we are willing to make alive in our souls that which knows nothing of the boundaries separating the different parts of humanity and speaks a language which all souls, all the world over, can understand. We feel the thought of peace, of love, of harmony, which lies in the Whitsun thought. And we feel this Whitsun thought enlivening our Whitsun festival. We feel it to be a surety for our hope of freedom and eternity. Because we feel the individualised spirit awakening in our souls, there awakens in us the most significant element of the spirit: the endlessness of the spiritual. Through sharing in the spiritual, man can become conscious of his immortality and his eternity. And in the Whitsun thought we truly realise the power of those primal words which Initiate after Initiate continued to implant, and which reveal to us the meaning of wisdom and eternity: we feel them as a Whitsun thought, handed on from epoch to epoch, in the words which to-day for the first time sound forth exoterically:

Being is ranged by Being in the widths of Space,
Being follows on Being in the courses of Time,
Remain'st thou in widths of Space, in courses of Time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the passing world alone.
But above them with power thy soul itself upraises
When, divining or knowing, it beholds what passes not;
Beyond the widths of Space, beyond the courses of Time!

Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenläufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, 0 Mensch, allein in Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!

• 1. i.e. in and through physical consciousness.

To turn our minds to thoughts connected with the Whitsun festival seems to me less appropriate during these grave days¹ than would have been the case in earlier years. For mankind is passing through fateful ordeals and at such times it is not really fitting to call up feelings of inner warmth and exhilaration. If our feelings are right and true we can never for a single moment forget the suffering that is now so universal, and in a certain sense it is actually selfish to wish to forget it in order to give ourselves up to thoughts that warm and uplift the soul. It will therefore be more fitting to-day to speak of certain matters bearing on the needs of the age, for our recent studies have shown very clearly that many of the reasons for the sufferings of the present time lie in the prevailing attitude to the spiritual, and that it is vitally urgent to work for the development of the human soul in order that mankind may go forward to better days. Nevertheless I want at least to start with thoughts which will bring home to us the meaning of a festival such as Whitsun.

There are three festivals of main importance in the course of the year: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun. Everyone who has not become indifferent, as is the case with the majority of our contemporaries, to the significance of such festivals in the evolution of the world and of humanity will at once perceive the contrasts between these three festivals, for the difference in the kind of experiences associated with each is expressed in their outer symbolism. Christmas is a festival connected above all with the joys of childhood, a festival in which a part is usually, if not always, played by the Christmas Tree brought into the house from snow-clad nature outside. Our thought also turns to the Christmas Plays so often performed among us and which for centuries have brought uplift to the simplest human hearts at this season by reminding them of the great and unique event in earth-evolution when Jesus of Nazareth, or, to be quite exact, Jesus who came from Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. The festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a festival connected with a world of feeling engendered by the Gospel of St. Luke, by those parts of the Gospel which make the most general appeal to simple hearts and are the easiest to understand. It is therefore a festival of universal humanity, intelligible, to a certain extent at least, even to the child and to men who have preserved a childlike quality of heart and mind. Yet it brings to such childlike hearts something great and mighty which then becomes part of their consciousness.

The Easter festival, although it is celebrated during the season when nature is waking to life, leads our minds to the portal of death. By contrast with the tenderness and universal appeal of the Christmas festival, the festival of Easter contains something infinitely sublime. If human souls are able to celebrate the Easter festival truly, they cannot fail to be aware of its transcendent majesty. It brings the sublime conception of the Divine Being who descended into a human body and passed through death. The whole riddle of death and the preservation in death itself of the eternal life of the soul—this is the great vista presented by the Easter festival.

These times of festival can be experienced in their depths only when we recall many things made real to us by Spiritual Science. Think only of how closely connected with all the festivals celebrated in the world in commemoration of the births of saviours are the thoughts arising from the Christmas festival. We are reminded, for example, of the Mithras festival celebrating the birth of Mithras in a cave. All these things are evidence of an intimate connection with nature. That Christmas is a festival linked with nature is symbolised in the Christmas Tree, and the birth, too, leads our minds to the workings and powers of nature. But because the birth of which Spiritual Science has so many things to say is that of Jesus of Nazareth, it is a birth fraught with infinite significance. And remembering that the Spirit of the earth wakens in winter, is most active during the season when outer nature appears to lie sleeping in a mantle of ice and snow, we can feel that the Christmas festival leads us into elemental nature herself, and that the lighting of the Christmas candles is a symbol of how the Spirit is awakening in the wintry darkness of nature.

If we would relate the Christmas festival to the life and being of man, we can do so by remembering that man is also connected with nature when he has separated from her spiritually, as he does in sleep, when in his ego and astral body he has gone into the spiritual world. His etheric body remains bound, supersensibly, to the physical body, and represents the part of man's being which belongs to elemental nature, to that elemental nature which wakens to life within the earth when the earth is shrouded in the ice of winter. It is far more than an analogy, indeed it is a profound truth to say that in addition to everything else, the Christmas festival is a token that man has in his being an etheric, elemental principle, an etheric body through which he is linked with elemental nature.

If you think, now, of all that has been said in the course of many years about the gradual darkening and decline of man's forces, you will realise how closely all the forces in the human astral body are connected with the death-bringing processes. The fact that we have to develop the astral body during our life, and that in the astral body we have to receive the spiritual, means that, in doing so, we bring the seeds of death into our being. It is quite incorrect to believe that death is connected with life in an external sense only, for the connection is most inward and fundamental. Our life is as it is only because we are able to die in the way we do. But this is bound up with the whole development of man's astral body. Again it is more than an analogy when we say: The Easter festival is a symbol for everything that has to do with the astral nature of man, with that principle of his being which, whenever he sleeps, leaves the physical body together with him and enters the spiritual world whence descended that Divine-Spiritual Being Who in Jesus of Nazareth actually passed through death. If one were speaking in an age more alive to the spiritual than is our own, what I have just said would be recognised as reality, whereas in our days it is taken merely as symbolism. It would then be realised that the purpose of instituting the Christmas and Easter festivals was to provide man with tokens of remembrance that he is connected with spiritual nature, with that nature that brings death to the physical, and to provide him with tokens reminding him that in his etheric body and astral body he is himself a bearer of the spiritual.—In our days these things have been forgotten. They will come to light again when humanity has the will to acquire understanding of spiritual truths such as these.

But now, besides the etheric body and the astral body, we bear within us as that which is supremely spiritual, our Ego. We know something of the complex nature of the Ego. We know especially that it is the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation, that the inner forces of the Ego build themselves up and shape themselves to that form which we carry forward into our being in each new incarnation. In the Ego we rise again from death to prepare for a new incarnation. It is by virtue of the Ego that we are individuals. If we can say that the etheric body represents in a certain sense that which is akin to birth and is connected with the elemental forces of nature, that the astral body symbolises the death-bringing principle that is connected with the higher spirituality, so we can say that the Ego represents our continual rising again in the spirit, our resurrection into the spiritual realm which is neither nature nor the world of stars, but pervades them all. And just as the Christmas festival can be connected with the etheric body and the Easter festival with the astral body, so the Whitsun festival can be connected with the Ego. This is the festival which, representing the immortality of the Ego, is a token of the fact that we, as men, do not share only in the universal life of nature, do not merely undergo death, but that we are individual immortal beings, rising ever and again from death.

And how beautifully this comes to expression when the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought are carried further! The Christmas festival is directly connected with earthly happenings, with the winter solstice, the time when the earth is shrouded in deepest darkness. In celebrating the Christmas festival we follow as it were the law by which earth-existence itself is governed; when the nights are longest and the days shortest, when the earth is frost-bound, we withdraw into ourselves and seek for the spiritual that is now alive within the earth. The Christmas festival is linked with the Spirit of the earth; it reminds us ever and again that we belong to the earth, that the Spirit had perforce to come down from cosmic heights and take earthly form in order to be a child of earth among the children of earth.

The Easter festival has a different setting. You know well that Easter is determined by the relation of the sun to the moon on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the first full moon after the 21st March. The Easter festival, therefore, is fixed according to the relative position of the sun to the moon. In a wonderful way, then, the Christmas festival is linked with the earth, and the Easter festival with the cosmos. At Christmas we are reminded of what is most holy in the earth, at Easter of what is most holy in the heavens. But the thought underlying the Christian festival of Whitsun is associated in a most beautiful way with what is even above the stars—the universal, spiritual, cosmic fire which individualises and in the fiery tongues descends upon the Apostles. It is the fire that is neither heavenly alone nor earthly alone; it is the all-pervading fire which individualises and passes into each single human being. In very truth the Whitsun festival is linked with the whole universe. Just as the Christmas festival is connected with the earth and the Easter festival with the stars, so is the Whitsun festival directly connected with man, with individual man, inasmuch as he receives the spark of spiritual life out of the whole universe. What is bestowed upon mankind in general through the descent to the earth of the Being who was both God and Man, is made ready for every individual human being in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. These fiery tongues represent what lives alike in man, in the stars, in the world.

And so for those who are seeking for the spiritual, this festival of Whitsun has a meaning and content of special profundity, calling ever and again for perpetual renewal of the spiritual quest.

In our days it is necessary that these thoughts of the festival should be taken in a deeper sense than at other times. For how we shall emerge from the grievous events of this age will depend very largely upon how deeply men are able to experience these thoughts. That souls will have themselves to work their way out of the present catastrophic conditions is already beginning to be realised here and there. And those who have come to Spiritual Science should feel with even greater intensity the need of the age for new strength to be infused into the spiritual life, the need to surmount materialism. This victory over materialism will only be possible if men have the will to kindle the spiritual world into living activity within them, to celebrate the Whitsun festival inwardly and with true earnestness.

• 1. Berlin, 1916.

In the course of the evolution of mankind, the different world-religions have placed mighty pictures before humanity. If these pictures are to be fully understood a certain esoteric knowledge is required. In the course of years, such a knowledge, based on Anthroposophy, has been applied to the interpretation of all the four Gospels, in order that their deeper content and meaning may be brought to light.* This content is for the most part in the form of pictures, because pictures refuse to communicate themselves in the narrow, rationalistic way that is possible with concepts and ideas. People think that once a concept has been grasped they have got to the root of everything to which it is relevant. No such opinion is possible in the case of a picture, an imagination. A picture or an imagination works in a living way, like a living being itself. We may have come to know one aspect or another of a living person, but ever and again he will present new aspects to us. We shall not be satisfied, therefore, with definitions purporting to be comprehensive, but we shall endeavour to look for characteristics which contribute to the picture from different angles, giving us increasing knowledge of the person in question.¹

To-day I want to bring two familiar pictures before you, and to describe certain aspects of them.

The first picture is that of the disciples of Christ Jesus on the day of the Ascension. Gazing upwards, they see Christ vanishing in the clouds. The usual conception of this scene is that Christ went up into heaven and so departed from the earth, and that the disciples were then left, as it were, to their own resources. Likewise all earthly humanity, for whose sake Christ fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, was by the Ascension left to its own resources.

The thought may occur to you that in a certain respect this belies the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ourselves know that through His deed on Golgotha Christ resolved to unite His own Being with the earth, that is to say, from the Mystery of Golgotha onwards to remain forever connected with earth-evolution. The mighty picture of the Ascension might thus seem to be at variance with what esoteric vision of the Mystery of Golgotha reveals concerning Christ's union with the earth and with mankind.

We will try to-day to overcome this seeming contradiction in the light of actual spiritual facts.

The second picture is that of the scene ten days after the Ascension, when tongues of fire descend upon the heads of the assembled disciples and they are moved “to speak with other tongues.” What this actually means is that henceforward the disciples were able to impart the secrets of the Deed on Golgotha to the heart of every human being, irrespective of religion or creed.

Keeping these two pictures before our minds, we shall try to give some indication of their meaning. Anything more than this is not possible.

We know from our study of Anthroposophy, that the evolution of mankind did not begin on the Earth, but that Earth-evolution proper was preceded by a “Moon” evolution, this by a “Sun” evolution, and this again by a “Saturn” evolution, as described in my book An Outline of Occult Science. During the period of the “Saturn” evolution, man developed in his descent from the Spiritual as far as the rudimentary basis of the physical body. In that epoch, however, the physical body was a body of warmth only; that is to say, warmth of varying degrees, forces of warmth, gathered together around the being of soul-and-spirit.

During the “Sun” evolution man acquired an aeriform body, during the “Moon” evolution a kind of fluid, watery body, and a solid, earthy body, in the real sense, only during “Earth” evolution proper.

Let us think, now, particularly of the Earth-evolution. It fulfils its course in seven successive epochs, of which the first three are recapitulations: the first, a recapitulation of the “Saturn” period, the second of the “Sun” period, the third (the Lemurian epoch) of the “Moon” period. Earth-evolution proper really begins with the fourth epoch, that of Atlantis. We are living now in the fifth epoch, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh.

The mid-point of Earth-evolution falls in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and so in our present age the Earth has already passed the mid-point of its development. From this you will realise that the Earth is already involved in a declining phase of evolution, and in our time this must always be taken into account. As I have often said, it conforms entirely with the findings even of modern materialistic geology.

In his book The Face of the Earth, Eduard Suess has stated that the soil beneath our feet to-day belongs to an earth that is already dying. During the Atlantean epoch the earth was, so to say, in the middle period of life; it teemed with inner life; it had upon it no such formations as the rocks and stones, which are gradually crumbling away. The mineral element was active in the earthly realm in the way in which it is active to-day in an animal organism, in a state of solution out of which deposits will not form unless the organism is diseased. If the animal organism is healthy it is only the bones that can be said to take their form as deposits. In the bones, however, there is still inner life. The bones are not in the condition of death, they are not, like our mountains and rocks, in process of crumbling into dust. The crumbling of the rocks is evidence that the earth is already involved in a death-process.

As already said, this is now known even to ordinary materialistic geology. Anthroposophy must add to this knowledge the fact that the earth has been involved in this process of decline ever since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Moreover, in the earth must be included everything that belongs to it: the plants, the animals, and, above all, physical man. Physical man is part and parcel of the earth. In that the earth is involved in a process of decline, so too is the human physical body. Expressed differently, in more esoteric terms, this signifies that by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, everything that was first laid down in a germinal condition in the warmth-body of the “Saturn” evolution had reached completion. The human physical body actually reached completion by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and since then the path of its evolution has been one of decline.

Evolution does not, of course, proceed with complete uniformity. One race or people enters a phase of evolution earlier or later than another, but, speaking generally, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was at hand, the evolution of the physical constitution of man had reached a stage when humanity all over the globe was facing the prospect of finding further incarnation impossible on the earth; in other words, of being unable henceforward to accompany the earth in its declining evolution.

In the Schools of Initiation it was known, and can of course also be known to-day, that at about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the human physical body had reached a degree of decline where the men who were then in incarnation or who were to be incarnated in the near future, that is, up to about the fourth century A.D., were faced with the danger of leaving an earth that was growing more and more desolate and barren, and of finding no possibility in the future of descending from the world of spirit-and-soul and building a physical body out of materials provided by the physical earth. This danger existed, and the inevitable consequence would have been the failure of man to fulfil his allotted earthly mission. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers working in combination had succeeded to the extent that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, earthly mankind was face to face with the possibility of dying out.

Mankind was rescued from this fate through that which was achieved by the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby the human physical body itself was imbued again with the necessary forces of life and freshness. Men were thereby enabled to continue their further evolution on earth, inasmuch as they could now come down from worlds of spirit-and-soul and find it possible to live in physical bodies. Such was the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I have often spoken of this, as for example in the lecture-course given in Carlsruhe under the title From Jesus to Christ.² The greatest hostility was aroused by these lectures because, out of a sense of esoteric duty, certain truths were presented which many people wish to keep concealed. Indeed it can be said that from a certain quarter the hostility to Anthroposophy started from these very lectures.

What I have described, however, is one aspect of the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha. This same fact can, of course, be expressed in many different ways. It was expressed differently in that lecture-course, but what I am now describing is the same fact, merely seen from another side. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the forces promoting the growth and thriving of man's physical body were quickened anew, with the following result.—It was now made possible for man to receive, during his life of sleep, an impulse he would not otherwise have received. The whole evolution of man on earth takes its course, as we know, in the alternation of waking life and sleep-life. In sleep, the physical body and ether-body remain behind; from the time of falling asleep until that of waking, the ego and the astral body make themselves independent of them. During this state of independence in sleep the influence of the Christ-Force takes effect in the ego and the astral body in those men who through the requisite mood and content of their soul-life have made fitting preparation for this condition of sleep. Penetration of these higher bodies by the Christ-Force, therefore, takes place mainly during the state of sleep.

To turn now to the biblical event of the Ascension, we must realise that at that time the disciples had become clairvoyant to a degree at which they were able to behold what is, in truth, a deep secret of earthly evolution. These secrets remain unnoticed by man's everyday consciousness, which is incapable of knowing whether at one point or another in the evolution of humanity something of supreme importance is taking place. There are many such happenings, but the everyday consciousness is unaware of them. The picture of the Ascension actually signifies that at this moment Christ's disciples were able to witness spiritually an event of untold significance, enacted “behind the scenes” as it were of earthly evolution.

What they witnessed revealed to them, as in a picture, the prospect of what would have come about for men had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place. They beheld as a concrete spiritual happening what would have then befallen, namely, that the physical bodies of men would have so deteriorated that the whole future of humanity would have been endangered. For the consequence of this physical deterioration would have been that the human etheric body would have obeyed the forces of attraction which properly belong to it. The etheric body is being drawn all the time towards the sun, not towards the earth. Our constitution as human beings is such that our physical body has earthly heaviness, gravity, but our etheric body, sun-levity. Had the human physical body become what it must have become if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the etheric bodies of men would have followed their own urge towards the sun and have left the physical body. The existence of mankind on earth would inevitably have come to an end.

Until the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ's dwelling-place was the sun. Therefore in that the etheric body of man strives towards the sun, it is striving towards the Christ. Now picture to yourselves the scene on the day of the Ascension. In spiritual vision the disciples see Christ Himself rising heavenwards. A vision is conjured before them of how the power, the impulse of Christ unites itself with the etheric nature of man, in its upward striving; of how at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha man was facing the danger of his etheric body being drawn out into the sun like a cloud, but how, in its sunward streaming, it was held together by Christ. This picture must be understood, for in truth it is a warning. Christ is akin to those forces in man which naturally strive towards the sun and away from the earth, and will always do so. But Christ remains in union with the earth. Thus the Christ Impulse holds man securely on the earth.

In this picture of the Ascension, something more is manifest to the disciples. Suppose that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place and that numbers of men had become clairvoyant to the degree to which the disciples became clairvoyant at this moment. These men would have seen the etheric bodies of certain human beings departing from the earth in the direction of the sun, and they would have come to this conclusion: ‘This is the path man's etheric body is taking. The etheric-earthly element in man is being drawn away into the sun.’ But now, by carrying to its fulfilment the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has rescued for the earth this sunward-striving etheric body. And thereby is manifest the fact that Christ remains united with mankind on the earth. Thus something else became apparent here, namely that through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ brought to pass within earth-evolution a cosmic event. Christ came down from the heights of spirit, linked Himself with humanity in the man Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, united His evolution with that of the earth. It was a cosmic Deed accomplished for the whole of humanity.

Mark these words: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for all mankind. The eye of clairvoyance can never fail to perceive how, since that Deed, the etheric forces in man, with their urge to escape from the earth, are united with Christ in order that He may keep them in the earth-evolution. This applies to the whole of mankind.

This leads us to another consideration. Suppose that only a handful of human beings had been able to acquire knowledge of these facts that relate to the Mystery of Golgotha, and that a large section of mankind—as is actually the case—had not recognised its significance. If this had come about, the earth would be peopled by a few true believers in Christ and by a large number who do not acknowledge the essential content and meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. What, then, is to be said of the latter? How are these human beings who do not acknowledge the Mystery of Golgotha related to it?—or, better put, how is the Deed of Christ on Golgotha related to these human beings?

The Deed of Christ on Golgotha is an objective fact; its cosmic significance does not depend upon what men believe about it. An objective fact has, in itself, reality of being. If an oven is hot, it does not become cold because a number of people believe that it is cold.—The Mystery of Golgotha rescues mankind from the decay of the physical body, no matter what men believe or do not believe about it. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted for the sake of all men, including those who do not believe in it.—That is the cardinal fact to be remembered.

We realise, then, that the Deed on Golgotha was enacted in order that by this means mankind on earth might be quickened to the degree necessary for its rejuvenation. That has come to pass. It has been made possible for men to find on the earth bodies in which they can and will for long ages of future time—be able to incarnate. It is, however, fundamentally as beings of spirit-and-soul that men will pass through existence in these now rejuvenated earthly bodies, and it is as beings of spirit-and-soul that they will be able to appear on the earth again and again.

Now the Christ Impulse, which must have significance for the spiritual nature of man as well as for his bodily nature, can impress itself upon a man's waking state, but it can make no impression on his sleeping state unless this Impulse has been received into his soul. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, would have produced its effect in the waking life of men who had no knowledge of it; but it would not, in such circumstances, have affected them in their life of sleep. The inevitable result would have been that while men would have gained the possibility of incarnating time and again on the earth, nevertheless, if they had acquired no knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the condition of their sleep would have been such that the connection of their spirit-and-soul nature with Christ must have been lost.

Here you see the difference in the relation to the Mystery of Golgotha of those men who have, so to speak, no desire to know anything about it. Christ performed His Deed for their bodies, in order that earthly life should be made possible for them, just as He performed it for utterly unbelieving non-Christian peoples. But to take effect in man's spirit-and-soul nature, the Christ Impulse must also be able to penetrate into the human soul during the state of sleep. And this is only possible if a man consciously acknowledges the import of the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, can proceed only from a true recognition of its content.

Thus there are two things that mankind must realise: on the one hand that Christ holds back the ether-body in its perpetual urge towards the sun; and on the other, that man's spirit-and-soul nature, his ego and astral body, can receive the Christ Impulse only in the time between falling asleep and waking—and this is only possible when knowledge of this Impulse has been acquired in waking life.

To sum up: the urge of the etheric bodies of men to draw towards the sun is perceived by the disciples in clairvoyant vision. But they also perceive how Christ unites Himself with this urge, restrains it, holds it fast. The mighty scene of the Ascension is that of the rescue of the physical-etheric nature of man by Christ.

The disciples withdraw in deep contemplation. For in their awakened souls is the knowledge that through the Mystery of Golgotha complete provision was made for the physical-etheric nature of mankind as a whole. But what happens, they wonder, to the being of spirit-and-soul? Whence does man acquire the power to receive the Christ Impulse into his nature of spirit-and-soul, into his ego and astral body? The answer is found in the Whitsun festival.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Impulse has taken effect on the earth as a reality which is within the comprehension of spiritual cognition alone. No materialistic knowledge, no materialistic science can understand the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the soul must acquire the power of spiritual cognition, of spiritual perception, of spiritual feeling, in order to be able to understand how, on Golgotha, the Christ Impulse was united with the impulses of the earth.

Christ Jesus fulfilled His Deed on Golgotha to the end that this union might take effect, fulfilled it in such a way that ten days after the event of the Ascension He sent man the possibility of imbuing also his inner nature of spirit-and-soul, his ego and astral body, with the Christ Impulse. The permeation of the human spirit-and-soul with the power to understand the Mystery of Golgotha is the sending of the Holy Spirit. This is the picture of the Whitsun festival, the festival of Pentecost. Christ fulfilled His Deed for all mankind. But to each human individual, in order that he may be able to understand this Deed, Christ sent the Spirit, in order that the individual being of spirit-and-soul may have access to the effects of the Deed that was accomplished for all men in common. Through the Spirit man must learn to experience the Christ Mystery inwardly, in spirit and in soul.

Thus these two pictures stand side by side in the history of the evolution of humanity. That of the Ascension tells us: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical body and the etheric body in the universal human sense. That of Whitsun tells us: The single human being must make this Deed bear fruit in himself by receiving the Holy Spirit. Thereby the Christ Impulse becomes individual in each human being.

And now something else can be added to the picture of the Ascension. Spiritual visions such as came to the disciples on the day of the Ascension always have a bearing upon what man actually experiences in one or another state of consciousness. After death, as you know, the etheric body leaves the human being. He lays aside the physical body at death, retains the etheric body for a few days, and then the etheric body dissolves, is actually united with the sun. This dissolution after death betokens union with the sun-nature streaming through the space in which the earth, too is included. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man beholds, together with this departing etheric body, the Christ Who has rescued it for earthly existence through the ages of time to come. So that since the Mystery of Golgotha there stands before the soul of every human being who passes through death the Ascension picture which the disciples were able to behold that day in a particular condition of their soul-life.

But for one who makes the Whitsun Mystery, too, part of his being, who allows the Holy Spirit to draw near to him—for such a one this picture after death becomes the source of the greatest consolation he can possibly experience: for now he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha in all its truth and reality. This picture of the Ascension tells him: You can with confidence entrust all your following incarnations to earth-evolution, for through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has become the Saviour of earth-evolution.—For one who does not penetrate with his ego and astral body—that is to say, does not penetrate with knowledge and with feeling—to the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, for him this picture is a reproach until such time as he too learns to understand it. After death, the picture is as it were an admonition: Endeavour to acquire for the next earthly life such forces as will enable you to understand the Mystery of Golgotha!—That this picture of the Ascension should, to begin with, be an admonition, is only natural; for in subsequent earthly lives men can endeavour to apply the forces they have been admonished to acquire, and gain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You can now perceive the difference between those who with their inmost forces of faith, knowledge and feeling put their trust in the Mystery of Golgotha, and those who do not. The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled for mankind as a whole, in respect of the physical body and etheric body only. The sending of the Holy Spirit, the Whitsun mystery, signifies that the soul and spirit of man can partake of the fruits of the Deed on Golgotha only if he finds wings to bear him to actual understanding of the essence and meaning of that Deed.

But because this essence and meaning can be fully grasped by spiritual knowledge alone, not by material knowledge, it follows that the truth of the Whitsun festival can be grasped only when men realise that the sending of the Holy Spirit is the challenge to humanity more and more to achieve Spirit-knowledge, through which alone the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood.

That it must be understood—this is the challenge of the Whitsun Mystery. That it came to pass for all mankind—this is the revelation given in the Ascension.

And so it can truly be said that Anthroposophy enables us to understand the relation of the Whitsun Mystery to the Ascension revelation. We can feel Anthroposophy to be like a herald bringing illumination to these festivals of Spring, and to its many facets we have added yet another, essentially belonging to it.

This should convey to you the mood-of-soul in which the true feeling for the festivals of the Ascension and of Whitsun can arise. The pictures which such festivals bring before the soul are like living beings: we can approach nearer and nearer to their reality, learn to know them more and more intimately. When once again the year is filled with spiritual understanding of the festival seasons, it will be imbued with cosmic reality, and within earthly existence men will experience cosmic existence.

Whitsun is pre-eminently a festival of flowers. If a man has a true feeling for this Festival he will go out among the buds and blossoms opening under the influence of the sun, under the etheric and astral influences—and he will perceive in the flower-decked earth the earthly image of what flows together in the picture of Christ's Ascension, and the descent of the tongues of fire upon the heads of the disciples which followed later. The heart of man as it opens may be symbolised by the flower opening itself to the sun; and what pours down from the sun, giving the flower the fertilising power it needs, may be symbolised by the tongues of fire descending: upon the heads of the disciples. Anthroposophy can work upon human hearts with the power that streams from an understanding of the festival times and from true contemplation of each festival season; it can help to evoke the mood-of-soul that conforms truly with these days of the Spring festivals.

• 1. See lecture-courses by Rudolf Steiner on each of the four Gospels; also numbers of other published lectures.
• 2. Ten lectures, Oct. 5th—14th, 1911. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.

When we look back over the history of human evolution, events of major or minor importance which have influenced the life of the whole of mankind stand out in strong relief. The greatest of all these events is that known as the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby Christianity became an integral part of the evolution of humanity. In the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, man's conception of it was quite different from that of later times. In our present age a new understanding, a new conception, must arise. It is the task of Anthroposophy to promote an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that is in keeping with the spirit of our epoch.

We must cast our minds back to earlier ages when human consciousness was altogether different from that of to-day. Three or four thousand years ago, men were instinctively conscious that before coming down into a physical body on the earth they had lived in the spiritual world. Every individual in those times knew that within him was a being of soul-and-spirit, sent down by the Divine Powers into earth-existence. Men's consciousness of death, too, was different, for, in that they were able to look back in remembrance to their pre-earthly existence as beings of soul-and-spirit, they knew that the part of them that had lived before this earthly life would also live on beyond death.

In those days there were schools of learning which were at the same time religious institutions—the Mysteries, as they are called—where men received instruction on what it was within their power to know concerning their pre-earthly life. Thereby they came to realise that before their earthly existence they had lived among stars and among spiritual Beings, just as on earth they were living among plants and animals, mountains and rivers. Man said to himself: “Out of the world of the stars I have descended to existence on earth.” He knew, too, that the stars are not merely physical, that every star is peopled by spiritual Beings with whom he had been connected before descending to the earth. He knew also that on laying aside his physical body at death he would return to the world of the stars, that is to say, to the spiritual world. He regarded the sun as the star of supreme importance—the sun with its Beings, of whom the most exalted was the One known as the sublime Sun-Spirit.

From the Mysteries the teaching came to men that before they descend to the earth the sublime Sun-Being gives them the power whereby they are able to return in the right way after death into the spiritual worlds of the stars. The teachers in the Mysteries said to their pupils and these pupils in turn to other men: “It is the spiritual power of the sun, the spiritual light, which bears you on beyond death and which accompanied you when you descended, through birth, into earthly existence.” [Cp. John I, 9.]

Many were the prayers, many were the lofty teachings given by the teachers in the Mysteries in order to glorify and describe the sublime Sun-Spirit. These teachers in the Mysteries said to their pupils and they in turn to all humanity, that when man has passed through the gate of death he must enter, first, into the sphere of the lesser stars and their beings, and then rise above the sun. This he cannot do if the power of the Sun-Being is not bestowed upon him. Thus the hearts of men who understood this were aglow with ardour when they offered their prayers to the Spirit of the sun who gives them immortality. The hymns and devotional exercises dedicated to the sun had a particularly strong influence upon man's feeling and upon his whole life of soul. He felt himself united with the God of the universe when he participated in sun-worship.

Among the peoples where these customs prevailed, special rites and ceremonies were enacted in connection with this veneration of the sun. The ritual consisted, as a rule, in an image of the god being laid in the grave and after some days taken out again, as a sign and token that there is a god in the universe—the Sun-God—who ever and again awakens men to life when he succumbs to death.

In enacting this ritual, the officiating priest said to his pupils, and they then repeated it to others: “This is the sign and token that before you came down to the earth you were in a spirit-realm that is the abode of the Sun-God. Look up to the sun which radiates light! Whatever you see is only the outward revelation of the Sun-Being. Behind its radiance is the eternal Sun-God who ensures immortality for you.” Thus those who received this teaching knew that they had come down from spiritual worlds into the earthly world, but that they had forgotten the world where dwells the Sun-God. But the priest told them: “Through your birth you have departed from the realm of the Sun-God. When you pass through death you shall find that realm again through the power that he, the Sun-God, has laid in your hearts.”

It was known to the initiated priests of these Mysteries that the sublime Sun-Spirit of whom they spoke to the worshippers is the same Being as He who would later be called the Christ. But before the Mystery of Golgotha the priests could speak to this effect only: “If you desire to know something of the Christ, you will seek in vain on the earth; you must be lifted to the secrets of the sun. For only outside and beyond the earth will you find the mysteries pertaining to the Christ.”

Relatively speaking, it was not difficult for men at that time to accept such teaching because they had an instinctive remembrance of the realm of the Christ whence they had descended to the earth. But human nature is involved in a process of evolution and this instinctive remembrance of pre-earthly, spiritual life was gradually lost. Eight hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha there were only a very few in whom any instinctive remembrance of pre-earthly life still survived.

Let us picture for a moment the passing of a man through death.—He passes out into the starry universe, gradually reaching spheres from which he beholds the stars—and even the sun—from the other side. From the earth we see the sun in the way to which we are accustomed here. When, after death, we pass into the cosmic expanse and see the sun from the other side, we see it, not as a physical orb, but as a realm of spiritual Beings.

Long before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, men had been able to behold the Christ in the sun from the other side, both before their birth and after their death. The teachers in the Mysteries were able to recall this vision of the Christ to their pupils, and to awaken in them the realisation: “Before I came to the earth, I beheld the sun from the other side.”—This was so in times long preceding the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the age—beginning about eight hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha—when it was no longer possible to quicken in men the remembrance that before they came down to the earth they beheld the Christ from the other side of the sun. And now the teachers in the Mysteries could no longer say to men: “Look up to the sun and behold the revelation of Christ!”—for men would not have understood these words. It was as if men on the earth had been quite forsaken by the Christ-power, were no longer able to kindle to life within them any remembrance of the spiritual worlds.

Then, for the first time, there came upon men what may be called the fear of death. When in earlier times they saw the physical body die, they knew: As souls we are of the kingdom of Christ and do not die.—But now men were greatly troubled as to the destiny of the immortal, eternal being within them. It was as though the link between themselves and the Christ had been severed. This was because they were no longer able to look up into the spiritual worlds, and in the earthly realm the Christ was nowhere to be found.

Then, at the time when men could no longer find the Christ on yonder side of the sun in the super-earthly world, out of infinite grace, out of infinite mercy, Christ came down to the earth in order that men might find Him there. Something happened then in the evolution of worlds that has no parallel with anything within the range of human knowledge. For in the spiritual world, the Beings above man—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, up to the very highest Divine Beings—only pass through transformation, metamorphosis. They are not born, neither do they die. In the Mysteries of those times it was said: “Men alone know birth and death. The gods know metamorphosis only; they do not know birth and death.”

And so, since men could no longer reach Him, Christ came to them on earth. In order that this might be achieved, it was necessary that He, as a god, should undergo what no god had ever previously undergone, namely, birth and death. Christ became the soul of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, and passed through birth and death. That is to say: for the first time a god trod the path which leads through human death.

The essential truth of the Mystery of Golgotha is that it is not a mere human affair; it is a Divine affair. It was a resolve of the divine world that the sublime Sun-Being Himself should unite His destiny with mankind so completely as to pass through birth and death. Since then, men have been able to look to that which happened on Golgotha and so to find the Christ on the earth—to find Him who would otherwise have been lost to them because the heavens were no longer within reach of their consciousness.

In those who were the first to share in the secrets of Golgotha, the apostles and disciples of Christ, a last vestige remained of an instinctive consciousness of what had come to pass. These men knew: The Being who was formerly to be found only by those able to look up in spirit to the sun, can be found here and now if men rightly understand the birth, life and suffering of Christ Jesus. There were, then, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, a few who knew that He who, as the Christ, was in Jesus of Nazareth, is the sublime Sun-Being who has come down to the earth.

Until the fourth century after the Mystery of Golgotha there were always some who knew that Christ, the Sun-Being, and the Christ who had lived in Jesus of Nazareth were one and the same. It is deeply moving to learn from Spiritual Science of the fervent prayers of men in the early Christian centuries: “Thanks be to the Christ-Being from whom we should perforce have been separated, had He not come down from spiritual worlds to us here on earth!”

After the fourth century A.D. the human mind could no longer comprehend that the Christ, who ensures immortality for men, was the sublime, divine Sun-Being. From that time until our own day there have been only the external words of the Gospels, telling of the Mystery of Golgotha. Nevertheless, these words of the Gospels worked throughout the centuries with such power that they turned men's hearts to the Mystery of Golgotha.

To-day, however, we are on the threshold of an age when, having acquired great knowledge about the secrets of nature, men would be wholly estranged from the Gospel tidings if a new path to Christ were not opened. Anthroposophy would fain open this path by leading men again to knowledge of the spiritual world. For the Christ Event can only be understood as a spiritual Fact. Those who are incapable of this do not understand the Christ Event at all.

With the help of anthroposophical knowledge we can carry ourselves back in imagination to the time when Christ Jesus walked in Palestine and lived through His earthly destiny. We can look into the hearts of the disciples and apostles who realised with their intuitive knowledge: “The Being whose abode in former time was the sun, has come down to the earth, has dwelt among us. He who has dwelt among us as Christ Jesus, He who has walked the earth, was once to be found only in the realm of the sun.”—Therefore these disciples said to themselves: “Out of the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth the light of the sun rays forth to us. Out of the words of Jesus of Nazareth streams the power of the warmth-giving sun. When Jesus of Nazareth moves among us it is as though the sun itself is sending its light and power into the world.”

Those who understood this, said: “Moving among us in the form of a man is the Sun-Being, who in earlier times could be reached only when man's gaze was directed upwards from the earth to the spiritual world.” And because the disciples and apostles knew this, their attitude to Christ's death was also true and right, and they could remain disciples of Christ Jesus even after He had passed through death on the earth.

Through Spiritual Science we know that when the Christ had departed from the body of Jesus of Nazareth, He moved in a spirit-body among His disciples and gave them further teaching. A power had been given to the apostles and disciples which enabled them still to receive the teaching of Christ when He appeared to them in this spirit-body. This power however, departed from them after a certain time. There was a point in the lives of the disciples of Christ Jesus when they said among themselves: “We have seen Him but we see Him no longer. He came down from heaven to us on earth. Whither has He gone?”

The point of time when the disciples believed they had again lost the presence of Christ is commemorated in the Christian festival of the Ascension, which preserves in remembrance the disciples' conviction that the sublime Sun-Being who had walked the earth in the man Jesus of Nazareth had vanished from their sight. At this happening there fell upon the disciples a sorrow such as cannot be compared with any other sorrow on earth. When in the ritual of the Sun Cult in the ancient Mysteries, the image of the god was laid in the grave and lifted out only after a period of days, the souls of those participating in the ceremony were filled with sorrow at the death of the god. But this sorrow was not to be compared in magnitude with the sorrow that filled the hearts of Christ's disciples. All knowledge that can truly be called great is born from pain, from inner travail. When through the means for the attainment of knowledge described in anthroposophical spiritual science one tries to tread the path into the higher worlds, the goal can be reached only by experiencing pain. Without having suffered, suffered intensely, and thereby having become free from the oppression of pain, no man can come to know the spiritual world.

During the ten days following the Ascension, the suffering of Christ's disciples was beyond all telling, because Christ had vanished from their sight. And out of this pain, out of this infinite sorrow, there sprang that which we call the Mystery of Pentecost, the Whitsun Mystery. Having lost the sight of Christ in instinctive, external clairvoyant vision, the disciples found it again in their inmost being, in their feelings, in inner experience—found it through sorrow, through pain.

Once again let us look back to earlier times.—Before the Mystery of Golgotha men had some remembrance of pre-earthly existence. They knew that in this pre-earthly existence they had received from Christ the power to attain immortality. But now, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha men knew that through their own human power they were not able to look back into the spiritual world, into pre-earthly existence.

The disciples of Christ therefore turned their thoughts to all that their memory had preserved concerning the Event of Golgotha. And out of this remembrance, and the suffering it evoked, the vision arose in their souls of that which man had lost because he no longer possessed the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. The men of old had said: “Before we were born on earth we were together with Christ. From Him we have the power which leads to immortality.” And now, ten days after they had lost the outer sight of Christ, the disciples said: “We beheld the Mystery of Golgotha, and this gives us the power to feel again the reality of our immortal being.”—This is expressed symbolically by the tongues of fire at Pentecost. Thus, in the light of Spiritual Science, the Pentecost-secret reveals to us that the Mystery of Golgotha has replaced the Sun-Myth of the ancient Mysteries.

It was Paul who, through the revelation that came to him at Damascus, realised with particular clarity that Christ was the Sun-Being. As a pupil of the ancient Initiates in the Mysteries, Paul's first firm conviction had been that Christ is to be found only when, by means of clairvoyance, man reaches the spiritual world. Therefore he said: “This sect declares that the Sun-Being has lived within a man, has passed through death. This cannot be, for only above and beyond the earth is the Sun-Being to be seen.”—As long as Paul's belief was based upon knowledge acquired by him in the Mysteries, he was an opponent of Christianity. But through the revelation at Damascus Paul realised that without being transported into the spiritual world, man can behold the Christ, and therefore that He had in very truth descended to the earth. From this moment he knew that the disciples of Christ Jesus spoke the truth; for the sublime Sun-Being had now come down from the heavens to the earth.

Had Christ not appeared on the earth, had He remained the Sun-God only, humanity on the earth would have fallen into decay. Increasingly men would have come to believe that material things alone exist, that the sun and the stars are material bodies. For men had forgotten altogether that they themselves had descended from a pre-earthly existence, from the spirit-world of the stars.

Only for a time, however, can mankind hold to the conviction that everything is material. If all human beings were to believe, let us say for a century, that everything is material, they would lose the strength of the spirit within them and would become decrepit and sick. This would in fact have been the lot of mankind if Christ in His infinite mercy had not come down from the spiritual world to the earth.

You will say: Yes, but there are many who do not want to know anything of Christ, who do not believe in Him. How is it that these human beings have not become decrepit, weak and sick? The answer is that Christ appeared on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha not merely in order to give teaching to men but to make the fact of His appearance effective on the earth. He died for all men. The physical nature of every human being, including those who have not believed in Him, has been rescued and restored through the Deed of Golgotha. Ever since that time a man might be a Chinese, a Japanese, a Hindu, with no desire to know anything of Christ,—nevertheless Christ died for all men.

In the future it will not be the same, inasmuch as knowledge will become a much more decisive factor for man than hitherto. More and more it will become a necessity in the evolution of mankind for all human beings to acquire some knowledge of spirit-being and of spiritual life. Such a knowledge as will lead all mankind into the world of spirit is the goal striven for by anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

Moreover this knowledge can give a new understanding of Christ, in the sense that, where Anthroposophy is rightly understood. Christ can be presented in a way that is comprehensible to all men. Christianity, as it has hitherto been proclaimed, may have been carried to Africa or to Asia. A few, maybe, have professed their belief in Christ, but the great mass of the people have rejected the teaching, for they could not understand what the missionaries were saying.

What kind of religion had these people? They had religions which had originated among themselves and were understood only by the particular people to whom some particular place or personality was sacred. As long as the god of the ancient Egyptians was worshipped at Thebes, the people had perforce to journey to Thebes in order to worship in the sanctuary of this god. While Zeus was worshipped at Olympia, the people had perforce to journey to Olympia in order to worship him. In like manner the Mohammedan must journey to Mecca. Even in Christendom itself an element of this has remained.

But if Christianity is rightly understood, men know that the sun shines upon all men, it shines upon Thebes, upon Olympia, upon Mecca; physically, the sun can be seen in the same way everywhere. So too, the sublime Sun-Being, the Christ, can be worshipped spiritually everywhere. Anthroposophy will reveal to men that the Being who before the Mystery of Golgotha could be reached only by instinctive, super-earthly faculties, can be reached since the Mystery of Golgotha through a power of knowledge acquired on the earth itself.

Men will again understand the meaning of the words: The kingdoms of heaven have come down to the earth—and they will no longer speak in vague, mystical terms of the ‘kingdom of a thousand years.’ They will understand that the Being who was formerly to be found on the sun is now to be found on the earth. They will say: “Christ came down to the earth and since the Mystery of Golgotha He dwells among men in the sphere of the earth.” They will be able to feel ever and again what the disciples experienced as the Whitsun Mystery: Christ Himself has come down to the earth.

A power that guarantees immortality for men is dawning in our hearts, but words of Christ, such for example as: “I am with you always, even unto the end of earthly days” must be taken in true earnestness and their deep truth understood. If words such as these are understood in all their spiritual depths, man will also wrestle through to the knowledge that Christ was not only present at the beginning of our era. He is forever present. He speaks to us provided only that we are willing to listen to Him.

But this means that through Spiritual Science we must again learn to perceive a spiritual reality in everything that is of a material nature—a spiritual reality behind stones, plants, animals, human beings, behind clouds, stars, behind the sun. When through what is material we again find the Spirit in all its reality, we also open our soul to the voice of Christ who will speak to us if we are willing to hear Him.

Anthroposophy is able to affirm the reality of the Spirit behind the whole of nature. It may therefore also affirm that the Spirit is at work throughout the earthly history of mankind, that the earth itself first acquired meaning through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha the meaning of the earth was contained in the realm of the Sun; but since the Mystery of Golgotha it inheres in the Earth itself.

This is what Anthroposophy would fain bring to mankind as a perpetual Whitsun Mystery. And when, prepared by Anthroposophy, men are ready to seek again for the spiritual world, they will find Christ as an ever-present reality, in the way that is needful and right for our age. If in this age men do not turn to spiritual knowledge, they will lose Christ. Until now, Christianity did not depend upon knowledge. Christ died for all men. Verily He has not belied them. But if in our day men reject knowledge of Christ, then they belie Him.

As it has been possible for us to be together this year at the time of the Whitsun Festival, I wanted to speak to you of the Christ Mystery in relation to Pentecost. People often speak of Anthroposophy as if it were at variance with Christianity. But if you truly receive into yourselves the spirit of Anthroposophy, you will find that it will again open the ears, the hearts and the souls of men to the Mystery of the Christ.

Anthroposophy would wish its destiny to be one with the destiny of Christianity. This requires that men to-day shall turn, not merely to dead words which speak to them of Christ, but to knowledge which leads them to the light wherein is contained the living Christ—not the historical figure who centuries ago dwelt on the earth—the Christ who lives now and will live through all future time among men, because He who was once their God has become their divine Brother.

And so among our thoughts at Whitsun, let this too be included: that through Anthroposophy we will seek the way to the living Christ, realising that the first Whitsun Mystery can thereby be renewed in every Anthroposophist, and that with knowledge of Christ Himself dawning in his heart, he will feel inwardly warmed and enlightened through the fiery tongues of a Christian understanding of the world.

May our way to the Spiritual through Anthroposophy be at one and the same time the way to Christ through the Spirit.

If, even in small numbers, men make solemn avowal of this, the Whitsun Mystery will take firmer and firmer root in many human beings living at the present time and particularly in the future. Then there will come that which humanity so sorely needs for its redemption and salvation; then the healing Spirit will speak to a new faculty of understanding in men—the Spirit by whom the sickness of human souls is healed, the Spirit sent by Christ. And then will come that which is a need of all mankind: WORLD-PENTECOST!

When we consider how Karma works,¹ we always have to bear in mind that the human Ego, which is the essential being, the inmost being, of man, has as it were three instruments through which it is able to live and express itself in the world. These are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Man really carries the physical, etheric and astral bodies with him through the world, but he himself is not in any one of these bodies. In the truest sense he is the Ego; and it is the Ego which both suffers and creates Karma.

Now the point is to gain an understanding of the relationship between man as the Ego-being and these three instrumental forms—if I may call them so—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. This will give us the foundation for an understanding of the essence of Karma. We shall gain a fruitful point of view for the study of the physical, the etheric and the astral in man in relation to Karma, if we consider the following.

The physical as we behold it in the mineral kingdom, the etheric as we find it working in the plant kingdom, and the astral as we find it working in the animal kingdom—all these are to be found in the environment of man here on Earth. In the Cosmos surrounding the Earth we have that Universe into which, if I may so describe it, the Earth extends on all sides. Man can feel a certain relationship between what takes place on the Earth and what takes place in the cosmic environment. But when we come to Spiritual Science we have to ask: Is this relationship really so commonplace as the present-day scientific conception of the world imagines? This modern scientific conception of the world examines the physical qualities of everything on the Earth, living and lifeless. It also investigates the stars, the sun, the moon, etc.; and it discovers—indeed it is particularly proud of the discovery—that these heavenly bodies are fundamentally of the same nature as the Earth.

Such a conception can only result from a form of knowledge which at no point comes to a real grasp of man himself—a knowledge which takes hold only of what is external to man. The moment, however, we really take hold of Man as he stands within the Universe, we become able to discover the relationships between the several instrumental members of man's nature, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body and the corresponding entities, the corresponding realities of Being, in the Cosmos.

In regard to the etheric body of man, we find spread out in the Cosmos the universal Ether. The etheric body of man has a definite human shape, definite forms of movement within it, and so on. These, it is true, are different in the cosmic Ether. Nevertheless the cosmic Ether is fundamentally of like nature with what we find in the human etheric body. In the same way we can speak of a similarity between what is found in the human astral body and a certain astral principle that works through all things and all beings out in the far-spread Universe.

Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. (A drawing is made on the blackboard). We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic Ether—the cosmic Ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is Astrality. Where are we to find this cosmic Astrality? Where is it? It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover—what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic Astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the Astrality. Is this Astrality in the Cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?

In itself, of course, the Ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of Ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The Ether is like an empty nothingness to you. But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the Ether. Thus you behold the Ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the Ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal Ether that surrounds us.

At first contact, we see through the Ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The Ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the Universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.

Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky. In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the Cosmos the Supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The Ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.

But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the Cosmos. In the blue sky the Ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense. Where then does the Astrality in the Cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility? The answer, my dear friends, is this.

Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the Astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the Astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the Cosmos makes itself visible to us.

For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though—forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true—it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells. It is the astral body of the Universe which is perpetually wielding its influences—like the gently stroking fingers—on the etheric organism of the Cosmos. The etheric Cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic Ether by the astral Universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the Cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.

In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the Cosmos. Think how dead the Cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies. Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral Cosmos works upon the etheric Cosmos—for this is to express it with perfect truth. Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times,—processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the Cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine Beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.

We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the Cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

It is only the Ego that we do not find revealed in the cosmic environment. Why is this? We shall find the reason if we consider how this human Ego manifests here on the Earth, in a world that is in reality threefold,—physical, etheric and astral. The Ego of man, as it appears within the Universe, is ever and again a repetition of former lives on Earth; and again and again it finds itself in the life between death and a new birth. But when we observe the Ego in its life between death and a new birth, we perceive that the Etheric which we have here in the cosmic environment of the Earth has no significance for the human Ego. The etheric body is laid aside soon after death. It is only the astral world, that shines in towards us through the stars that has significance for the Ego in the life between death and a new birth. And in that world which glistens in towards us through the stars, in that world there live the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies with whom man forms his Karma between death and a new birth.

Indeed, when we follow this Ego in its successive evolutions through lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth, we cannot remain within the world of Space at all. For two successive earthly lives cannot be within the same space. They cannot be within that Universe which is dependent on spatial co-existence. Here therefore we go right out of Space and enter into Time. This is actually so. We go out of Space and come into the pure flow of Time when we contemplate the Ego in its successive lives on Earth.

Now consider this, my dear friends. In Space, Time is still present, of course, but within this world of Space we have no means of experiencing Time in itself. We always have to experience Time through Space and spatial processes. For example, if you wish to experience Time, you look at the clock, or, if you will, at the course of the sun. What do you see? You see the various positions of the hands of the clock or of the sun. You see something that is spatial. Through the fact that the positions of the hand or of the sun are changed, through the fact that spatial things are present to you as changing, you gain some idea of Time. But of Time itself there is really nothing in this spatial perception. There are only varied spatial configurations, varied positions of the hands of the clock, varied positions of the sun. You only experience Time itself when you come into the sphere of the soul's experience. There you do really experience Time, but there you also go out of Space. There, Time is a reality, but within the earthly world of Space, Time is no reality. What, then, must happen to us, if we would go out of the Space in which we live between birth and death and enter into the spacelessness in which we live between death and a new birth? What must we do? The answer is this: We must die!

We must take these words in their exact and deep meaning. On Earth we experience Time only through Space—through points in Space, through the positions of spatial things. On Earth we do not experience Time in its reality at all. Once you grasp this, you will say: “Really to enter into Time we must go out of Space, we must put away all things spatial.” You can also express it in other words, for it is really nothing else than—to die. It means, in very deed and truth: to die.

Let us now turn our eyes to this cosmic world that encircles the Earth—this cosmic world to which we are akin both through our etheric body, and also through our astral body—and let us look at the spiritual in this cosmic world. There have indeed been nations and human societies who have had regard only to the spiritual that is to be found within our earthly world of Space. Such peoples were unable to have any thoughts about repeated lives on Earth. Thoughts about repeated lives on Earth were possessed only by those human beings and groups that were able to conceive Time in its pure essence, Time in its spaceless character. But if we consider this earthly world together with its cosmic environment, or, to put it briefly, all that we speak of as the Cosmos, the Universe; and if we behold the spiritual manifest in it, we are then apprehending something of which it can be said that it had to be present in order that we might enter into our existence as earthly human beings; it had to be there.

Unfathomable depths are really contained in this simple conception,—that all that to which I have just referred, had to exist in order that we as earthly human beings might enter this earthly life. Infinite depths are revealed when we really grasp the spiritual aspect of all that is thus put before us. If we conceive this Spiritual in its completeness as a self-contained whole, if we consider it in its own purity and essence, then we have a conception of what was called “God” by those peoples who limited their outlook to the world of space alone.

These peoples—at any rate in their Wisdom-teachings—had come to feel: The Cosmos is woven through and through by a Divine element that is at work in it, and we can distinguish from this Divine element in the Cosmos that which is present, on the Earth in our immediate environment, as the physical world. We can also distinguish that which, in this cosmic, divine-spiritual world reveals itself as the Etheric, namely that which gazes down upon us in the blue of the sky. We can distinguish as the Astral in this divine world, that which gazes down upon us in the configuration of the starry heavens.

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the Physical in the Universe?” Here I am returning to something which I have already pointed out. The physical science of to-day expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the Universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the Universe at all. Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe on the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. In the Universe there is the Etheric and the Astral. There is also a third element within the Universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the Cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the Cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the Cosmos in which we include the Earth.

Let these feelings enter into our earthly consciousness, the perceiving of the Physical in our immediate earthly dwelling-place; the feeling of the Etheric, which is both on the Earth and in the Universe; the beholding of the Astral, glistening down to the Earth from the stars, and most intensely of all from the Sun-star. Then, when we consider all these things and place before our souls the majesty of this world-conception, we can well understand how in ancient times, when with the old instinctive clairvoyance men did not think so abstractly, but were still able to feel the majesty of a great conception, they were led to realise: “A thought so majestic as this cannot be conceived perpetually in all its fullness. We must take hold of it at one special time, allowing it to work on the soul in its full, unfathomable glory. It will then work on in the inner depths of our human being, without being spoilt and corrupted by our surface consciousness.”—If we consider by what means the old instinctive clairvoyance gave expression to such a feeling, then out of all that combined to give truth to this thought in mankind in olden time, there remains to us to-day the institution of the Christmas Festival.

On Christmas Night, man, as he stands here upon the Earth with his physical, his etheric and his astral bodies, feels himself to be related to the threefold Cosmos, which appears to him in its Etheric nature, shining so majestically, and with the magic wonder of the night in the blue of the heavens; while face to face with him is the Astral of the Universe, in the stars that glitter in towards the Earth. As he realises how the holiness of this cosmic environment is related to that which is on the Earth itself, he feels that he himself with his own Ego has been transplanted from the Cosmos into this world of Space. And now he may gaze upon the Christmas Mystery—the new-born Child, the Representative of Humanity on Earth, who, inasmuch as he is entering into childhood, is born into this world of Space. In the fullness and majesty of this Christmas thought, as he gazes on the Child that is born on Christmas Night, he exclaims: “Ex Deo Nascimur—I am born out of the Divine, the Divine that weaves and surges through the world of Space.”

When a man has felt this, when he has permeated himself through and through with it, then he may also recall what Anthroposophy has revealed to us about the meaning of the Earth. The Child on whom we are gazing is the outer sheath of That which is now born into Space. But whence is He born, that He might be brought to birth in the world of Space? According to what we have explained to-day, it can only be from Time. From out of Time the Child is born.

If we then follow out the life of this Child and His permeation by the Spirit of the Christ-Being, we come to realise that this Being, this Christ-Being, comes from the Sun. Then we shall look up to the Sun, and say to ourselves: “As I look up to the Sun, I must behold in the sunshine that Time, which in the world of Space is hidden. Within the Sun is Time, and from out of the Time that weaves and works within the Sun, Christ came forth, came out into Space, on to the Earth.”

What have we then in Christ on Earth? In Christ on Earth we have That, which coming from beyond Space, from outside of Space, unites with the Earth.

I want you to realise how our conception of the Universe changes, in comparison with the ordinary present-day conception, when we really enter into all that has come before our souls this evening. There in the Universe we have the Sun, with all that there appears to us to be immediately connected with it—all that is contained in the blue of the heavens, in the world of the stars. At another point in the Universe we have the Earth with humanity. When we look up from the Earth to the Sun, we are at the same time looking into the flow of Time.

Now from this there follows something of great significance. Man only looks up to the Sun in the right way (even if it be but in his mind) when, as he gazes upwards, he forgets Space and considers Time alone. For in truth, the Sun does not only radiate light, it radiates Space itself, and when we are looking into the Sun we are looking out of Space into the world of Time. The Sun is the unique star that it is because when we gaze into the Sun we are looking out of Space. And from that world, outside of Space, Christ came to men. At the time when Christianity was founded by Christ on Earth, man had been all too long restricted to the mere Ex Deo Nascimur, he had become altogether bound up in it, he had become a Space-being pure and simple. The reason why it is so hard for us to understand the traditions of primeval epochs, when we go back to them with the consciousness of present-day civilisation, is that they always had in mind [Space], and not the world of [Time]. They regarded the world of [Time] only as an appendage of the world of [Space].²

Christ came to bring the element of Time again to men, and when the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, unite themselves with Christ, then man receives once more the stream of Time that flows from Eternity to Eternity. What else can we human beings do when we die, i.e. when we go out of the world of Space, than hold fast to Him who gives Time back to us again? At the Mystery of Golgotha man had become to so great an extent a being of Space that Time was lost to him. Christ brought Time back again to men.

If, then, in going forth from the world of Space, men would not die in their souls as well as in their bodies, they must die in Christ, We can still be human beings of Space, and say: Ex Deo Nascimur, and we can look to the Child who comes forth from Time into Space, that he may unite Christ with humanity. But since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot conceive of death, the bound of our earthly life, without this thought: “We must die in Christ.” Otherwise we shall pay for our loss of Time with the loss of Christ Himself, and, banished from Him, remain held spell-bound. We must fill ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha. In addition to the Ex Deo Nascimur, we must find the In Christo Morimur. We must bring forth the Easter thought in addition to the Christmas thought. Thus the Ex Deo Nascimur lets the Christmas thought appear before our souls, and in the In Christo Morimur the Easter thought.

We can now say: On the Earth man has his three bodies, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The Etheric and Astral are also out there in the Cosmos, but the Physical is only to be found on the Earth. Out in the Cosmos there is no Physical. Thus we must say: On the Earth—physical, etheric, astral. In the Cosmos—no physical, but only the etheric and the astral.

Yet the Cosmos too is threefold, for what the Cosmos lacks at the lowest level, it adds above. In the Cosmos the Etheric is the lowest: on the Earth the Physical is the lowest. On Earth the Astral is the highest; in the Cosmos the highest is that of which man has to-day only the beginnings—that out of which his Spirit-Self will one day be woven. We may therefore say: In the Cosmos there is, as the third, the highest element, the Spirit-Selfhood.

Now we see the stars as expressions of something real. I compared their action to a gentle stroking. The Spirit-Selfhood that is behind them is indeed the Being that lovingly strokes,—only in this case it is not a single Being but the whole world of the Hierarchies. I gaze upon a man and see his form; I look at his eyes and see them shining towards me; I hear his voice; it is the utterance of the human being. In the same way I gaze up into the far Spaces of the world, I look upon the stars. They are the utterance of the Hierarchies,—the living utterance of the Hierarchies, kindling astral feeling. I gaze into the blue depths of the firmament and, perceive in it the outward revelation of the etheric body which is the lowest member of the whole world of the Hierarchies.

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element.

Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement—an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us—namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules—is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

To His intimate disciples Christ spoke these words: “Behold the life of the Earth; it is related to the life of the Cosmos. When you look out on the Earth and the surrounding Cosmos, it is the Father whose life permeates this Universe.³ The Father-God is the God of Space. But I make known to you that I have come to you from the Sun, from Time—Time that receives man only when he dies. I have brought you myself from out of Time.⁴ If you receive me, you receive Time, and you will not be held spell-bound in Space. But you find the transition from the one trinity—Physical, Etheric and Astral—to the other trinity, which leads from the Etheric and Astral to Spirit-Selfhood. Spirit-Selfhood is not to be found in the earthly world, just as the Earthly-Physical is not to be found in the Cosmos. But I bring you the message of it, for I am from the Sun.”

The Sun has indeed a threefold aspect. If one lives within the Sun and looks down from the Sun to the Earth, one beholds the Physical, Etheric and Astral. One may also gaze on that which is within the Sun itself. Then one still sees the Physical so long as one remembers the Earth or gazes down towards the Earth. But if one looks away from the Earth one beholds on the other side the Spirit-Selfhood. Thus one swings backwards and forwards between the Physical and the nature of the Spirit-Self. Only the Etheric and Astral in between are permanent. As you look out into the great Universe, the Earthly vanishes away, and you have the Etheric, the Astral and the Spirit-Selfhood. This is what you behold when you come into the Sun-Time between death and a new birth.

Let us now imagine first of all the inner mood of a man's soul to be such that he shuts himself up entirely within this Earth-existence. He can still feel the Divine, for out of the Divine he is born: Ex Deo Nascimur. Then let us imagine him no longer shutting himself up within the mere world of Space, but receiving the Christ who came from the world of Time into the world of Space, who brought Time itself into the earthly Space. If a man does this, then in Death he will overcome Death. Ex Deo Nascimur. In Christo Morimur. But Christ Himself brings the message that when Space is overcome and one has learned to recognise the Sun as the creator of Space, when one feels oneself transplanted through Christ into the Sun, into the living Sun, then the earthly Physical vanishes and only the Etheric and the Astral are there. Now the Etheric comes to life, not as the blue of the sky, but as the lilac-red gleaming radiance of the Cosmos, and forth from the reddish light the stars no longer twinkle down upon us but gently touch us with their loving effluence.

If a man really enters into all this, he can have the experience of himself, standing here upon the Earth, the Physical put aside, but the Etheric still with him, streaming through and out of him in the lilac-reddish light. No longer now are the stars glimmering points of light; they are radiations of love like the caressing hand of a human being. As we feel all this—the divine within ourselves, the divine cosmic fire flaming forth from within us as the very being of man; ourselves within the Etheric world and experiencing the living expression of the Spirit in the Astral cosmic radiance, there bursts forth within us the inner awakening of the creative radiance of Spirit, which is man's high calling in the Universe.

When those to whom Christ revealed these things had let the revelation sink deep into their being, then the moment came when they experienced the working of this mighty concept, in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. At first they felt the falling away, the discarding of the earthly-Physical as death. But then the feeling came; This is not death, but in place of the physical of the Earth, there now dawns upon us the Spirit-Selfhood of the Universe. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.”

Thus may we regard the threefold nature of the one half of the year. We have the Christmas thought—Ex Deo Nascimur; the Easter thought—In Christo Morimur; and the Whitsun thought—Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

There remains the other half of the year. If we understand that too, there dawns on us the other aspect of our human life. If we understand the relationship of the physical to the soul of man and to the superphysical—which contains the true freedom of which man is to become a partaker on the Earth,—then in the interconnection of the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals we understand the human freedom on Earth. As we understand man from out of these three thoughts, the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought, and as we let this kindle in us the desire to understand the remaining portions of the year, there arises the other half of human life which I indicated when I said: “Gaze upon this human destiny; the Hierarchies appear behind it—the working and weaving of the Hierarchies.” It is wonderful to look truly into the destiny of a human being, for behind it stands the whole world of the Hierarchies.

It is indeed the language of the stars which sounds towards us from the thoughts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide; from the Christmas thought, inasmuch as the Earth is a star within the Universe; from the Easter thought inasmuch as the most radiant of stars, the Sun, gives us his gifts of grace; and from the Whitsun thought inasmuch as that which lies hidden beyond the stars lights into the soul, and lights forth again from the soul in the fiery tongues of Pentecost.

Enter into all this, my dear friends! I have told you of the Father, the Bearer of the Christmas thought, who sends the Son that through him the Easter thought may be fulfilled; I have told you further how the Son brings the message of the Spirit, so that in the thought of Whitsun man's life on Earth may be completed in its threefold being. Meditate this through, ponder it well; then for all the descriptive foundations I have already given you for an understanding of Karma, you will gain a right foundation of inner feeling.

Try to let the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun thoughts, in the way I have expressed them to you to-day, work deeply and truly into your human feeling, and when we meet again after the journey which I must undertake this Whitsun-tide for the Course on Agriculture—when we come together again, bring this feeling with you, my dear friends. For this feeling should live on in you as the warm and fiery thought of Pentecost. Then we shall be able to go further in our study of Karma; your power of understanding will be fertilised by what the Whitsun thought contains.

Just as once upon a time at the first Whitsun Festival something shone forth from each one of the disciples, so the thought of Pentecost should now become alive again for our anthroposophical understanding. Something must light up and shine forth from our souls. Therefore it is as a Whitsun feeling, to prepare you for the further continuation of our thoughts on Karma, which are related to the other half of the year, that I have given you what I have said to-day about the inner connections of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide.

• 1. From February until September, 1924, with intervals of visits to other towns and countries, Rudolf Steiner was giving at Dornach the great series of 49 lectures on Karma, subsequently produced in four volumes now available in English translation. The present lecture was given very shortly before the Whitsun Festival and deals with its specific significance for the problem of human destiny with which the Karma lectures deal.
  
  Lecturing as he was to Anthroposophists, Dr. Steiner begins at once with the fundamental fact of the three ‘bodies’ at work in the human organism. A full exposition of this is to be found in the book Theosophy, chapter I.
• 2. The bracketed words were transposed in the translation. Error brought to our attention by to Lucas Dreier
• 3. Cp. Paul: “God that made the world and all things therein, being Lord of heaven and earth, giveth to all life and breath and all things, and is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” Acts XVII, 24–28.
• 4. “Time,” as here used, is what we usually designate as “Eternity”, i.e. a continuous, unbroken time-experience. What we usually call “Time” is our spatialised concept of real Time, separate successional events, measured by spatial changes.

You will remember that I have spoken of the meaning of the Christmas Festival in its connection with the evolution of races, or, better said, the epochs of civilisation, and indeed the significance of the Festival lies in this very connection both in respect of the past and of the future.

I want to speak to-day about a Festival to which in modern times less importance is attached than to the Christmas Festival itself, namely, the Festival of the Three Kings, of the Magi who came from the East to greet the newly born Jesus. This Festival of the Epiphany (celebrated on the 6th of January) will assume greater and greater significance when its symbolism is understood.

It will be obvious to you that very profound symbolism is contained in the Festival of the Three Magi from the East. Until the 15th century, this symbolism was kept very secret and no definite indications were available. But since that century some light has been thrown on the Festival of the Magi by exoteric presentations. One of the Three Kings—Caspar—is portrayed as a Moor, an inhabitant of Africa; one as a white man, a European—Melchior; and one—Balthasar—as an Asiatic; the colour of his skin is that of an inhabitant of India. They bring Myrrh, Gold and Frankincense as offerings to the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

These three offerings are full of meaning and in keeping with the whole symbolism of the Festival celebrated on the 6th of January. Exoterically, the date itself throws some light; esoterically, the Festival is pregnant with meaning. The 6th of January is the same date as that on which, in ancient Egypt, the Festival of Osiris was celebrated, the Festival of the re-finding of Osiris. As you know, Osiris was overcome by his enemy Typhon: Isis seeks and eventually finds him. This re-finding of Osiris, the Son of God, is represented in the Festival of the 6th of January. The Festival of the Three Kings is the same Festival, but in its Christian form. This Festival was also celebrated among the Assyrians, the Armenians and the Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a Festival connected with a kind of universal baptism—a rebirth from out of the water. This in itself points to the connection with the re-finding of Osiris.

What does the disappearance of Osiris signify? It signifies the transition from the epoch before the middle of the Lemurian race to the epoch after the middle of that race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, no human being was endowed with Manas. It was not until the middle of the race that Manas came down as a fertile seed into men. Manas (Spirit-Self) was now disseminated among men and in each single individual a grave was created for Manas—for the dismembered Osiris. The Divine Manas was disseminated and thereafter dwelt in men. In the Egyptian Mystery-language, the bodies of men were called the ‘graves of Osiris’ Manas was fettered until it was freed by the new revelation of Love.

What is the new revelation, the new manifestation of Love? The descent of Manas somewhere around the middle of the Lemurian epoch, was accompanied by the penetration into mankind of the principle of desire, or passion. Before that time there had been no desire-principle in the real sense. The animals of the preceding epochs were cold-blooded; even man himself at that time, had no warm blood. In the Old Moon period and, correspondingly, in the Third Earth-Round, men may be likened to fishes, in the sense that their own warmth and the warmth of their environment were equal in degree. Of this epoch the Bible says: ‘The Spirit of God brooded over the waters.’ The principle of Love was not within the beings, but outside, manifesting as earthly Kama (that is to say, earthly passion or desire). Kama is egotistic love. The first bringer of Love free of all egoism is Christ Who appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Who are the Magi? They represent the Initiates of the three preceding races or epochs of culture, the Initiates of mankind up to the time of the coming of Christ, the Bringer of the Love that is free of egoism—the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates—and so too the Three Magi—were endowed with Manas. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh as their offerings. And why are their skins of three colours: white, yellow and black? One is European—his skin is white; one is Indian—his skin is yellow; one is African—his skin is black. This indicates the connection with the so-called Root Races. The remaining survivors of the Lemurian race are black; those of the Atlantean race are yellow; and the representatives of the Fifth Root Race, the Post-Atlantean or Aryan race, are white.

Thus the Three Kings or Magi are representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring the three offerings. The European (Melchior) brings gold, the symbol of wisdom, of intelligence which comes to expression paramountly in the Fifth Root Race. The offering of the Initiate representing the Fourth Root Race (Balthasar) is frankincense, connected with what was intrinsically characteristic of the Atlanteans. They were united more directly with the Godhead, a union which took effect as a suggestive influence, a kind of universal hypnosis. This union with the Godhead is betokened by the offering. Feeling must be sublimated in order that God may fertilise it. This is expressed symbolically by the frankincense, which is the universal symbol for an offering that has something to do with Intuition.

In the language of esotericism, myrrh is the symbol of dying, of death. What is the meaning of dying and of resurrection, as exemplified in the resurrected Osiris? I refer you here to words of Goethe: “So long as thou hast it not, this dying and becoming, thou'rt but a dull guest on the dark earth.” Jacob Boehme expresses the same thought in the words: “He who dies not ere he dies, perishes when he dies.” Myrrh is the symbol of the dying of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is offered by the Initiate representing the Third Root Race (Lemurian). A deep meaning lies in this. Jesus of Nazareth is a very highly developed individuality. In the thirtieth year of his life he gives up his own life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. All this the Magi foresaw. The great sacrifice made by Jesus of Nazareth is that he gave up his ‘ I ’ to make way for the Second Logos. There is a definite reason for this sacrifice. Not until the Sixth Root Race will it become possible, and then only gradually, for the human body to receive into itself the Christ Principle from childhood onwards. Only then, in the Sixth Root Race, will mankind have reached such maturity that the body will not need years of preparation but will be able from the beginning, to receive the Christ Principle. In the fourth sub-race of the Fifth Root Race it was necessary for a body to be prepared for thirty years. (In the Northern regions we find something similar, in that the personality of Sig was so prepared that he could place his body at the disposal of a higher Being, and, in fact, did so). In the Sixth Root Race it will be possible for a man to place his body at the disposal of a sublime Being, as did Jesus of Nazareth when Christianity was founded. At the time of the founding of Christianity it was still necessary for an advanced individuality to sacrifice his own ‘ I ’ and send it into the astral realm, in order that the Logos might dwell in the body. This is an act upon which light is shed by the last words on the Cross. What other meaning could these words contain: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” These words give expression to the mystical fact then consummated. At the moment of Christ's death, the Divine Being had departed from the body, and it is the body of Jesus of Nazareth that utters these words—a body so highly developed that it could voice the reality. And so these words give expression to an event of untold significance. All this is represented by the myrrh. Myrrh is the symbol of sacrifice, of death, the sacrifice of the earthly in order that the Higher may come to life. In the middle of the Lemurian epoch, Osiris came to his grave; Manas drew into human beings. Men were educated under the guidance of the Initiates until the principle of Love (Budhi) could shine forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is the heavenly Love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled through the Christ Love. Kama is purified in the fire of the Divine Love.

Melchior is the representative of the principle of wisdom, of intelligence—the task of the Fifth Root Race. This is symbolised by his offering—gold.

The principle of sacramental offering is represented by the frankincense. This offering symbolises the principle that was dominant in the Fourth Root Race, the Atlantean. The task of Christianity is fulfilled in the Sixth Root Race, when material existence will be fraught with sacramentalism and sacramental deeds. Sacraments have very largely lost their meaning to-day; the feeling of their significance has disappeared. But this feeling will be kindled to life again when the higher man is born. It is this that is symbolised by the frankincense.

In the Lemurian Race, Osiris meets his death, in the Sixth Root Race, Osiris is resurrected.

Thus the offerings made by the Three Kings indicate the connection of the Festival with the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Root Races. By what are the Three Holy Kings guided, and whither are they led? They are guided by a Star to a grotto, a cave in Bethlehem. This is something that can be understood only by one who has knowledge of the so-called lower, or astral mysteries. To be led by a Star means nothing else than to see the soul itself as a Star. But when is the soul seen as a Star? When a man can behold the soul as a radiant aura. But what kind of aura is so radiant that it can be a guide? There is the aura that glimmers with only a feeble light; such an aura cannot guide. There is a higher aura, that of the intelligence, which has, it is true, a flowing, up-surging light, but is not yet able to guide. But the bright aura, aglow with Budhi, is in very truth a Star, is a radiant guide. In Christ, the Star of Budhi lights up—the Star which accompanies the evolution of mankind. The Light that shines before the Magi is the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines before the Magi and over the cave in Bethlehem.

The grotto or cave is the body wherein dwells the soul. The seer beholds the body from within. In astral vision, everything is reversed—for example, 365 instead of 563. The human body is seen as a cave, a hollow. In the body of Jesus shines the Christ Star, the soul of Christ. This must be conceived as a reality, taking place in the astral world. It is an enactment of the Lesser Mysteries. There, in very truth, the Christ Soul shines as an auric Star, and it is by this Star that the Initiates of the three Root Races are led to Jesus in Bethlehem.

The Festival of the Three Kings is celebrated every year on the 6th of January, and its significance will steadily increase. Men will understand more and more what a Magi is, and what the great Magi, the Masters, are. And then understanding of Christianity will lead to understanding of spiritual science.

How many people are there to-day who, as they walk through the streets at this season and see all the preparations made for the Christmas Festival, have any clear or profound idea of what it means? How seldom do we find evidence of any clear ideas of this Festival, and even when they exist, how far removed they are from the intentions of those who once inaugurated the great Festivals as tokens of what is eternal and imperishable in the world! A glance at the ‘Christmas Reflections’ as they are called, in the newspapers, is quite sufficient proof of this. Surely there can be nothing more dreary and at the same time more estranged from the subject than the thoughts sent out into the world on printed pages in this way.

To-day we shall try to bring before our minds a kind of summary of the knowledge revealed to us by Spiritual Science. I do not, of course, mean any kind of pedantic summary; I mean a gathering-together of all that the Christmas Festival can bring home to our hearts if we regard Spiritual Science not as a dull, grey theory, not as an outer confession, not as a philosophy, but as a real and vital stream of life pulsating through and through us.

The man of to-day confronts Nature around him as a stranger. He is far more of a stranger to Nature than he thinks, far more even than he was in the time of Goethe. Is there anyone who still feels the depth of words spoken by Goethe at the beginning of the Weimar period of his life? He addressed a Hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with all her mysterious powers:

“Nature!—we are surrounded and embraced by her; we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us unasked and unwarned into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms ... All men are within her and she in all men ... We are obedient to her laws even when we would fain oppose them ... She (Nature) is all in all. She alone praises and she alone punishes—herself, Let her do with me what she will; she will not cherish hatred for her created work. It was not I who spoke of her, Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers is the credit ...”

Verily, we are all Nature's children. And when we think we are least of all obedient to her, it may be that just then we are acting most strictly in accordance with the great laws which pervade the realm of Nature and stream into our own being. Again, there are so few who really feel the depth of other pregnant words of Goethe in which he tries to express the feeling of communion with the hidden forces common to Nature and to the human being. I refer to that passage in Faust where Goethe addresses Nature, not as the dead, lifeless being conceived of by materialistic thinkers of to-day, but as a living Spirit:

“Spirit sublime, Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to endure it. Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.

The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.
And when the storm in forests roars and grinds,
The giant firs, in falling, neighbour bough
And neighbour trunks with crushing weight bear down,
And falling, fill the hills with hollow thunders,—
Then to the cave secure thou leadest me,
Then show'st me mine own self, and in my breast
The deep, mysterious miracles unfold.”

Translation by BAYARD TAYLOR

This was the mood of soul which Goethe's knowledge and feeling for Nature awakened in him and these words were an attempt to bring to life again a mood which filled men's hearts in an age when wisdom itself was still organically united by living ties to Nature. And it was as tokens of this ‘feeling at one’ with Nature and the universe that the great Festivals were inaugurated.

The Festivals have become abstractions, matters of indifference to modern people. The word as a medium of strife and blasphemy often means more than the Word conceived as the power by which the world itself was created. Yet the alphabetical word ought to be the representative, the symbol of the Word Creative in Nature around us, in the great universe and within us too when self-knowledge awakens, and of which all mankind can be made conscious by those who truly understand the course of Nature. It was for this that the Festivals were instituted and with the knowledge we have gleaned from Spiritual Science we will try to understand what it was that the wise men of old set out to express in the Christmas Festival.

Christmas is not a Festival of Christendom only. In ancient Egypt, in the regions we ourselves inhabit, and in Asia thousands and thousands of years before the Christian era we find that a Festival was celebrated on the days now dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Christ.

Now what was the character of this Festival which since time immemorial has been celebrated all over the world on the same days of the year? Wonderful Fire Festivals in the northern and central regions of Europe in ancient times were celebrated among the Celts in Scandinavia, Scotland and England by their priests, the Druids. What were they celebrating? They were celebrating the time when winter draws to its close and spring begins. It is quite true that Christmas falls while it is still winter, but Nature is already heralding a victory which can be a token of hope in anticipation of the victory that will come in spring—a token of confidence, of hope, of faith—to use words which are connected in nearly every language with the Festival of Christmas. There is confidence that the Sun, again in the ascendant, will be victorious over the opposing powers of Nature. The days draw in and draw in, and this shortening of the days seems to us to be an expression of the dying, or rather of the falling asleep of the Nature-forces. The days grow shorter and shorter up to the time when we celebrate the Christmas Festival and when our forefathers also celebrated it, in another form. Then the days begin to draw out again and the light of the Sun celebrates its victory over the darkness. In our age of materialistic thinking this is an event to which we no longer give much consideration.

In olden times it seemed to men in whom living feeling was united with wisdom, to be an expression of an experience of the Godhead Himself, the Godhead by Whom their lives were guided. The solstice was a personal experience of a higher being—as personal an experience as when some momentous event forces a man to come to a vital decision. And it was even more than this. The waxing and waning of the days was not only an expression of an event in the life of a higher Being, but a token of something greater still, of something momentous and unique.

This brings us to the true meaning of Christmas as a Festival of the very highest order in cosmic and human life. In the days when genuine occult teaching was not disowned as it is today by materialistic thought but was the very wellspring of the life of the peoples, the Christmas Festival was a kind of memorial, a token of remembrance of a great happening on the Earth. At the hour of midnight the priests gathered around them their truest disciples, those who were the teachers of the people, and spoke to them of a great Mystery. (I am not telling you anything that has been cleverly thought out or discovered by a process of abstract deduction but was actually experienced in the Mysteries, in the secret Sanctuaries of those remote times). This Mystery was connected with the victory of the Sun over the darkness. There was a time on the Earth when the light triumphed over the darkness. And it happened thus: in that epoch, all physical, all bodily life on Earth had reached the stage of animality only. The highest kingdom upon the Earth had only reached a stage at which it was preparing to receive something higher. And then there came that great moment in evolution when the immortal, imperishable soul of man descended. Life had so far developed that the human body was able to receive into itself the imperishable soul. These ancestors of the human race stood higher in the scale of evolution than modern scientists believe, but the higher part of their being, the divine ‘spark’ was not yet within them. The divine spark descended from a higher planetary sphere to our Earth which was now to become the scene of its activity, the dwelling-place of the soul which henceforward can never be lost to us.

We call these remote ancestors of humanity the Lemurian race. Then came the Atlantean race and the Atlantean race was followed by our own—the Aryan race. Into the bodies of the Lemurian race the human soul descended. This descent of the divine ‘Sons of the Spirit,’ this great moment in the evolution of mankind was celebrated by the sages of all times as the victory of the light over the darkness. Since then the human soul has been working in the body and bringing it to higher stages of development but not at all in the way that materialistic science imagines. At the time when the human soul was quickened by the Spirit, something happened in the universe, something that is one of the most decisive events in the evolution of mankind.

In those remote ages—and this is contrary to what modern science teaches—certain constellation of Earth, Moon and Sun was in existence. It was not until then that the Sun assumed the significance it now has in the process of man's growth and life upon the Earth and of the other creatures belonging to the Earth—the plants and animals. Before that time, the beings on Earth were adapted to the conditions then obtaining upon the planetary body. Only those who are able to form a clear idea of the process of the development of the Earth and of mankind will understand the connection of Sun, Moon and Earth with the human being as he lives upon the Earth. There was a time when the Earth was still united with Sun and Moon, when Sun, Moon and Earth were still one body, The beings who dwelt upon this planet were different in appearance from those who inhabit the Earth to-day; they lived in forms which were suited to the conditions of existence as they were on the planetary body consisting of Sun, Moon and Earth.

The form and essential being of everything that lives upon our Earth is determined by the fact that first the Sun and then, later, the Moon separated from the Earth. The forces and influences of these two heavenly bodies henceforward played down upon the Earth from outside. This is the basis of the mysterious connection of the Spirit of man with the Spirit of the universe, with the Logos in Whom Sun, Moon and Earth are all contained. In this Logos we live and move and have our being. Just as the Earth was born from a planetary body in which the Sun and Moon were also contained, so is man born of a Spirit, of a Soul which belongs alike to Sun, Moon and Earth. And so when a man looks up to the Sun, or to the Moon, he should not only see external bodies in the heavens, but in Sun, Moon and Earth he should see the bodies of Spiritual Beings.

This truth is utterly lost to the materialism of the age. Those who do not see in Sun and Moon the bodies of Spiritual Beings cannot recognise the human body as the body of the Spirit. Just as truly as the heavenly bodies are the bodies of Spiritual Beings, so is the human body the bearer of the Spirit. And man is connected with these Spiritual Beings. Just as his body is separate from the forces of the Sun and Moon and yet contains forces which are active in the Sun and Moon, so the same spirituality which reigns in Sun and Moon is contained within his soul. Man has evolved on Earth into the being he is, and he is dependent upon the Sun as the heavenly body from which the Earth receives her light.

And so in days of old, our forefathers felt themselves to be spiritual children of the great universe and they said: “We have become men through the Sun Spirit, through the Sun Spirit from Whom the Spirit within us proceeded. The victory of the Sun over the darkness commemorates the victory of the Sun when it shone down upon the Earth for the first time. The immortal soul has been victorious over the forces of the animal nature.” It was verily a victory of the Sun when, long, long ago, the immortal soul entered into the physical body and penetrated into the dark world of desires, impulses and passions. Darkness preceded the victory of the Sun and this darkness had followed a previous Sun Age. So it is with the human soul. The soul proceeds from the Divine but it must sink for a time into the darkness, in order, out of this darkness, to build up the vehicle for the human soul. By slow degrees the human soul itself built up the lower nature of man in order then to take up its abode in the dwelling-place of its own construction. You have a correct simile for the entry of the immortal soul of man into the human body if you imagine an architect devoting all his powers to the building of a house in which he then lives. But in those remote ages the soul could only work unconsciously on its dwelling-place. The descent is expressed by the darkness; the awakening to consciousness, the lighting-up of the conscious human soul is expressed in this simile as a victory of the Sun. And so to those who were still aware of man's living connection with the universe, the victory of the Sun signified the great moment when they had received the impulse which was all-essential for their earthly existence. And this great moment was perpetuated in the Christmas Festival.

And now try to think of the course of human life in connection with the harmony of the universe. Man seems to become more and more akin to the great rhythms of Nature. If we think of all that encompasses the life of the soul, of the course of the Sun and everything that is connected with it, we are struck by something that closely concerns us, namely, the rhythm and the marvellous harmony in contrast to the chaos and lack of harmony in the human soul. We all know how rhythmically and with what regularity the Sun appears and disappears. And we can picture what a stupendous upheaval there would be in the universe if for a fraction of a second only the Sun were to be diverted from its course. It is only because of this inviolable harmony in the course of the Sun that our universe can exist at all, and it is upon this harmony that the rhythmic life-process of all beings depends. Think of the annual course of the Sun.—Picture to yourselves that it is the Sun which charms forth the plants in spring time and then think how difficult it is to make the violet or some other plant flower out of due season. Seed-time and harvest, everything, even the very life of animals is dependent upon the rhythmic course of the Sun. And in the being of man himself everything that is not connected with his feelings, his desires and his passions, or with his ordinary thinking, is rhythmic and harmonious. Think of the pulse, of the process of digestion and you will feel the mighty rhythm and marvel at the wisdom implicit in the whole of Nature. Compare with this the irregularity, the chaos of man's passions and desires, especially of his ideas and thoughts. Think of the regularity of your pulse, your breathing, and then of the irregularity, the erratic nature of your thinking, feeling and willing. With what wisdom the powers of life are governed where the prevailing rhythmic forces meet the challenge of the chaotic! And how greatly the rhythms of the human body are outraged by man's passions and cravings! Those who have studied anatomy know how marvellously the heart is constructed and regulated and how wonderfully it is able to stand the strain put upon it by the drinking of tea, coffee and spirits.

There is wisdom in every part of the divine, rhythmic Nature to which our forefathers looked up with such veneration and the very soul of which is the Sun with its regular, rhythmic course. And as the wise men of old looked upwards to the Sun, they said to their disciples: ‘Thou art the image of what the soul born within thee has yet to become and what it will become.’ The divine cosmic Order was revealed in all its glory to the sages of old. And again, in the Christian religion we have the ‘Gloria in excelsis.’ The meaning of ‘gloria’ is revelation, not ‘glory’ in the sense of ‘honour.’ Therefore we should not say: ‘Glory (honour) to God in the highest,’ but rather: ‘To-day is the revelation of the Divine in the heavens!’ The birth of the Redeemer makes us aware of the ‘Glory’ streaming through the wide universe.

In earlier times this cosmic harmony was placed as a great Ideal before those who were to be leaders among their fellow-men. Therefore in all ages and wherever there was consciousness of these things, men spoke of Sun Heroes. In the temples and sanctuaries of the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. I will speak of them as they were known in ancient Persia.

The first stage is attained when a man's ordinary feeling and thinking is raised to a higher level, where knowledge of the Spirit is attained. Such a man received the name of ‘Raven.’ It is the ‘Ravens’ who inform the Initiates in the temples what is happening in the world outside. When medieval poetic wisdom desired to depict in the person of a great Ruler an Initiate who amid the treasures of wisdom contained in the Earth must await the great moment when newly revealed depths of Christianity rejuvenate mankind—when this poetic wisdom of the Middle Ages created the figure of Barbarossa, ravens were his heralds. The Old Testament, too, speaks of the ravens in the story of Elijah.

Those who had reached the second stage of Initiation were known as ‘Occultists’; at the third stage they were ‘Warriors,’ at the fourth, ‘Lions.’ At the fifth stage of Initiation a man was called by the name of his own people: he was a ‘Persian,’ ‘Indian,’ or whatever it might be. For that man alone who had reached the fifth degree of Initiation was regarded as a true representative of his people. At the sixth stage a man was a ‘Sun Hero’ or one who ‘runs in the paths of the Sun.’ And at the seventh stage he was a ‘Father.’

Why was an Initiate of the sixth degree known as a Sun Hero? To reach this level on the ladder of spiritual knowledge a man must have developed an inner life in harmony with the divine rhythms pulsating through the cosmos. His life of feeling and of thinking must have rid itself of chaos, of all disharmony, and his inner life of soul must beat in perfect accord with the rhythm of the Sun in the heavens. Such was the demand made upon men at the sixth degree of Initiation. They were looked upon as holy men, as Ideals, and it was said that if a Sun Hero were to deviate from the divine path of this spiritual harmony, it would be as great a calamity as if the Sun were to deviate from its course. A man whose spiritual life had found a path as sure as that of the Sun in the heavens was called a ‘Sun Hero,’ and there were Sun Heroes among all the peoples.

Our scholars know remarkably little about these things. They are aware that Sun myths are connected with the lives of all the great Founders of religions, but what they do not know is that at the Initiation Ceremony it was the custom for the leading figures to be made into Sun Heroes. It is not really so surprising that materialistic research should rediscover these things. Sun myths have been sought for and found in connection with Buddha and with the Christ.

The Sun-Soul was the great example for the way in which a man's life must be ordered. How did the ancients conceive of the soul of a Sun Hero who had reached this inner harmony? They pictured to themselves that no longer did a single individual human soul live within him, but that forces of the cosmic Soul were streaming into him. This cosmic Soul was known in Greece as Chrestos, in the sublime wisdom of the East as Budhi. When a man no longer feels himself a single being, as the bearer of an individual soul, but experiences something of the universal Soul, he has created within himself an image of the union of the Sun-Soul with the human body and he has attained something of the very greatest significance in the evolution of mankind.

If we think of these men with all their nobility of soul, we shall be able to some extent to visualise the future of the human race and the relation of the future to the ideal of mankind generally. As humanity is to-day, decisions are arrived at by individuals who amid quarrelling and strife finally reach a measure of unity in majority-resolutions. When such resolutions are still regarded as the ideal, this is evidence that men have not realised what truth really is. Where in us does truth exist? Truth lives in that realm of our being where we think logically. It would be nonsense to decide by a majority vote that 2 x 2 = 4, or that 3 x 4 = 12. When man has once realised what is true, millions may come and tell him it is not so, that it is this or it is that, but he will still have his own inner certainty.

We have reached this point in the realm of scientific thinking, of thinking upon which human passions, impulses and instincts no longer impinge. Wherever passions and instincts mingle with thinking, men still find themselves involved in strife and dispute, in wild confusion, for the life of instincts and impulses is itself a seething chaos. When, however, impulses, instincts and passions have been purged and transmuted into what is known as Budhi or Chrestos, when they have developed to the level at which logical, dispassionate thinking stands to-day, then the ideal of the ancient wisdom, the ideal of Christianity, the ideal of Anthroposophy will be realised. It will then be as unnecessary to vote about what is held to be good, ideal and right as it is to vote about what has been recognised as logically right or logically wrong.

This ideal can stand before the soul of every human being and then he has before him the ideal of the Sun Hero, the ideal to which every aspirant at the sixth stage of Initiation has attained. The German Mystics of the Middle Ages felt this and expressed it in the word ‘Vergöttung’—deification. This word existed in all the wisdom-religions, What does it signify? Let me try to express it in the following way.—There was a time when those whom we look upon to-day as the ruling Spirits of the universe also passed through a stage at which mankind as a whole now stands -the stage of chaos. These ruling Spirits have wrestled through to the divine heights from which their forces stream through the harmonies of the universe. The regularity with which the Sun moves through the seasons, the regularity manifested in the growth of plants and in the life of animals—this regularity was once chaos. Harmony has been attained at the cost of great travail. Humanity stands to-day within the same kind of chaos but out of the chaos there will arise a harmony modelled in the likeness of the harmony in the universe.

When this thought takes root in our souls, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as living insight, then we shall understand what Christmas signifies in the light of anthroposophical teaching. If the glory, the revelation of the divine harmony in the heavenly heights is a real experience within us, and if we know that this harmony will one day resound from our own souls, then we can also feel what will be brought about in humanity itself by this harmony: peace among men of good-will. These are the two thoughts or, better, the two feelings which arise at Christmastide. When with this great vista of the divine ordering of the world, of the revelation, the glory of the heavens, we think of the future lying before mankind, we have a premonition even now of that harmony which in the future will reign in those who know that the more abundantly the harmony of the Cosmos fills the soul, the more peace and concord there will be upon the Earth. The great ideal of Peace stands there before us when at Christmas we contemplate the course of the Sun. And when we think about the victory of the Sun over the darkness during these days of Festival there is born in us an unshakable conviction which makes our own evolving soul akin to the harmony of the cosmos—light over the darkness had always been commemorated.¹ And so Christianity is in harmony with all the great world-religions. When the Christmas bells ring out, they are a reminder to us that this Festival was celebrated all over the world, wherever human beings knew what it signified, wherever they understood the great truth that the soul of man is involved in a process of development and progress on this Earth, wherever in the truest sense man strove to reach self-knowledge.

We have been speaking to-day, not of an undefined, abstract feeling for Nature but of a feeling that is full of life and spirituality. And if we think of what has been said in connection with Goethe's words: “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by thee ...” it is quite obvious that we are not speaking here in any materialistic sense, but that we see in Nature the outward expression, the countenance of the Divine Spirit of the Cosmos. Just as the physical is born out of the physical, so are the soul and the Spirit born out of the Divine Soul and the Divine Spirit. The body is connected with purely material forces and the soul and Spirit with forces akin to their own nature. The great Festivals exist as tokens that these things must be understood in their connection with the whole universe; our powers of thinking must be used in such a way that we realise our oneness with the whole universe. When this insight lives within us, the Festivals will change their present character and become living realities in our hearts and souls. They will be points of focus in the year uniting us with the all-pervading Spirit of the universe.

Throughout the year we fulfil the common tasks and duties of daily life, and at these times of Festival we turn our attention to the links which bind us with eternity. And although daily life is fraught with many a struggle, at these times a feeling awakens within us that above all the strife and turmoil there is peace and harmony.

Festivals are the commemoration of great Ideals, and Christmas is the birth feast of the very greatest Ideal before mankind, of that Ideal which man must strain every nerve to attain if he is to fulfil his mission. The birth festival of all that man can feel, perceive and will—such is Christmas when it is truly understood.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to stimulate a true and deep understanding of the Christmas Festival. We do not want to promulgate a dogma or a doctrine, or a philosophy. Our aim is that everything we say and teach, everything that is contained in our writings, in our science, shall pass over into life itself.

When in all that pertains to his daily life man applies spiritual wisdom, life will be filled with it and from all pulpits, far and wide, godlike wisdom, the living wisdom of the Spirit will resound in the words that are spoken to the ‘faithful.’ It will then be unnecessary to utter the actual words ‘Spiritual Science’ at all. When in Courts of Law the deeds of human beings are viewed with the eyes of spiritual perception, when at the bed of sickness the doctor spiritually perceives and spiritually heals, when in the schools the teacher brings spiritual knowledge to the growing child, when in the very streets men think and feel and act spiritually, then we shall have reached our Ideal, for Spiritual Science will have become common knowledge. Then too there will be a spiritual understanding of the great turning-points of the year and the everyday experiences of man will be truly linked with the spiritual world. The Immortal and the Eternal, the spiritual Sun will flood the soul with light at the great Festivals which will remind man of the divine Self within him. The divine Self, in essence like the Sun, and radiant with light, will prevail over darkness and chaos and will give to his soul a peace by which all the strife, all the war and all the discord in the world will be quelled.

• 1. We cannot here enter into the details of the wisdom-teachings of Christianity itself which will form the subject of a later lecture. But this much shall be said to-day: that nothing could be more correct than to place at this time the Birth Festival of that divine Individuality Who is to the Christian a guarantee and an assurance that his divine soul will ultimately prevail over the darkness in the outer world.

THE Festival of Christmas which we shall soon be celebrating acquires new life when a deeper, more spiritual conception of the world is brought to bear upon it. In a spiritual sense the Christmas Festival is a Festival of the Sun, and as such we shall think of it to-day. To begin with, let us listen to the beautiful apostrophe to the sun which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust:—

Life's pulses newly-quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou girdest me about with gladness, priming
My soul to stern resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.—
Unfolded lies the world in twilight-shimmer;
With thousand throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, where through the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered,
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered.
A very Paradise about me lightens!

Look up!—The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal,
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered.

Now are the green-sunk, Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new and new distinctness dowered,
And stepwise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth, and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.

Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.
Then bursts from yonder depths whose days ne'er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire-and what a fire!—hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate? that yonder glowing spindle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders
To veil our gaze in Earth's fresh mantle wend us.

Nay then, the sun shall bide behind my shoulders!
The cataract, that through the gorge doth thunder,
I'll watch with growing rapture, 'mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,
Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man's efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.

(Translation by Latham)

Goethe lets these words be spoken by Faust, the representative of humanity, as he gazes at the radiant morning sun. But the Festival of which we are now to speak has to do with a Sun belonging to a far deeper realm of being than the sun which rises anew every morning. And it is this deeper Sun that will be the guiding moth in our thoughts to-day.

And now we will listen to words in which the deepest import of the Christmas Mystery is mirrored. In all ages these words resounded in the ears of those who were pupils of the Mysteries—before they were allowed to participate in the Mysteries themselves:—

Die Sonne schaue
Um mitternächtige Stunde.
Mit Steinen baue
Im lebenlose Grunde.
So finde im Niedergang
Und in des Todes Nacht
Der Schöpfung neuen Anfang,
Des Morgens junge Macht.

Die Höhen lass offenbaren
Der Götter ewiges Wort,
Die Tiefen sollen bewahren
Den friedensvollen Hort.
Im Dunkel lebend
Erschaffe eine Sonne.
Im Stoffe webend
Erkenne Geisteswonne.

Behold the Sun
At tire midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation's new beginning,
Young morning's strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit!

Many to whom the Christmas Tree with its candles is a familiar sight to-day, believe that it is a very ancient institution—but this is not the case. The Christmas Tree is a very recent European custom, dating no further back than about a hundred years or so. Although, however, the Christmas Tree is a recent custom, the Christmas Festival is very ancient. It was celebrated in the earliest Mysteries of all religions, not as a festival of the outer sun but as one which awakens in men an inkling of the very wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated every year by the highest Initiates in the Mysteries, at the time of the year when the sun sends least power to the earth, bestows least warmth. But it was also celebrated by those who might not yet participate in the whole festival, who might witness only the outer, pictorial expression of the highest Mysteries. This imagery has been preserved through the ages, varying in form according to the several creeds.

The Christmas Festival is the Festival of the Holy Night, celebrated in the Mysteries by those who were ready for the awakening of the higher Self within them, or, as we should say in our time, those who have brought the Christ to birth within them.

Only those who have no inkling of the fact that as well as the chemical and physical forces, spiritual forces are also at work and that the workings of both kinds of forces take effect at definite times and seasons in cosmic life, can imagine that the moment of the awakening of the higher Self in man is of no importance. In the Greater Mysteries man beheld the forces working through all existence; he saw the world around him filled with spirit, with spiritual Beings; he beheld the world of spirit around him, radiant with light and colour. There can be no more sublime experience than this and in due time it will come to everyone. Although for some it may be only after many incarnations, nevertheless the moment will come for all men when Christ will be resurrected within them and new vision, new hearing will awaken. In preparation for the awakening, the pupils in the Mysteries were first taught of the cosmic significance of this awakening and only then was the sacred Act itself performed. It took place at the time when darkness on the earth is greatest, when the external sun gives out least light and warmth—at Christmas time—because those who are cognisant of the spiritual facts know that at this time of the year, forces that are favourable for such an awakening stream through cosmic space. During his preparation the pupil was told that one who would be a true knower must have knowledge not only of what has been happening on the earth for thousands and thousands of years but must also be able to survey the whole course of the evolution of humanity, realising that the great festivals have their own, essential place within that evolution and must be dedicated to contemplation of the eternal truths. The pupil's gaze was directed to the time when our earth was not as it is now, when there was no sun, no moon out yonder in the heavens, but both were still united with the earth, when earth, sun and moon formed one body. Even then man was already in existence, but he had no body; he was still a spiritual being. No sunlight fell from outside upon these spiritual beings, for the sunlight was within the earth itself. This was not the sunlight that shines from outside upon objects and beings to-day, but it was inner sunlight that glowed within all beings of the earth. Then came the time when the sun separated from the earth, when its light shone down upon the earth from the universe outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth and inner darkness came upon man. This was the beginning of his evolution towards that future when the inner light will again be radiant within him. Man must learn to know the things of the earth with his outer senses; he evolves to the stage where the higher Man, Spirit-Man, again glows and shines within him. From light, through darkness, to light—such is the path of the evolution of mankind.

The pupils of the Mysteries were prepared by these constantly inculcated teachings. Then they were led to the actual awakening. This was the moment when, as chosen ones, they experienced the spiritual Light within them; their eyes of spirit were opened. This sacred moment came when the outer light was weakest, when the outer sun was shining with least strength. On that day the pupils were called together and the inner Light revealed itself to them. To those who were not yet ready to participate in this sacred enactment, it was presented as a picture which made them realise: For you too the great moment will come; to-day you see a picture only; later on, what you now see as a picture will be an actual experience. Thus it was in the lesser Mysteries. Pictures were presented of what the candidate for initiation was subsequently to experience as reality. To-day we shall hear of the enactments in the lesser Mysteries. Everywhere it was the same: in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Asia Minor, of Babylon and Chaldea, as well as in the Mithras-cult and in the Indian Mysteries of Brahman. Everywhere the same experiences were undergone by the pupils of these Mysteries at the midnight hour of the Holy Night.

Early on the previous evening the pupils gathered together. In quiet contemplation they were to be made aware of the meaning and import of this momentous happening. Silently and in darkness they sat together. When the midnight hour drew near they had been for long hours in the darkened chamber, steeped in the contemplation of eternal truths. Then, towards midnight, mysterious tones, now louder, now gentler, resounded through the space around them. Hearing these tones, the pupils knew: This is the Music of the Spheres. Then a faint light began to glimmer from an illumined disc. Those who gazed at it knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker—until finally it was quite black. At the same time the surrounding space grew brighter. Again the pupils knew: the black disc represents the earth; the sun, which otherwise radiates light to the earth, is hidden; the earth can see the sun no longer. Then, ring upon ring, rainbow colours appeared around the earth-disc and those who saw it knew: This is the radiant Iris. At midnight, in the place of the black earth-disc, a violet-reddish orb gradually became visible, on which a word was inscribed, varying according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. With us, the word would be Christos. Those who gazed at it knew: It is the sun which appears at the midnight hour, when the world around lies at rest in deep darkness. The pupils were now told that they had experienced what was known in the Mysteries as "seeing the sun at midnight."

He who is truly initiated experiences the sun at midnight, for in him the material is obliterated: the sun of the Spirit alone lives within him, dispelling with its light the darkness of matter. The most holy of all moments in the evolution of man is that in which he experiences the truth that he lives in eternal light, freed from the darkness. In the Mysteries, this moment was represented pictorially, year by year, at the midnight hour of the Holy Night. The picture imaged forth the truth that as well as the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun which, like the physical sun, must be born out of the darkness. In order that the pupils might realise this even more intensely, after they had experienced the rising of the spiritual Sun, of the Christos, they were taken into a cave in which there seemed to be nothing but stone, nothing but dead, lifeless matter. But springing out of the stones they saw ears of corn as tokens of life, indicating symbolically that out of apparent death, life arises, that life is born from the dead stone. Then it was said to them: Just as from this day onwards the power of the sun awakens anew after it seemed to have died, so does new life forever spring from the dying.

The same truth is indicated in the Gospel of St. John in the words: "He must increase, but I must decrease!" John, the herald of the coming Christ, of the spiritual Light, he whose festival day in the course of the year falls at midsummer—this John must ‘decrease’ and in this decreasing there grows the power of the coming spiritual Light, increasing in strength in the measure in which John ‘decreases.’ Thus is the new life, prepared in the seed-grain which must wither and decay in order that the new plant may come into being. The pupils of the Mysteries were to realise that within death, life is resting, that out of the decaying and the dying the new flowers and fruits of spring arise in splendour, that the earth teems with the powers of birth. They were to learn that at this point of time something is happening in the innermost being of the earth: the overcoming of death by life, by the life that is present in death. This was portrayed to them in the picture of the Light gradually conquering the darkness; this is what they experienced as they saw the Light beginning to shine in the darkness. In the rocky cave they beheld the Light that rays forth in strength and glory from what is seemingly dead. Thus were the pupils led on to believe in the power of life, in what may be called man's highest Ideal. Thus did they learn to look upwards to this supreme Ideal of humanity, to the time when the earth shall have completed its evolution, when the Light will shine forth in all mankind. The physical earth itself will then fall into dust, but the spiritual essence will remain with all human beings who have been made inwardly radiant by the spiritual Light. And the earth and humanity will then waken into a higher existence, into a new phase of existence.

When Christianity came into being it bore this Ideal within it. Man felt that the Christos would arise in him as the representative of the spiritual re-birth, as the great Ideal of all humanity and moreover that the birth takes place in the Holy Night, at the time when the darkness is greatest, as a sign and token that out of the darkness of matter a higher Man can be born in the human soul.

Before men spoke of the Christos, they spoke in the ancient Mysteries of a ‘Sun Hero’ who embodied the same Ideal which, in Christianity, was embodied in the Christos. Just as the sun completes its orbit in the course of the year, as its warmth seems to withdraw from the earth and then again streams forth, as in its seeming death it holds life and pours it forth anew, so it was with the Sun Hero, who through the power of his spiritual life had gained the victory over death, night and darkness. In the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. First, the degree of the Ravens who might approach only as far as the portal of the temple of Initiation. They were the channels between the outer world of material life and the inner world of the spiritual life; they did not belong entirely to the material world but neither, as yet, to the spiritual world. We find these ‘Ravens’ again and again; everywhere they are the messengers who pass hither and thither between the two worlds, bringing tidings. We find them too, in our German sagas and myths: the Ravens of Wotan, the Ravens who fly around the Kyffhäuser. At the second degree the disciple was led from the portal into the interior of the temple. There he was made ready for the third degree, the degree of the Warrior who went out to make known before the world the occult truths imparted to him in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the Lion, was reached by one whose consciousness was no longer confined within the bounds of individuality, but extended over a whole tribal stock. For this reason Christ was called "the Lion of the stem of David." To the fifth degree belonged a man whose still wider consciousness embraced a whole people. He was an Initiate of the fifth degree. He no longer bore a name of his own but was called by the name of his people. Thus men spoke of the ‘Persian,’ of the ‘Israelite.’ We understand now why Nathaniel was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of Initiation. The sixth degree was that of the Sun Hero. We must understand the meaning of this appellation. Then we shall realise what awe and reverence surged through the soul of a pupil of the Mysteries who knew of the existence of a Sun Hero. He was able in the Holy Night to participate in the festival of the birth of a Sun Hero.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course: the stars, as well as the sun, follow a regular rhythm. Were the sun to abandon this rhythm even for a moment, an upheaval of untold magnitude would take place in the universe. Rhythm holds sway in the whole of nature, up to the level of man. Then, and only then is there a change. The rhythm which through the course of the year holds sway in the forces of growth, of propagation and so forth, ceases when we come to man. For man is to have his roots in freedom; and the more highly civilised he is, the more does this rhythm decline. As the light disappears at Christmas-time, so has rhythm apparently departed from the life of man: chaos prevails. But man must give birth again to rhythm out of his innermost being, his own initiative. By the exercise of his own will he must so order his life that it flows in rhythm, immutable and sure; his life must take its course with the regularity of the sun. Just as a change of the sun's orbit is inconceivable, it is equally inconceivable that the rhythm of such a life can be broken. The Sun Hero was regarded as the embodiment of this inalterable rhythm; through the power of the higher Man within him, he was able to direct the rhythm of the course of his own life. And this Sun Hero, this higher Man, was born in the Holy Night. In this sense, Christ Jesus is a Sun Hero and was conceived as such in the first centuries of Christendom. Hence the festival of His birth was instituted at the time of the year when, since ancient days, the festival of the birth of the Sun Hero had been celebrated. Hence, too, all that was associated with the history of the life of Christ Jesus; the Mass at midnight celebrated by the early Christians in the depths of caves was in remembrance of the festival of the sun. In this Mass an ocean of light streamed forth at midnight out of the darkness as a remembrance of the rising of the spiritual Sun in the Mysteries. Hence the birth of Christ in the cave—again a remembrance of the cave of rock out of which life was born—life symbolised by the ears of corn. As earthly life was born out of the dead stone, so out of the depths was born the Highest—Christ Jesus. Associated with the festival of His nativity was the legend of the three Priest-Sages, the Three Kings. They bring to the Child: gold, the symbol of the outer, wisdom-filled man; myrrh, the symbol of the victory of life over death; and frankincense the symbol of the cosmic ether in which the Spirit lives.

And so in the whole content of the Christmas Festival we feel something echoing from primeval ages. It has come over to us in the imagery belonging to Christianity. The symbols of Christianity are reflections of the most ancient symbols used by man. The lighted Christmas Tree is one of them. For us it is a symbol of the Tree of Paradise, representing all-embracing material nature. Spiritual Nature is represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

There is a legend which gives expression to the true meaning of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Seth stands before the Gate of Paradise, craving entry. The Cherubim guarding the entrance with a fiery sword, allow him to pass. This is a sign of Initiation. In Paradise, Seth finds the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge firmly intertwined. The Archangel Michael who stands in the presence of God, allows him to take three grains of seed from this intertwined Tree. The Tree stands there as a prophetic indication of the future of mankind. When the whole of mankind has attained Initiation and found knowledge, then only the Tree of Life will remain, there will be no more death. But in the meantime only he who is an Initiate may take from this Tree the three grains of seed -the three seeds which symbolise the three higher members of man's being. When Adam died, Seth placed these three grains of seed in his mouth and out of them grew a flaming bush. From the wood cut from this bush, new sprouts, new leaves burst ever and again. But within the flaming ring around the bush there was written: "I am He who was, who is, who is to be"—in other words, that which passes through all incarnations, the power of ever-evolving man who descends out of the light into the darkness and out of the darkness ascends into the light.

The staff with which Moses performed his miracles is cut from the wood of the bush; the door of Solomon's Temple is made of it; the wood is carried to the waters of the pool of Bethesda and from it the pool receives the healing properties of which we are told. And from this same wood the Cross of Christ Jesus is made, the wood of the Cross which is a symbol of life that passes into death and yet has within it the power to bring forth new life. The great symbol of worlds stands before us here: Life the conqueror of Death. The wood of this Cross has grown out of the three grains of seed of the Tree of Paradise.

The Rose Cross is also a symbol of the death of the lower nature and the resurrection of the higher. Goethe expressed the same thought in the words:

"As long as thou best it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou'rt but a dreary guest
Upon the dark earth."

The Tree of Paradise and the wood of the Cross are connected in a most wonderful way. Even though the Cross is always an Easter symbol, it deepens our conception of the Christmas Mystery too. We feel how in this night of Christ's Nativity, new, upwelling life streams towards us, This thought is indicated in the fresh roses adorning this Tree; they say to us: the Tree of the Holy Night has not yet become the wood of the Cross but the power to become that wood is beginning to arise in it. The Roses, growing out of the green, are a symbol of the Eternal which springs from the Temporal.

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man; physical body, ether-body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol for Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol for Tarok. Those who were initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to interpret this sign. They knew too, how to read the Book of Thoth, consisting of 78 leaves on which were inscribed all happenings in the world from the beginning to the end, from Alpha to Omega and which could be read if the signs were rightly put together. These pictures gave expression to the life that dies and then springs again to new life. Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures, were able to read the Book. This wisdom of numbers and of pictures had been taught from time immemorial. In the Middle Ages it was still in the fore ground although little of it survives to-day.

Above this symbol is the Tao—the sign that is a reminder of the conception of the Divine held by our early forefathers; it comes from the word: TAO. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were scenes of human civilisation, these early forefathers of ours lived on the continent of Atlantis which was finally submerged by mighty floods. In the Germanic sagas of Nifelheim or Nebelheim, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Vast cloud-masses moved over the land, like those to be seen to-day clustering around the peaks of high mountains. The sun and moon did not shine clearly in the heavens—they were surrounded by rainbows—by the sacred Iris. At that time man understood the language of nature. To-day he no longer understands what speaks to him in the rippling of waves, in the noise of winds, in the rustling of leaves, in the rolling of thunder—but in old Atlantis he understood it. He felt it all as a reality. And within these voices of clouds and waters and leaves and winds a sound rang forth: TAO—That am I. The man of Atlantis heard and understood it, feeling that Tao pervaded the whole universe.

Finally, the cosmic symbol of Man is the pentagram, hanging at the top of the tree. Of the deepest meaning of the pentagram we may not now speak. But it is the star of humanity, of evolving humanity; it is the star that all wise men follow, as did the Priest-Sages of old. It symbolises the very essence and meaning of earth-existence. It comes to birth in the Holy Night because the greatest Light shines forth from the deepest Darkness. Man is living on towards a state where the Light is to be born in him, where words full of significance will be replaced by others equally significant, where it will no longer be said: ‘The Darkness comprehendeth not the Light,’ but when the truth will ring out from cosmic space: The Darkness gives way before the Light that shines in the Star of Humanity—and now the Darkness comprehendeth the Light!

This should resound and the spiritual Light ray forth from the Christmas Festival. We will celebrate this Christmas Festival as the Festival of the supreme Ideal of mankind, for then it will bring to birth in our souls the joyful confidence: I too shall experience the birth of the higher Man within me! In me too the birth of the Saviour, the birth of the Christos will take place!

Positions of the symbols on the Christmas Tree