The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From what has been said about the relation of sleeping to waking in man, and also about the membering of his organism, it can be seen that in sleep he experiences a profound cleavage in his earthly existence. We know that a distinction has to be made between the part of man which is materially perceptible to the senses, his physical body, and the part that can be seen only through Imagination, his etheric or formative forces body. This formative forces body embraces also the living forces which enable a man to grow, underlie his nutritive processes and generally build him up. As we have seen, the formative forces body includes also the whole system of a man's thoughts. Intermingled with his formative forces body and his physical body are two higher members, which we may call the astral body and the Ego-organisation.

In a man's life during the day these four members of his being are in active inner relationship with one another. But when he passes into the sleeping state, his physical and etheric bodies separate from the Ego and astral body. They remain—if one may put it thus—in bed, while the astral and Ego organisations enter a purely spiritual world. So that, from his falling asleep until he wakes, a man's being is split in two—on the one hand there are his physical organisation and the etheric that holds his world of thought; on the other, the Ego and the astral organisation.

I believe someone in the course of these days has voiced the misgiving: If in sleep a man's whole thought-world remains in the etheric organisation, then he must be unable to carry effectively into the sleeping state the thoughts which he can grasp only while he is awake. This shows a certain anxiety lest wishes for one's fellow-men, for example, or thoughts relating to an absent one, should lose all power because they cannot be taken over into the life of sleep. I should like to reply with a picture.

You are not very likely to have heard of anyone who, wanting to shoot at a target, thought he had to throw his gun at it. While still holding the gun he lets the charge do the work, and you cannot say that nothing reaches the target because the gun remains in the man's hands. It is just the same in the case we are considering. The effects of our thinking life when we are awake do not cease during sleep because the thoughts remain in the physical and etheric bodies. It is particularly important with these subtle matters that we should be precise in our thinking—precise to a degree unnecessary in the physical world, where the things themselves provide immediate corrections. From what has been said in these last few days, however, you will see that a much more intimate relation exists between the physical body and the etheric body than between the etheric body and the astral organisation. For throughout the whole of an earthly life the physical body and the etheric remain together, never separating even when, in sleep, the etheric body and the astral body have to part company.

There is a close connection, on the other hand, between the Ego and the astral organisation, for neither do they ever part from one another during life on Earth. But the connection between the astral and the etheric bodies is looser, and it is there that the split can occur. This has a quite definite effect on a man's earthly life, and also on his life beyond the Earth. In our waking state we give life to our senses through our Ego, and through the astral body to our nervous system; and what is brought about in this way we send down into the etheric and physical bodies, as we must do if we are to live in the physical world. Hence, because everything has to be imprinted into the physical body, in order to become manifest in life from birth or conception until death, a materialist supposes that the physical body can make up the whole of a man's being.

This work of incorporating the experiences of earthly existence into the etheric body and the physical body does not proceed, however, without meeting obstacles and hindrances. We are never able to send down straight away into the organs of these bodies our experiences and the thoughts embodied in our nervous system, for anything we absorb from the external physical world is at first in a form moulded by that world. If, for example, we perceive something angular, an experience of this angular quality forms itself in our Ego and our astral body. This cannot be taken up immediately into the etheric body, for the etheric body struggles against absorbing anything experienced in the external world of the senses. Imaginative knowledge alone is able to throw light on this situation. No ordinary sense-observation, no material experiment, no intellectual reflection, will help us to a view of this necessary re-forming, re-shaping, of what we perceive with the senses, so as to fit it for living in the etheric body and physical body in such a way that we can separate from it in sleep. It is only when we are able to observe the actual relation between waking and sleeping in earthly man that we come to realise the continuous conflict that goes on in life. Thus—in the case of the crude example already mentioned—if I have to take my experience of an angular object into my etheric and physical bodies, I must first round off its angles and give the object a form suited to those bodies. It has to be completely transformed.

This transforming of anything having as volatile a life as that of the Ego and astral body themselves, and giving it a plastic form capable of living in the etheric body and of continuing its existence as plastic movement in the physical body—this transformation creates an inner struggle not perceived by ordinary consciousness to-day, but anyone who has Imaginative knowledge can perceive it. Generally it lasts two or three days. We have to sleep on an experience for two or often three nights for it to unite with the other experiences already imprinted in the etheric and physical bodies. The dream-world is an actual expression, but only an outward expression, of this struggle. While a man is dreaming, his Ego and his astral body flow into his etheric and physical bodies and come to a sudden stop—as already explained. This check is an expression of the struggle I am now picturing; it goes on for two or three days. Until the experience has been slept upon more than once, it has not gone sufficiently far down into the etheric body, so that where the connection is loose, as it is between astral body and etheric body, a continuous interweaving is to be seen.

If we have here the etheric body and the astral is there asleep, then on the verge of waking or of going to sleep a continuous struggle takes place, a movement full of life, expressed outwardly in the dream, but signifying inwardly this weaving of experiences into the etheric and physical bodies. It is only when a man has slept on some experience two or three times—perhaps more often—that the experience is united with the memories already bound up with his etheric and physical bodies. The point is that the experience has to be transformed into memory, which is left lying in bed during sleep, for a memory is essentially the expression in thought of the physical and etheric bodies.

For Imaginative cognition, perceiving this is an extraordinarily interesting experience. The very form of its expression is significant. We give our ordinary earthly experiences definite outlines in conformity with natural laws. These laws, however, no longer hold good when the experiences merge with the etheric; everything firmly outlined becomes soft and plastic. Whatever was at rest begins to move; anything angular becomes rounded. Intellectual experience passes over into the experience of the artist.

That is the deeper reason why, in those ancient days when people still had instinctive vision, art was rooted in life in a quite different way from anything we have to-day. Even as late as the Renaissance, in the searching back to earlier art there was still in Raphael and other painters at least a tradition of that conversion of the intellectual into the artistic. For the intellectual loses its form, and takes on the nature of art, directly we rise to the super-sensible. The fact that in art to-day people are so strongly inclined to naturalism, wanting models for all their work, shows that they no longer realise its true nature. Humanity must find its way again into the true realm of art.

Human life as I have described it is thus made up in such a way that it is always possible to say: I am experiencing something which will take three days to flow into the etheric body. A day later, the experience of the previous day will flow in. Hence it takes a man two, three, or even four days to complete this uniting of an experience with the etheric body.

Now when a man passes through the gate of death, the etheric body detaches itself from the physical body—something that never happens during earthly life. And now, when the etheric body is free of the physical, all that has been interwoven into the etheric body is gradually dispersed, and this process lasts for about as long—two, three or four days—as the interweaving did. Imagination, which can judge rightly of these matters, shows how during life the physical body holds together, through its resistance, the experiences that have gradually penetrated into the etheric body. When the physical body is laid aside at death, it can be seen how in the first few days afterwards the memories woven into the etheric body pass out into the universal cosmic ether, and dissolve. And so, for two, three or four days after death, a person experiences this dissolving of his accumulated store of memories. This may be called the laying aside of the etheric body, but it involves an ever-increasing enhancement of the memories; they lose the third dimension and become two-dimensional, entirely picture-like. After the gate of death is passed, the person is faced with the whole tableau of his life, taking its course in vivid pictures for two, three or four days, the time varying with each individual.

But just as a student of botany recognises in a seed the plant that will develop from it, so anyone with Imaginative cognition does not see only at death this passing over of the etheric, of the whole memory system, to the cosmos; he has seen it already in picture form, for as a picture it is always present in human beings. Those who can grasp rightly the interweaving that goes on in the course of three days or more see already, in this incorporation of experiences in the etheric body, a picture of the inward experience that is lived through for three or four days after death. Whereas in earthly existence, before acquiring Imaginative cognition, a man experiences more or less unconsciously this blending of his experiences into the memories held together by the physical body, immediately after death he experiences the reverse process, the unwinding, as it were, of his memories and the passing away of them into the Cosmos. Our treasured thoughts, left behind whenever we fall asleep, unite directly after death with the whole Cosmos. This is what in dying we have to yield up to cosmic existence.

These things must not be grasped only intellectually, but also with heart and soul. For in face of them a man feels that his life is not to be taken egoistically, but that he is placed in the world as a thinking being. He will feel that his thoughts are not something he can preserve, for after his death they will flow out into the Cosmos and will go on working there as active forces. If we have had good thoughts, we surrender them to the Cosmos, and if we have had bad thoughts, we surrender them also. For a man does not exist on earth merely to develop himself as a free being. This he certainly should do, and he can do it precisely if he takes something else into consideration. He is here also as a being on whom the Gods themselves may work, in order to lead the Cosmos on from epoch to epoch. Moreover I would say this: What the Gods are to weave into the Cosmos as thoughts has to be prepared by them through all that can be thought and produced during individual human lives. Here is the nurturing-place where the Gods have to tend the thoughts they need for the continuing evolution of the world—thoughts they then incorporate into the Cosmos as active impulses.

During sleep, a man lives with his Ego and astral organisation outside his physical and etheric bodies. While in this state as a being of soul and spirit, as Ego and astral organisation, he is interwoven with the spiritual forces pervading the whole Cosmos. He is in the world that is, figuratively speaking, outside his skin—the world of which the only impressions he receives in waking life come through his senses. During sleep, therefore, he enters right into the things that in waking life show him only their outer side. But it is only what is experienced by the astral organisation, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, that can be brought back into the thoughts of the etheric body, not what is experienced out there by the Ego. Hence, during the whole of our existence on Earth, the experiences of the Ego in sleep remain subconscious for ordinary consciousness, and even for Imaginative consciousness. They are revealed only to Inspired consciousness, as already described.

So this may be said: In sleep a man gathers up sufficient strength to imprint on the etheric body those experiences that can be put into thoughts. But during his life on Earth he lacks the power to deal with the wishes and desires which during sleep are experienced by the Ego in connection with earthly affairs—for these also are gone over during sleep. In our epoch, therefore, only the part of sleep-life that can be transformed into thoughts, imprinted in thoughts, passes over into the conscious waking life of earthly men; while the sleep-experiences of the Ego lie hidden behind the veil of existence.

Imaginative and Inspired consciousness bring to light here things which can be perfectly well understood by any impartial person with a healthy mind, but in our present civilisation they encounter tremendous prejudice. Even the fact that when the three-dimensional in the physical world is imprinted in the etheric body, it changes from the plastic to a picture form, from three to two dimensions—even to grasp this calls for an unprejudiced approach. Directly we rise to Imagination, we no longer have to do with three dimensions, any more than with four, as a misguided science believes, but with two only. The difficulty of picturing what is then experienced comes from our being accustomed in earthly experience to reckon with three dimensions and to form our concepts accordingly. And so, when we should be finding our way over to two dimensions, we say: “Yes, but two dimensions are included in the three; the two dimensions of a plane can lie in such a way that there might still be a third.”

That, however, is not the point. As soon as we enter the Imaginative world, the third dimension no longer concerns us at all, and the position of a plane is immaterial. On our entering the etheric world of Imagination, the third dimension ceases to have any meaning. Hence—and I add this for mathematicians—all equations for the ether must be transformed so as to correspond with the two-dimensional world.

Now if we would pass on to the world accessible to Inspiration, in which we are as Ego between going to sleep and waking, we come to one dimension only; we then have to do with a one-dimensional world. This transition to a one-dimensional world, taken for granted by the faculty of Inspiration—the faculty, that is, of actually perceiving the spiritual in which we live between going to sleep and waking—this understanding of a world with only one dimension has always been part of Initiation-knowledge.

I have already described how the hidden forces of the Sun—not the forces of the external physical sunlight—are revealed to men of the Jacob Boehme type. These hidden Sun-forces do not spread out three-dimensionally, but are perceived in one dimension only. An older, more instinctive Initiation-knowledge could, and did, come to perceive this through Inspiration, but without a clearly conscious knowledge of what it was. Much that is still handed down in the ancient records of long past epochs of mankind is to be understood only when one knows: This refers to the spiritual world that is one-dimensional, the world we find through Inspiration; as regards our earthly life it refers to the hidden forces of the Sun and Stars. Between going to sleep and waking we do not live in Sun-forces that are outwardly displayed, but in those that are hidden.

These hidden forces of the Sun can, for example, pass through certain kinds of stone which are impenetrable to physically perceptible Sun-forces, and by passing through them become one-dimensional. If anyone has acquired Inspirational vision, then, although he may not perceive the physical light, he can see the hidden Sun-forces penetrating the otherwise opaque stone; thus the stone is permeable for the Sun's hidden forces and also for the forces of Inspiration.

In very ancient periods of human evolution on Earth, such expedients were not needed. But when the old instinctive clairvoyance, which in those days was the basis of Initiation-knowledge, was on the wane, these aids were adopted as a short cut—we might say—to the perception of things no longer perceptible through instinctive Inspiration. People had recourse to such measures in the following way, for example. Imagine a number of stones set up beside one another, with other stones laid across the tops of them. If this is so arranged that on certain occasions the penetrating rays of the Sun fall on the covering stone, then the physical rays of the Sun will be held up by the stone and the hidden rays will pass through.

When anyone trained to it places himself so that he can look into this structure from the side, he will see the spiritual, one-dimensional rays of the Sun shining through and vanishing into the earth. If, when all this was no longer perceived through instinctive clairvoyant powers, a short cut of that kind were taken, it enabled anyone looking from the side into the shadow-zone to perceive the world of spiritual Sun-rays which we experience every night during sleep. Hence in such contrivances, to be met with in this very district, we can see by what means, during a long transitional period, certain wise leaders of mankind tried to penetrate to the hidden forces of the Sun, which a man such as Jacob Boehme could do instinctively through simply beholding earthly things.

Although such collections of stones can be seen to-day in appropriate places, their real significance can be brought out only through what Spiritual Science reveals. Otherwise people are left with a superficial explanation which misses the real point.

Such stones can of course be distributed in the circle so as to show how the spiritual rays of the Sun differ according to particular constellations of the stars.

I have been trying to make clear to you the world in which our Ego lives during sleep. This world is not held together by the inherent forces of the physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, however, are alone responsible for the clear consciousness of earthly man; they are the source of the judgments we form, in accordance with our feelings and our will, on our own actions, our inward experiences and thoughts. Hence, when we are awake, we judge our external life according to the thoughts we have been able to imprint in our physical and etheric bodies. But it is not only a human being himself who has something to say about his experiences; his experiences and actions are the concern of the whole spiritual Cosmos. The Cosmos judges whether an action, a thought or feeling is to be declared good or bad. Between waking and sleeping we are left to form our own opinions about ourselves. As I have sufficiently shown during these lectures, the spiritual content of the Cosmos takes the moral as its natural law, and what the Cosmos has to say about our true nature and our actions is experienced by the Ego during sleep. Inspired cognition shows how the Ego, even during the shortest sleep, experiences over again everything the individual has gone through from his last moment of waking until his present sleep—however long or short this period may be. So a man, in the successive states of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, experiences again in sleep whatever he went through during his last waking time, especially where his own activities were concerned.

As far as this is the experience of the Ego, it remains outside ordinary consciousness, but Inspiration can call it up. Then the particular nature of the experience is disclosed, and we find it is gone through in reverse order to our experience by day. Whereas by day you go through your experiences—leaving short sleeps aside—from morning to evening, during the night, in sleep, you live through these experiences backwards—from evening to morning. This is in order that we may experience whatever the spiritual Cosmos has to say about the way we have lived through the day.

During earthly life, however, a man cannot normally call this experience up into consciousness. Yet he must become conscious of it, or his human existence would fall out of connection with cosmic existence. Inspired cognition shows that as soon as a man after death has watched his life-tableau, which, as I have said, lasts two, three, or four days, and as soon as his memories have dissolved into the Cosmos, spreading themselves out there—after this experience, often referred to as the freeing of the etheric body—a time comes when the man is able to look back on his earthly life again, but in a different way.

If we look at those few days after death, we come to a mighty panorama of our life, but at first it embraces daytime experiences alone. In reality, however, a man goes through not only his waking experiences but also those he has had during sleep. When in earthly life you look back on your ordinary memories, you always leave out your periods of sleep, as if your only experiences had been those lived through by day. And so it goes on right back to the time after birth when your memories cease.

In fact it is like this with the panorama that appears during those two or three days after death. Then, later, comes a period when soul and spirit have gained sufficient strength to experience in the spiritual world all that could manifest only unconsciously, in picture form, while we were asleep at night during our life on Earth. It now comes before us as experience. A man then passes through a period—lasting about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally spent in sleep—when he experiences his nights again, but in a backward direction. So he lives through his last night first, then the night before, and so on right back to the time of his birth and conception.

From other points of view I have described this going back through a quite different world after death in my book, Theosophy, when I was speaking of man, as a being of soul and spirit, passing through the soul-world.

Now when after death a man has gone thus through the soul-world, taking about seven years for it if he has lived twenty-one years, or, if he has lived to sixty, perhaps twenty years—always the length of time he has slept in earthly life—he has then to experience the total effect he has had upon Earth-existence—an existence created by the Gods in order to carry the world, with the help of the human race, a little further on its progress. Up to the end of this backward survey of his nights after death, a man has been gaining knowledge of what he has himself become, of his significance for the Cosmos. He now has to experience how the Earth itself has been affected by his life. This takes a long time—half the time, indeed, between earthly death and a new earthly life. Tomorrow we shall have to speak of this in greater detail.

After going backwards through our nights, we come to our birth; and having arrived there, after this backward journey through the soul-world, we have to find the way back to our previous earthly life. This enables a man to bring over with him that previous life for the shaping of his next life on Earth.

Here we enter the realm of the old Initiation-knowledge (which must be renewed to-day in a way suited to men's present faculties.) The old Initiation-knowledge led people over to religious experience. For Initiation-knowledge is always true knowledge, but of a kind that leads out from the world of the senses into the spiritual, so that the human will is stirred to take a religious form. At the stage of Initiation which leads to the Intuitive-knowledge already described, it has always been recognised as of the utmost importance that when a man goes back to his previous life on Earth, he should meet on the way a being who can become his guide after death.

In a certain region of the Earth a man would say to himself: In my earthly life I must absorb the teaching of the last Bodhisattva to appear on earth. The man may have lived three hundred years after the appearance of this Bodhisattva. But when after death he went back to his previous life on Earth, he arrived at the time when the last Bodhisattva was living on Earth. In the old Initiation-knowledge, this meeting with the last Bodhisattva to appear on the Earth was regarded as enabling the man to make a real contact with his own previous earthly life—which means finding the necessary strength for eternal life, for this can be found only when real contact with the previous earthly life is achieved.

Any possibility of this meeting with the Bodhisattvas, who descend to Earth from certain spiritual regions, ceased at a definite time in human evolution, in world-evolution. And to-day a man would have been unable, when after death he had gone back to his last birth and conception, to go further and make contact with his previous earthly lives. The way to this could be found by a man during the first millennia of earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, in going back, he came to the time of the last Bodhisattva. Today, however, he will find the way only if he makes the journey under the leadership of that Being who united Himself with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; if, in other words, he enters into such a relation with the Mystery of Golgotha that Christ can become his guide. For the Christ gathers into Himself all those powers of leadership for life between death and rebirth which used to belong to the Bodhisattvas who appeared on Earth.

Thus the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, with its particular bearing on our experience between death and rebirth, is one of the most important facts in the whole evolution of the Earth. If anyone wishes to learn about the spiritual evolution of the Earth and the place it takes in the spiritual evolution of the Cosmos, and if moreover he wishes to understand what a man goes through in connection with this spiritual evolution of Earth and Cosmos during his life between death and a new birth, then he must give the Mystery of Golgotha its right place in the whole evolution of the world. For people to-day, therefore, a way must be found that will lead attention over from the evolution of man to the evolution of the world, so that the Mystery of Golgotha is seen in all its fundamental significance for the course of events in the evolution of the Earth and in the evolution of man within the earthly.

With these matters, as far as modern Initiation-knowledge can reveal them—matters relating to the later experiences of human beings after death, when they have gone back in memory through their night-experiences—we will deal further tomorrow, in connection with the evolution of the world.

I began my lecture yesterday with a brief outline of a man's experiences in sleep, and of how in a certain sense they presage his experiences after death. These sleep-experiences lie beyond the so-called threshold which, in course of our days here, has often been mentioned. The experiences I am now going to describe are gone through by all human beings when asleep, though they do not rise up into ordinary consciousness in life on Earth, but are accessible only to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Because they do not enter consciousness, we should not believe they do not exist; they do exist, and we go through them. If I am allowed a simile—it is as though a man were led through a room blindfold. He does not see anything, but he has to exert himself to walk, and he can have some experience of many things in the room, although he cannot see them. What I am going to describe concerning the time between going to sleep and waking is plunged, as it were, in darkness, since the consciousness is blind to it, but it is positively lived through by human beings, and the effects of all we experience in sleep enter our waking life. Thus we understand rightly what anyone goes through, from the time of waking until going to sleep, only when we look upon it as combining the after-effect of his last sleep with whatever he does through his physical and etheric bodies during the day.

Now when a man goes to sleep, at first an indefinite feeling of anxiety comes over him. In ordinary life on Earth this anxiety does not rise into consciousness, does not actually manifest; but it is there as a process in the man's astral body and Ego, and he carries over its results into his waking state during the next day. If this anxiety were not carried over, were not to work in waking life as a force in physical body and etheric body, the man would be unable to hold together his physical constitution so that, for example, it may secrete salts and similar substances in the right way. This secretion, necessary for the organism, is throughout an effect of subconscious anxiety during the life of sleep. First of all in sleep, therefore, we enter what I might call a sphere of anxiety.

Then a condition arises in the soul like a continuous swinging to and fro, from a state of inner tranquillity to one of uneasiness—such a movement to and fro that, if the man were conscious of it, he might believe he was alternately beginning to faint and then recovering. Thus the anxiety sets going a constant alternation between self-control and the losing of it.

Thirdly comes a feeling of standing on the brink of an abyss with the ground giving way under one’s feet and that at any moment one might fall into the depths.

You see that at this moment when a man is falling asleep, conditions in the Cosmos are already beginning to rise from the physical to the moral. For the second state we enter on going to sleep can be properly judged only when we recognise that moral laws in the Cosmos have the validity of natural laws on Earth—only, that is, when we feel their reality with the same certainty we have in speaking of a stone falling to the ground, or of an engine driven by its steam. Nevertheless, in earthly life, because a man's strength is still limited, he is for the present protected by the kindly guidance of the world from experiencing consciously all that he goes through unconsciously every night.

The ordering of the Cosmos is such that even the things which shine out in the greatest beauty, the most lofty splendour, must have their roots in sorrow, suffering and renunciation. In the background of every beautiful appearance are pain and self-denial. In the universe this is just as inevitable as that the angles of a triangle should add up to 18o degrees. It is mere foolishness to ask why the Gods have not so organised the Cosmos that it would give men pleasure only. They bring about necessities. This was indeed divined in the Egyptian Mysteries, for example. They called the conscious perception of what occurs in sleep—the anxiety, the swinging to and fro between keeping hold of oneself and become powerless, and the standing on the brink of an abyss—the world of the three iron necessities.

These experiences during sleep produce in the man, again unconsciously, a profound yearning towards the divine which he then feels to be filling, penetrating, permeating, the whole Cosmos. For him, then, the Cosmos resolves itself into a kind of hovering, weaving, ever-moving cloud-formation, in which one is living, able at every moment to feel oneself alive, but at the same time realising that at any moment one could be submerged in all this weaving and living. A man feels himself interwoven with the weaving, surging movement of the divine throughout the world. And in the pantheistic feeling for God which comes to every healthy human being during waking life, there is the aftermath, the consequence, of the pantheistic feeling for God which is experienced unconsciously during sleep. A man then feels his soul to be filled with an inner unconscious conviction, born, one might say, out of anxiety and powerlessness; and filled also with something like an inner force of gravity in place of the ordinary gravity of the physical world.

The Rosicrucian mystery-teachings gave expression to what comes over a man when he sinks into the realm of the three iron necessities. The experience that would come to the pupils immediately after going to sleep was explained. They were told: Your daytime experiences sink into moving, floating cloud-formations, but these reveal themselves as having the nature of beings. You yourself are interwoven with these clouds, and you hover in anxiety and powerlessness on the edge of an abyss. But you have already discovered what then should be brought to your consciousness in three words—words which should pervade your whole soul: Ex Deo nascimur. This Ex Deo nascimur, so vague for ordinary consciousness, but raised into consciousness for students of the new Mysteries, is what a man first experiences on entering the state of sleep.

Later in these lectures we shall see how this Ex Deo nascimur plays an historic part also in the world-evolution of mankind. What I am now describing is the part it plays during earthly existence in the life of each single man, personally, individually.

If the man continues to sleep, the next stage is that the ordinary view of the Cosmos, as seen from the Earth, ceases. Whereas at night the Earth the glittering, shining stars are there for him, together with the Moon, and by day the Sun playing upon his senses, at a certain moment during sleep he sees how this whole starry world vanishes. The stars cease as physical entities, but in the places where they appeared physically to the senses there come forth from their rays—which have vanished—the genii, the spirits, the gods, of the stars. For conscious Inspiration the Cosmos changes into a speaking universe, declaring itself through the music of the spheres and the cosmic word. The Cosmos is then made up of living spiritual beings, in place of the Cosmos visible to the senses from the Earth.

This is experienced in such a way that, if a man became conscious of it, he would feel as if the whole spiritual Cosmos, from every side, was pronouncing judgment on what he has made of himself as a human being through all his deeds, both good and evil. He would feel that in his human worth he was bound up with the Cosmos.

What comes to him first of all, however—and if he could experience it consciously, as Inspiration does, he would notice this—is bewildering, and he has need of a guide. In the present period of human evolution this guide appears if, during life on Earth, a man has woven in his soul and heart a thread uniting him with the Mystery of Golgotha; if, that is, he has created a bond with the Christ, who, as Jesus, went through the Mystery of Golgotha. The feeling that immediately lays hold of a man at the present time—we will speak tomorrow of other epochs—is that, in the sphere he now enters, his bewildered soul would surely disintegrate if the Being who has come to be the very life of his conceptions and feelings, and of the impulses of his heart—if the Christ were not to be his Guide.

The approach of the Christ as Guide—who in this sphere must be conceived of as connected with the life of the Sun, just as the man is connected with earthly life—is felt again in the same way that it was when a medieval Mystery School brought it before the souls of the pupils with the words: In Christo morimur. For the feeling is that the soul must perish should it not die in Christ, thereby dying into cosmic life.

In this way a man lives through the experiences of sleep. After perceiving the stars of the Cosmos in their essential being, and because he cannot attain to conscious wakefulness in this sphere, a longing comes over him to return to the sphere where he is conscious. That is why we wake; it is the force by which we are awakened. We develop an unconscious feeling that, because of what we have absorbed from the real being of the stars, from the star Gods, we shall not be spiritually empty when we wake; for we bring down with us, into the daily life of the body, the spirit dwelling in our soul.

The pupils in the medieval Mystery Centres were made aware of this feeling, the third in the series of nightly, personal experiences of human beings on Earth, by a third saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. This threefold experience of the spiritual world lying beyond the Guardian of the Threshold—who is ignored only by men of the present epoch—is thus perceptible in three stages, and at the same time they imprint on the human soul what can truly be called the Trinity—the Trinity which permeates spiritual life, weaving and living throughout it.

What I have been describing here is experienced by a man every night in a picture, and into this picture are woven his daytime experiences, going backwards in time. Just as we find our earthly experiences interwoven with those of natural processes during waking life, so during the night we experience this backward repetition interwoven with memories of the starry world. But all this is at first a picture.

This can be realised only when a man has gone through the gate of death. Here on Earth it is a picture experienced backwards. It becomes real only when, after three or four days, we have completed the panoramic survey of our memories described yesterday, and we enter the spiritual world no longer in terms of pictures, as we do every night, but in reality.

If anyone wishes to bring before his soul with a right understanding the experiences that are gone through consciously after the gate of death is passed, the following must be borne in mind. The Gods, the spiritual Beings we meet from the metamorphosed stars, take a different cosmic direction in their lives from that followed by human beings in earthly existence. Here we touch on a very important truth about the spiritual worlds, though it is not generally recognised when the spiritual worlds are spoken of theoretically and with little perception. When we are conscious as earthly men in earthly existence, we have a physical body and an etheric body so organised that a later experience always follows an earlier one and we find ourselves carried along in a particular stream of time. It is characteristic of our physical and etheric bodies to take this direction in the Cosmos. In so far as we are human beings, we experience everything in this sequence.

Those beings whom we met on rising to life between death and rebirth—when we discover the reality behind the pictures of our sleep-experience—move and come towards us always from the opposite direction. So that, in accordance with what in earthly life is called time, we must say: The Gods have spiritual bodies—one could equally well say, bodies of light—with which they move from the most distant future towards the past.

During the time between death and rebirth our bodies are of this same nature; we acquire them just as here on Earth we acquire the physical substance of our physical body. Divine bodies clothe us, and with them we draw round us what in my book Theosophy I have called Spirit-Man and Life-Spirit. By so doing we find our direction reversed, and so we live through our life backwards until we reach our birth and conception. In life on Earth we start from birth or conception, and—if we think of a circle—during existence on Earth we complete the top half. When that existence is over, we return through the lower half of the circle to our birth and conception. Just as on leaving our home we might walk in a certain direction and return, completing a circle in space, so—since in the world we enter after death there is no space—we have now to complete a circle in time. In time, it is a going out and coming back. Between birth and death we go out and then, having had this experience, we go backwards through the experiences of our nights as spiritual realities, until we return to the point of time at which we started.

In this materialistically thinking age little is said about such circles of life, and we have to go back in human evolution on Earth if we are to find words to express what really happens. If we turn to the old Oriental wisdom, with its less conscious insight into things than we have to-day, and its dreamlike clairvoyance, we find there a wonderful expression, evidently derived from an insight we can recover if we cross the threshold with real understanding, and pass the Guardian consciously when entering the spiritual world.

When the spiritual world is described in theories built up at any rate half-intellectually, it is not far removed from a materialistic picture of the Cosmos. It shows a human being as beginning his life at birth, then becoming a child and later a youth or young girl, growing older and approaching death—and then on and on in a straight line which naturally is never brought to an end. Anyone with knowledge of Initiation knows how nonsensical it is to talk of an end. This road has no ending: it turns back on itself. And the wonderful expression used by the old Oriental Initiates to describe this fact is “the wheel of births”.

There is much talk of this “wheel of births”, but little of it nowadays points to the truth. In fact we have accomplished the first revolution of this wheel at the end of our journey around the stars, which takes about one-third of our whole earthly life—the time, that is, we spend in sleep on Earth. We have then completed the first revolution, and in the life between death and rebirth we can await further revolutions of the wheel.

That is how it is when, with knowledge awakened through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we make our way into the worlds lying behind the veil of the sense-world. These are worlds that once, in a remote period of evolution, were open to man as a heritage from a past age, when he associated with divine-spiritual Beings in the way described. It is only when some insight into the spiritual worlds takes us back to ancient times, when people knew about these worlds, that it becomes possible to understand all that has come down to us from the old wisdom. And then we are filled with wonder at this primeval wisdom of mankind. So that anyone who has received Initiation at the present time can do no other than look up to those ancient days of man's earthly existence with admiration, with reverence.

Something else can be seen from this—that only through the Spiritual Science of to-day can we arrive again at the true form in which things were perceived of old. People who want to shut out modern Spiritual Science have no means of understanding the language spoken by those who possessed the primeval wisdom of mankind; hence they are fundamentally unable to picture things historically. Those who know nothing of the spiritual world are often quite naive in the way they expound and interpret the old records of primeval peoples. So, in documents which perhaps contain primeval wisdom now obscured, we find ringing out such wonderful words as “the wheel of births”. These words must be understood by rediscovering the reality to which they allude. People who want to give a picture of the true history of mankind on Earth must therefore not shrink from first learning to know the meaning of the language used in those far-off days.

I might very well have begun by picturing the historical evolution of mankind in the terms used in the ancient records; but then you would not have heard words used merely as words, as they so often are in the world to-day. Hence, if one is to give a true picture of that part of the world of reality lived through by a man during his historical period, one has to start by describing his relation to the spiritual worlds. For only in this way are we enabled to find our way about in the language used, and in all that was done in those ancient times to maintain a connection with the spiritual worlds.

Yesterday I described how the Druid priests set up stones and screened them in such a way that, by gazing into the shadow thrown within this structure and looking through the stones, they could gain information concerning the will of the spiritual worlds which impressed itself into the physical. But something else also was connected with this. In the spiritual world there is not only a going away, but also always a coming back. Just as there are forces of time which carry us forward through physical existence on Earth, and after death draw us backwards again, so, in the structures set up by the Druids, there are forces descending from above and also forces ascending from below. Hence in these structures the Druid priests watched both a downward and an upward stream. When their structures were set up on appropriate sites, the priests could perceive not only the will of divine Spirits coming down from the Cosmos but—because in the upward stream the one-dimensional prevailed—they could perceive the good or bad elements which belonged to members of their community and flowed out from them into the Cosmos. Thus these stones served as an observatory for the Druid priests, enabling them to see how the souls of their people stood in relation to the Cosmos.¹

All these secrets, all these mysteries, are connected with things that have remained from ancient times, and exist now in so decadent a form. They can be understood only when through the power of individual Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, the world of the Spirit is raised once more out of its hidden existence and brought into consciousness.

These circular movements—which are of course meant metaphorically, since one is moving in the one-dimensional realm—are gone through repeatedly during a man's life between death and a new birth. And as with this revolution—going out from birth to death and returning from death to birth—so do others take their course in the whole of a man's life between death and rebirth, but in such a way that there is always a change of level between the experience of the going out and the experience of returning. In the first round of the wheel of birth, the distinction lies in our experiencing the out-going half up to death, and the return half—which lasts, when measured by earthly time, for a third of our life on Earth—immediately after physical death. Then the first round has been completed. Others follow, and we go on making such rounds until we come to a very definite place from which we can journey back in the way I shall be picturing tomorrow. We continue to complete these rounds of the wheel until we reach the point, in our life as a whole, which indicates the death we experienced in our last incarnation.

Thus in circles—though our first experience after death is a looking backwards, a living backwards—we live through what we underwent between our last death and last birth into Earth-existence. Each of these circular journeys corresponds in its outgoing to a cosmic life of sleep. If one were to describe further these circles, one would say that the outgoing always corresponds with a life after death, in that a man with his whole being goes out more into the cosmic world and is conscious of living within it—of becoming one with it.

When a man comes back into himself from the cosmic world, this return corresponds with his working on what he has experienced there, and now realises to be united with himself. As here on Earth we must have alternate sleeping and waking for a healthy life, between death and a new birth we have always to experience a flowing out into the Cosmos, when we feel ourselves to be as great and all-embracing as the Cosmos itself, and perceive the creations and deeds of the Cosmos as our own. We identify ourselves with the whole Universe so entirely that we say: That which you beheld with your physical eyes as an Earth-dweller; that which looked down on you in its physical reflection as the Cosmos of stars—in this you are now living. It is not, however, as physical stars but as divine-spiritual Beings that they are now uniting their existence with yours. You have, as it were, dissolved into the life of the Cosmos, and the divine-spiritual Beings of the Cosmos are living within you. You have identified yourself with them. That is one part of the experience we pass through between death and a new birth—whether you call it cosmic night or cosmic day. The terms used on Earth are naturally a matter of indifference to the Gods living in the spiritual world. In order to bring home to ourselves what we experience out there, we have to use earthly forms of speech, but they must be such as will correspond with the reality.

The times in which we grow together with the Cosmos, identify ourselves with the whole Cosmos, are followed by other times when we draw back, as it were, into a single point within ourselves—when everything we first experienced as being poured out into the whole Cosmos is now felt as a cosmic memory, inwardly united with ourselves. We feel the wheel of births as though perpetually turning, carrying us out into the Cosmos and back into ourselves, there to experience in miniature what we have lived through out there. Then we go out again, and return again, following a spiral path. The wheel of births can indeed be described as a spiral movement, perpetually turning in on itself. In this way, between death and a new birth, we progress through an alternation of self-experience and self-surrender. To say this, however, takes us only as far as if we were to describe events on Earth in the course of the twenty-four hours by saying: Human beings sleep and wake. We have merely gone that far with such a description of a man's experience between death and a new birth in the spiritual world. For the outgoing surrender and the drawing back again of the self in the spiritual world are similar to waking and sleeping in earthly life. And as in earthly life only those events a man has lived through find a place, so in the completion of these wheels of births and deaths the spiritual events involved are those a man has actually experienced between death and rebirth. In order to grasp these events we must form a sound conception of how matters really stand for a man in earthly life.

Strictly speaking, a man is awake only in his conceptual world and in a closely connected part of his world of feeling. When he intends to do anything, if only to pick up a pencil, his intention lives in a concept and shoots down into the will, which then makes a demand on the muscles, until the further concept of having grasped the pencil comes to him. All this activity, expressing his will and desire, remains shrouded in darkness for his earthly consciousness; it resembles his life of sleep. Only in our concepts and in part of our feeling-life are we normally awake. In the other part of our feeling, the part that approves or disapproves the actions of the will, and in the will itself, we are asleep.

Now we do not take our thoughts with us after death. We take them into that life after death as little as we take them with us at night. In the world between death and a new birth we have to form our own thoughts in keeping with that world. We do, however, take with us that which lies in our subconscious—our will and the part of our feeling connected with it. It is precisely with everything of which we are unconscious in earthly life, with all that lives in our impulses and desires, and in our will influenced by the senses, and with all that lives spiritually in our will—it is with all this that we go through the time between death and rebirth, making conscious our cosmic thoughts about our unconscious experiences on Earth.

If we wish to understand the times lived through immediately beyond the gate of death, we must be clear that the experiences which come to the soul from the physical body take on another aspect directly we no longer possess a physical body. It is not your physical body, with its chemical substances, that experiences hunger and thirst; these are experiences of the soul. But it is through the physical body that all such cravings are satisfied here on Earth. Hunger lives in the soul, and in earthly life hunger is satisfied through the body; through the body thirst is quenched, although thirst, too, lives in the soul. When you have passed the gate of death you no longer have a physical body, but you still have thirst and hunger. You carry them through the gate of death, and for a third of the length of your life on Earth, while you are going backwards through your nights, you have time to disaccustom yourself from thirst, hunger, and all other desires experienced only through the body. Herein consists the inner experience after death of this third of your life on Earth: everything that can be gratified only through the body—or at any rate only in earthly life—is purged from the soul, and the soul is freed from these desires. We shall see later what lies further on.

I have now given you a description of part of a man's experience after he passes through the gate of death—a description based on what we have gone into to-day. To-morrow we will look further into the life between death and rebirth, in its connection with the whole earthly evolution of mankind. We must, however, be clear about the scope of the events which enter into earthly life. A great deal that can now be investigated only through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition was at one time open to people through a kind of instinctive vision. The night was not such a closed book for them. Their waking life took a more dreamlike course, and in its dream-pictures revealed more of the spiritual world.

I should like now to draw attention to something you will see more clearly during the next few days. We are living in an age when human beings are exposed in the highest degree to the danger of losing all connection with the spiritual world. And perhaps, as we are so close here to centres reminiscent of the old European Druids, it will be appropriate to mention certain symptoms, which, though not harmful in themselves, show not only what is taking place on Earth but also what is happening spiritually behind the scenes of existence.

Now consider medieval man, including his shadow-side; consider the so-called Dark Ages; compare all this with mankind to-day. I will take only two symptoms which can show us how, from the spiritual standpoint, we should look upon the world. Turn to a medieval book. Every single letter is as though painted in. We seem actually to see how the eye rested on those characters. The writer's whole mood of soul, when it rested upon the written letters in those days, was attuned to enter deeply into whatever could come to him as revelations of the spiritual worlds.

And now consider a great deal of handwriting to-day—it is hardly legible! The letters cannot give one anything like the pleasure one has from a painting; they are thrown on the paper as though with a mechanical movement of the hand—or so it appears very often. Moreover the time is already beginning when there will no longer be any writing by hand—nothing but typewriting—and we shall no longer experience any connection with the words on the paper. This, and the motorcar, are the two symptoms which show what is going on behind the scenes of existence, and how human beings are driven away more and more from the spiritual world.

Do not think I want to come before you as a typical reactionary who would like to put a stop to cars and typewriters, or even to this terrible handwriting. Anyone who realises how the world is going knows very well that such things have to be; they are justified. Hence there is no question of abolishing them; I am saying only that in dealing with them we should be on our guard. These things have to come and must be accepted in the same way that we accept night and day, although enthusiasm for them may be found chiefly among people who are strongly inclined to materialism. All these developments, however, the illegible handwriting, the distressing noise of typewriters, and the quite horrible rushing of motorcars—all this has to be faced in order that men should rightly develop a vigorous approach to spiritual knowledge, spiritual feeling, and spiritual will. There is no question of fighting against the material, but of getting to know its reality and necessity; and also of seeing how essential it is that strength of spirit should be brought to bear against the crushing weight of physical existence. Then, through a swing of the pendulum between cars and typewriters and Imaginations and insight into the spiritual world—the fruits of spiritualscientific work—the healthy development of mankind can be furthered, which otherwise can only be prejudiced.

This has to be said particularly in Penmaenmawr, for here, on the one hand, we perceive how the Imaginations from the old days of the Druids remain, as I have already described; while on the other hand we discover how forcibly these Imaginations are destroyed by the rushing of motorcars through the atmosphere.

• 1. See the volume of four lectures given by Dr. Steiner in September, 1923, shortly after his return to the Continent from Penmaenmawr. The volume is entitled: Man in the Past, the Present and the Future. These three lectures are followed by a fourth, The Sun-Initiation of the Druid Priest and his Moon-science. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)

If we wish to bring before our souls the nature of our experiences between death and rebirth, we must above all grasp the great difference between them and those of earthly life. Here on Earth we carry out whatever we do in such a way that once done, it separates from us—it no longer belongs to us. For example, we manufacture various things and they become detached from us. Most people get free of them by selling them. Hence we find that anything a man makes on Earth, as the outcome of his will, goes out into the world in such a way that he feels relatively—I say expressly, relatively—little connection with it. And the thoughts out of which he creates something on Earth slip back within him, into his inner being, where they either remain merely passive or become memories, habits, aptitudes.

It is different between death and a new birth. There, everything a man achieves flows back to him, in a certain sense.

Now we must remember that here on Earth we carry out the impulses of our will on things belonging to the kingdoms of nature—on the minerals, plants and animals. We more or less mould them, move them around, and even set other people into motion.

In the spiritual world, between death and rebirth, we are among purely spiritual Beings, partly with those whose whole existence has been in the spiritual world, who have never been incorporated in earthly substance. Among such Beings belong the higher Hierarchies—the Angels, the Exusiai, the Seraphim and Cherubim. Other names may be preferred; but here, too, there is no need to quarrel over terminology. These particular names are old and venerable; they may well be used now for what we are rediscovering in spiritual realms.

Between his death and rebirth, accordingly, a man dwells partly among such Beings, and partly with the souls of men who have cast off their earthly bodies and taken on spiritual ones; or with those souls who are awaiting their coming re-descent to Earth. This co-existence, it is true, depends somewhat on whether we are connected with such souls, whether we have formed a bond with them in earthly life. For those persons with whom we have not been in close contact on Earth have little to do with us in the spiritual world. I shall have more to say about this.

Then, too, a man stands in relation to other beings who have never been so directly incorporated in earthly life as he was himself, for they are at a lower stage and not ready to take on human form. These are the elemental beings who live in the kingdoms of nature, in the plant kingdom, in the kingdom of the rocks, of the minerals, as well as in that of the animals. Thus, between death and rebirth, a man grows together with the whole spirit-populated world.

I must add that these beings are perceptible to Inspired, Intuitive and Imaginative consciousness, for with these forms of consciousness one can see into the world where we live between death and a new birth.

Because a man lives then in a quite different way, his whole mood and condition are changed. When here on Earth, for example—I am coming back to this same important theme—we make a machine, our action, the handling and fitting together of the parts, flow from our will and our thoughts. But all this becomes detached from us. When between death and a new birth we are in the spiritual world—where as souls we are continually active, always doing something—there shines out from our actions something we recognise as thoughts living in light. Here on Earth a thought stays with us; there, it shines out in everything we do, gleaming as a being of light. So that in the spiritual world we can never do anything without a thought springing from it. This thought is not like the thought of an earthly human being which he can often conceal, however harmful it may be, for it is a personal, individual thought. But in the life between death and rebirth the thought which springs out of things is a cosmic thought, expressing the response of the whole spiritual cosmic world to what we are doing.

Now picture this to yourselves vividly. In the life between death and a new birth a man is active. Through his activity, every action by the soul, every grasping, one might say every touch, immediately changes into a cosmic thought, so that in doing anything we imprint it on the spiritual world. Then on all sides an answer rings back from the Cosmos; out of what we do there flashes up what the Cosmos says of it, and this cosmic verdict is final. But that is not all. In this flashing up of the cosmic world of thought, something else glimmers—other thoughts which we cannot say originate in the Cosmos. Thus we find the brilliantly flashing thoughts permeated by all sorts of dark thoughts, glimmering out of our surroundings.

While the brightly gleaming thoughts from the Cosmos fill us with a profound feeling of pleasure, the glimmering ones—very often, though not always—carry something extraordinarily disquieting; for they are thoughts still working on from our life on Earth. If we have cultivated good thoughts during earthly life, they glimmer out, after death, from the radiant cosmic environment. If we have cherished bad thoughts, evil thoughts, they may be said to glimmer out towards us from the shining thoughts of the cosmic verdict.

In this way we behold both what the Cosmos is saying to us and what we ourselves have brought with us to the Cosmos. This is not a world that detaches itself from a person; it remains intimately bound up with him. After death he bears within him his cosmic existence, and, as a memory, his last existence on Earth. His next task is to lay aside this earthly life and to accustom himself to a different way of living, so that he may become a cosmic being in the true sense. As long as we are in that region of spiritual experience which in my book, Theosophy, I called the soul-world, we are pre-occupied with this aftermath of glimmering earthly thoughts, earthly ways of life, earthly aptitudes. Because of this we make what we feel could be beautiful cosmic forms into grotesque ones, and so, under the guidance of these distorted cosmic forms during our passage through the soul-world, we wander on through the Cosmos until we are freed from everything binding us to the Earth. Then we can find our way into the realm called spirit-land in my book, Theosophy. We have then left behind the state of soul habitual to us in physical life on Earth, and we are able to act in perfect accordance with the admonitions of those spiritual Beings whose realm we have to enter as the only one where it is possible for us to be.

You will see that a man does not take with him into the world after death anything that lives in his physical and etheric bodies. That is thrown off and sinks away into the Cosmos. He takes with him only what as Ego and astral body he has experienced within his physical and etheric bodies.

Something of outstanding significance and importance follows from this. While a man is going about on Earth, he regards his physical body and his etheric body—of which he knows little, but at least he feels it in his powers of growth, and so on—as his own body, but he has no right to do so. Only his Ego and his astral body are his. Everything present in his physical body and etheric body—even while he is on Earth—is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings who live and weave within them, and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep. It would go badly with anyone if he had to care for his own etheric and physical bodies in continual wakefulness between birth and death. Time and time again he is obliged to hand over his physical and etheric bodies to the Gods—especially during childhood, for then sleep is the most important thing of all. Later in life sleep works only as a corrective; the really fructifying sleep is the sleep that comes to a child in the first years of its life. Thus the human being has continually to be yielding up both physical and etheric bodies to the care of the Gods.

In past ages of human evolution this was so clearly perceived that the body was called the temple of the Gods, for so was its wonderful structure experienced. And in all architectural work—this can best be seen in oriental buildings, but also in those of Egypt and of Greece—the laws of the physical body and the etheric body were followed. In the very way the Cherubim are set on the temples of the East, in the attitude of a sphinx, or in the placing of pillars—in all this the work of divine-spiritual Beings in the human physical and etheric bodies has been made to live again. In the course of evolution, consciousness of this has been lost; and to-day we refer to the physical body as our own—with no notion of how unjustified this is—whereas as an earthly creation it belongs in reality to the Gods. Hence, when anyone to-day talks of “my body”, when he speaks of the healthy functioning of his body as due to himself, it is just an instance of the prodigious arrogance of modern man—a subconscious pride, certainly, expressed with no awareness of it, but none the less deplorable. It shows how in speaking of their bodies as their own, people are really laying claim to the property of the Gods, and this pride is embodied in their very speech.

To all these things attention must be drawn anew by Spiritual Science; it must show how a moral element is already mixed into our ordinary naturalistic life—and truly, as we have seen in the case just referred to, it can take a by no means healthy form. These matters show how, through genuine spiritual knowledge, our whole feeling life can be so transformed that, if Spiritual Science has been really understood, even ways of speaking can become different from the way in which people like to talk under the influence of purely materialistic thinking.

In order to understand the further experience we have between death and rebirth, we must be able to recall what was said yesterday—that, on growing accustomed to the spiritual world, a man loses the physical aspect of the stars and in its stead there arises the spiritual counterpart of the brilliance of their rays which meet the eye physically. Just as the Earth is the dwelling-place of men who, with their Ego and astral body, live upon it as spiritual beings, so certain spiritual Beings dwell in every single star. And during his physical life a man is connected also with elemental beings dwelling in the kingdoms of the minerals, plants and animals. He is also connected through his ordinary bodily life with other human souls. Then, between death and a new birth, he is in connection with the dwellers on other stars, and his life is actually spent in experiencing the world of the stars through its spiritual counterpart, through life in common with the other divine-spiritual Beings dwelling there.

We have already seen how, immediately after earthly life, we pass through existence in the soul-world, and how it is essentially a living backwards through all that we have slept through in unconscious imagery during our nights on Earth. One-third of the duration of a man's earthly life is thus spent in weaning himself from that which his glimmering thoughts carry into the thoughts of the Cosmos. Anyone who has lived to the age of sixty, say, on Earth, will therefore go through the soul-world in twenty years, while he is working his way out of everything connecting him with physical existence. Inwardly, during this time after death, he experiences his coming into relation with the world of the stars, and especially with the Moon. Yesterday I spoke of a man describing a circle, as it were, completing the first half between birth and death, and the return half in a third of that time. I would now add that he feels this circling to take place round the Moon-existence and the spirits belonging to it. As I pointed out yesterday, he is not conscious of returning to his birth, and so his movement is not actually a circle but a spiral, a progressive spiral.

The reason why we do not simply circle round the Moon, but move on to approach another state of existence, is partly the onward driving force of the Mercury beings. These beings are rather stronger than those of Venus. Existence is urged forward by the Mercury beings, whereas through the Venus beings it is brought to a stop, as though completed. Hence the essential course of a man's passage through the soul-world is such that he feels himself taken up into the activity of Moon, Mercury, Venus.

We must make a quite clear picture of this form of existence. Here on Earth we say: “As a man I have a head”, activated chiefly by what might be called the middle brain—the pineal gland and so on. “In the middle of my body is my heart, and in my whole kidney system the organism for metabolism and movement.” In the soul-world all this would have no meaning; we have laid it all aside. After death we say: “As a man I consist of what comes from the Moon-spirits on the Moon.” This corresponds with saying on Earth: “I have a head.” And whereas on Earth we say: “I have a heart in my breast”—which covers the whole breathing and circulatory system—in the soul-world we say: “I bear within me the forces of Venus.” Again whereas on Earth we say: “I have a metabolic-limb system with all its organs,” of which the chief is the kidney system, after death we have to say: “The forces coming from the Mercury beings live in me.” Therefore on Earth we must say: “As man I am head, breast, lower body and limbs”; and after death: “As a man I am Moon, Venus, Mercury.”

This corresponds entirely with our true inner existence during life. For our whole physical existence here on Earth depends upon how head, heart, and digestive system work together—everything turns on that. The slightest movement of the hand involves the action of head, heart and digestive system, for continuous changes in the relevant substances come into play. Our whole earthly existence takes its course in head, heart, limbs—to put it in a very summary way. So in the soul-world the activity of the Moon, Mercury and Venus forces within us fills our whole existence. And through this we are in fact carried back to a time when human beings were experiencing natural existence in long past epochs of human evolution—epochs to which I have often alluded during these lectures.

In those days people had a kind of instinctive vision, and I have already spoken here of certain types of this which can still be found. Even on Earth a man then had a presentiment of his connection, in life beyond the Earth, with Moon, Mercury and Venus. Why has this consciousness disappeared today? When anyone speaks of these deeply significant things which lie behind the veil of the physical world and can be spoken of only from the realm beyond the threshold, one naturally stirs up ill-feeling, or, to put it more elegantly, one arouses contemporary criticism. For to-day it is particularly difficult to put into words the truths of Initiation. It must either be done in such abstract concepts that people to-day will not realise what is meant, or terms that really belong to such truths must be used—and this makes many people downright angry. One can understand this anger, for they are being told about a world they want to be rid of, a world they fear and hate. But this cannot prevent a start being made in speaking honestly of these matters in civilised circles. Were one to show great consideration—though it would not help us much—towards the people who hate Initiation-knowledge—not of course any of those sitting here but those in the world outside—one would have to say: As a man grows accustomed to life in the soul-world, he finds himself in conditions resembling an earlier condition on Earth, when he had instinctive spiritual knowledge of the truth, and in this knowledge, lived the forces of the Moon. In that way one might perhaps have gone halfway, quite respectably, towards the materialistic concepts of to-day; but it would have been put far too abstractly. If one is not afraid of the criticisms that will of course come from materialistic thinkers, one has to speak differently and say: When people were going through a far-off prehistoric epoch in earthly evolution—of which more is to be said later—even on Earth they were in the company of spiritual beings who were in direct connection with the Cosmos rather than with the Earth itself. We can say that divine Teachers, not earthly ones, directed the Mysteries and instructed human beings then on Earth.

In such remote ages these Teachers did not take on physical bodies of flesh, but worked in their etheric bodies upon men. So that the highest Teachers in the Mysteries, to whom physically incorporated men stood merely as servants, were etheric and divine; but they dwelt among men on Earth. Hence we are expressing something very real when we say: Once, in a long past period of human evolution, divine-spiritual Beings dwelt on Earth together with men. They did not always make their presence known if someone, let us say, was simply going for a walk, but they did reveal themselves if a person was led to them in the right way through the servants of the Mystery-temples. This happened only in the Mysteries, and through the Mysteries these Beings became companions of earthly men. Since then they have withdrawn from the Earth to the Moon, where they now dwell as if in a cosmic citadel, not perceptible from earthly existence, within the Moon's inner being. Thus, when considering this inner existence of the Moon, we have to look upon it as a gathering of those Beings who once, in etheric bodies, were the great Teachers of men upon Earth. And really we should never look at the Moon without saying: Our one-time Teachers on Earth are now assembled there.

Nothing that comes to earthly men from the Moon is inherent in it, but only what is reflected by the Moon from the rest of the Cosmos. For the Moon reflects all cosmic activity in the same way that it reflects the light. Hence when we look at the Moon and see its light most clearly, this is really the least part of it. We are seeing a mirror of cosmic activities, not the inner life of the Moon.

Within the Moon dwell those Beings who once lived on Earth, and it is only during man's life in the soul-world, after death, that he again comes under their influence. It is these Beings who, in accordance with the judgment of the far-distant past, work correctively on what a man has done on Earth. After death, therefore, in our epoch, a man actually comes once more into relation with these Beings who formerly, as divine-spiritual Beings, educated and instructed him and all mankind on Earth.

When the human being has passed through this realm of the Moon, it is then his appointed task in the Cosmos to enter the Sun-existence. Whereas the first circle, the first completed spiral, has existence on the Moon for its central point, this spiral movement now takes a man a further step forward, and on leaving the realm of the Moon, he enters the realm of the Sun.

Any spatial diagram illustrating this process can be no more than illusory, for it all takes its course in the one-dimensional, the super-sensible. However, as we must use earthly words, we can say: When a man has completed the first revolution in the realm of the Moon, he comes to the Sun realm, and the Sun, the spiritual Sun, then stands in the same relation to him as the Moon did previously. The man has now to become a being who—on entering what in my book, Theosophy, I called spirit-land, the spiritual realm of the Sun—must transform his previous Moon-, Venus-, Mercury-, existence. He must in actual fact become a different being. In earthly life he says: I am a being of head, heart, breast; a being of metabolism and limbs. Immediately after death he says: I am a being of Moon, Mercury, Venus. But then he can no longer say this, for it would mean his having come to a standstill in the spiritual world, between the soul-world and the real world of the spirit. He has now to go through a special metamorphosis even of his soul-spirit being and become what I may describe as follows: The Sun must be his skin. Everything around must be Sun. As here on Earth our physical body is wrapped in our skin, so now, on entering the life of the spirit, we have to be clothed in a skin consisting entirely of the Sun's spiritual forces.

Now it is not easy to picture this, for on the Earth you think: There is the Sun, shining down upon us; the Sun is in the centre and sheds its rays all around. On entering the realm of the spiritual Sun we find the Sun to be no longer in a definite place—it is everywhere. A man is then within the Sun; it shines in upon him from the periphery, and is, in truth, the spiritual skin of the entity he has become. Moreover, within the realm of the spiritual Sun, we have what must be described as organs. In the same way that in earthly life we have head, heart, limbs, and, immediately after death, Moon, Mercury, Venus, so, after that, we have organs which we must attribute to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

These are then our inner organs, just as heart, pineal gland, kidneys, are on Earth. All this has gone through a metamorphosis into the spiritual and these new organs, not fully formed when first we leave the soul-world and enter the world of spirit, now have to be gradually developed. For this purpose we do not describe one circle only in the Sun-existence, as in our Moon-existence, but three. In the first circle the spiritual Mars organ is developed; in the second, the Jupiter organ, and the Saturn organ in the last circle. If we compare them with earthly periods of time, we find that these three circles are traversed much more slowly, about twelve times more slowly than the relatively fast Moon circle. And during this whole journey, while a man is living in the world of spiritual spheres and participating in its forces, he is continually active. Just as we are active here with the forces of nature, so there we are active with the forces, the Beings, of the higher Hierarchies, whose physical manifestation in the surrounding starry heavens is only an outer reflection, as with the Sun and Moon.

In order to find his way from the realm of the Moon to that of the Sun, however, a man must have the guidance to which I have already referred. We have seen how, in the most ancient epochs of mankind, Beings lived on Earth who have since withdrawn, entrenching themselves, as it were, in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon. They are the Beings with whom a man, after death, first enters into a relationship. But these Beings have had successors who, in the epochs after the ancient Hyperborean period, appeared on Earth from time to time. In the East they have been called Bodhisattvas. Although they have always made their appearance embodied as men, yet they are the successors of the Beings now entrenched on the Moon, and their life is passed in community with these Beings. There lie the springs of their strength, the sources of their thoughts. And they were the Beings who once acted as the guides of mankind. Through the teaching they gave on Earth, men were enabled to have the strength, on coming to the end of their journey through the Moon-sphere, to pass over into the realm of the Sun.

In future lectures we shall see how, in the course of man's earthly evolution, this has become impossible, and how the Christ Being had to descend from the Sun to carry out the Mystery of Golgotha so that mankind, through the teachings of that Mystery, should be given sufficient force to make the crossing from the soul-world to spirit-land, from Moon-sphere to Sun-sphere.

In the ancient days of Earth evolution, the Moon-influence was closely connected with the Earth, and cared for its spiritual element, with the participation, direct or indirect, of the Bodhisattvas. Then, when the time was ripe, after the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch had expired, the effects of the Mystery of Golgotha, the working of the Christ, came in. This work of the Christ was surrounded by the twelve-fold activity of the Bodhisattvas, indicated—though indeed it was a reality—in the twelve Apostles. Thus the Christ, incorporated in the body of Jesus, is the power who, coming from spiritual existence in the Sun, has now united Himself with the Earth.

If we look up to the Moon with the desire to understand it, rather than merely to gaze at it with our soul and spirit clouded by materialism, and if we realise it to be a gathering of beings pointing to the past evolution of the Earth, then we must look up in the same way to the Sun. The Sun is a gathering of those Beings who point to the future of Earth-evolution and now also to the present, and whose great representative is the Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through as much as human beings absorb on Earth in their relation to that Mystery, so will their entrance into the spiritual land of the Sun be facilitated, so that they are enabled to take up inwardly the Mars organ in the sphere of Mars, the Jupiter organ in the Jupiter-sphere, and in the sphere of Saturn the corresponding Saturn organ. This is accomplished in threefold circles which take their course far more slowly than that of the Moon; yet this also underlies world-evolution. The complete fulfilment of what I have just been describing—the development into Mars man, Jupiter man, Saturn man—will come about only in the future. During our present epoch we can make only the circle of the Mars region after death, through the activity of world-forces; after that we are unable to do more than touch on the Jupiter region. We have to go through many earthly lives before being able—between death and rebirth—to enter fully the Jupiter region and, later still, that of Saturn.

In order that man, though not yet able to enter the Jupiter region, may receive, between death and a new birth, something of the forces of Jupiter and also of Saturn, many planetoids are interspersed between Mars and Jupiter; in their outer aspect they are constantly being discovered by the astronomers. They make up the region which in its spiritual aspect is experienced by a man after death because he cannot yet reach Jupiter. They have the remarkable characteristic of being spiritual colonies, as it were, of beings from Jupiter and Saturn who have withdrawn there. And before a man is ripe for existence on Earth, he can find in this region of the planetoids, which are there for that purpose, a kind of preparatory substitute, before he is able to enter the region of Jupiter and Saturn. At present, therefore, by the time a man has gone through death and rebirth, he has achieved his Mars-organisation, and has absorbed those Jupiter and Saturn forces to be found in the colonised regions of the planetoids. With the after-effects of this—we still have to learn about them—the human being embarks on another earthly life.

How this life between death and a new birth, which I have now described in relation to the world of the stars, can be further characterised, we shall hear tomorrow.

If we look back on the descriptions given yesterday, we shall be aware that man, living through successive times after death—and we have to use the word “time” in relation to physical conditions—comes first of all to the realm of the Moon Beings, and then passes on to that of the Sun Beings. The Moon Beings still belong to earthly-existence in a certain sense and the experiences a man goes through under their influence in the soul-world are indeed cosmic memories of earthly existence. He has experiences also of his own earthly life, though now in a backwards direction, and these are united with the judgments of the Cosmos, as I called them yesterday. These cosmic judgments are made known to men after death through the Moon Beings. We then come under the influence of these Beings, and it is they who cause the judgments to flow into us, in the same way as those that flow into us, here on Earth, from minerals, plants and animals. So we can say: On entering spiritual-cosmic existence after death, a man gains his first glimpse into such cosmic perceptions as still proceed from Beings once connected with the Earth. We have already had occasion to speak of how these Beings, before taking up their abode in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon, were Teachers of human beings in the ancient Mysteries. Hence, what a man once experienced on Earth, in primeval times, he now experiences when journeying through the soul-world, under the influence of those Beings who have been raised—we might perhaps say—to become inhabitants of the Moon. We can truly speak of them in this way if sufficient consideration is given to what was said in my last lecture. These inhabitants of the Moon, under the leadership of the one-time Teachers of mankind, judge quite differently from the way things are judged by people on Earth. For people on Earth, in their life between birth and death, are now approaching a stage completed by the Moon-dwellers in long past ages.

Reckoning by earthly years, we must say that the inhabitants of the Moon, when on Earth, accomplished quite 15,000 years ago what human beings still have to do. More than 15,000 years have passed since these Moon inhabitants acquired the power of making judgments which bring together the naturalistic and the moral.

We on Earth keep our naturalistic judgments separate, and when giving an opinion about a stone or an animal we leave morality aside. We say: “Nature follows only an amoral necessity.” But this is not true of the world as a whole. Even though we may consider that moral judgments are not applicable to individual animals, or to plants, or to minerals above all, in their separate forms of existence, yet the very fact of their creation, of their being in the world at all, is entirely the result of cosmic moral judgment.

Now these Moon-dwellers already judge in terms of cosmic morality. Therefore, when we have passed through the gate of death and are together with them, we must listen to all the Cosmos has to say about what we have thought, wished, felt, willed and done on Earth. Our entire earthly life is exposed to the light of cosmic judgment, and we learn the value our deeds have for the whole great universe.

From these lessons we develop the impulse to complete, to correct, or in some way to set right, during our next life on Earth, whatever we have done either to help or to hinder the evolution of the world. And so, while thus under the influence of the Moon Beings, we take up the impulses for our future destiny—for our karma, as oriental wisdom has always called it. These impulses are thus absorbed while the human being is still under the influence of dwellers in the Moon, who are able to tell him how much his earthly deeds and thoughts are worth for the Cosmos.

The spiritual Beings of the higher world, in whose neighbourhood a man lives while under the influence of the Moon-dwellers, are those grouped together in my Occult Science as the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, Archai. Of the ranks of Beings whose realm a man enters after death, they are the first who do not have to live through a phase of earthly embodiment. On their side, they stand in close connection with the Beings of the still higher Hierarchies. But it is with this Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai that a man is essentially concerned during his Moon existence after death, while the higher Hierarchies are still beyond his ken.

The judgments of the Angels are especially important for the deeds of individual men, and it is thus from the Angels that a man learns the value his deeds have in the Cosmos as a whole. From the Archangels he learns more about the value of what he has done in connection with the language he speaks, with the people to whom he belongs, and from this source also come impulses which work into his further destiny, his karma. From the Archai he learns what value his actions during a given period on Earth will have for the time when he has to descend once more from spiritual heights into earthly existence.

By means of all that a man can achieve in this way if—and I beg you to bear the following in mind—he has rightly prepared himself for life after death through the impulses he is able to receive on Earth, and particularly (as we shall see later) through his attitude towards the great leaders of mankind, he can then find the way over from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to the sphere of the Sun-dwellers.

The inhabitants of the Moon we already know as those Beings who once dwelt on Earth and were in close connection with it. In a very, very much earlier age this was true also of the inhabitants of the Sun; they, too, participated in earthly affairs.

On coming to the realm of the Moon-dwellers it is quite clear to a man that he is meeting Beings who once dwelt with him on Earth. And when he enters the realm of the Sun Beings, something like a powerful cosmic memory of a primeval age comes over him—an age which in Occult Science you will find described from another point of view. He is taken possession of by something like a memory of an infinitely ancient time, when the Sun, with its inhabitants, was still one with the Earth. After death, therefore, we make our way through the spiritual Cosmos by growing into, as it were, two spiritual cosmic regions where we meet those Beings with whom, at one time, when we lived on Earth as quite different beings, we were closely associated.

So it is that by going through these experiences between death and a new birth we look back in grand, mighty memories on the evolution of the Earth in the Cosmos. Whereas a man, while here on Earth, goes through only part of human evolution, between death and rebirth he goes through part of cosmic evolution, part of the evolution of the universe. Those Beings who inhabit the Sun are such that in far distant times they had already risen above the experiences possible for earthly beings, and above those possible for the Beings of the Moon.

On reaching the realm of the Sun Beings, a man enters a sphere of the highest wisdom, where he can live only if on Earth he has prepared himself sufficiently for it.

Now I said yesterday that on passing from the soul-world into the land of spirit, or, as we must express it to-day, from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to that of the Sun-dwellers, a man proceeds more slowly in his journeyings through the Cosmos. Whereas the circling of the Moon takes about a third of his earthly lifetime, the next rounds, the circling of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn—I mentioned yesterday how these rounds are not completed—takes a more leisurely course, twelve times slower than the circling of the Moon.

If now we reckon up the actual time, we arrive at the following result. We must start from the original plan decreed for human beings by the Cosmos. Then we find that a man goes through the Moon period in a third of the time he has spent on Earth. If we allow for the fact that at the beginning of life more time is spent in sleep, and add on the time given to sleep in later life, we find that a man needs approximately thirty years to accomplish the first cycle, that of the Moon. Each of the following cycles takes twelve times as long, or 36o years for each cycle. If we follow a man in his further journeying through the worlds, we find him going through three cycles. He does not reach Saturn, but has to go through the cycles in the way originally decided. He then has to go backwards through the three again. Thus he completes three cycles in an outward direction and, on returning towards his next earthly life, another three backwards, making six in all. We then have the time originally intended for man. I shall still have to speak of how things are different for human beings to-day; but according to the original cosmic decrees, the time was 2,160 years.

What do these 2,160 years signify? You have only to recall that the position of the Sun at the vernal equinox moves forward year by year. In recent centuries it has advanced from the Ram to the Fishes, and approximately in 25,920 years—or close on 26,000 years—the Sun travels round the whole zodiacal circle, and the twelfth part of this is 2,160 years. In 2,160 years the Sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to the next. It was originally decreed that a man should return to Earth when the Sun had thus moved on.

When we consider the inner reasons for this number, and compare it with what from I said from another point of view in Occult Science, those who have read the book will remember that the time taken by the Sun to pass from one sign of the Zodiac to the next was given there as the original length of the interval between a man's incarnations. If we look at this from two sides—more outwardly, from the cosmic aspect, as in Occult Science, and then from the side of man's inner life that we are dealing with to-day—the two numbers are identical. Such things should be noticed; and it will be found that whenever in Spiritual Science a correct judgment is made from one point of view, and then another correct judgment from a quite different point of view, the two judgments are inwardly in agreement.

Anyone judging Spiritual Science from the ordinary standpoint of to-day will quite possibly ask: “What is there to support this Spiritual Science of yours? Our natural science rests upon observation, experiment; that is the firm ground from which we start.” But one might just as well say: “As earthly man I stand on firm ground, and a rock, too, has solid ground beneath it—like everything else on Earth. As for you astronomers—it is really fantastic for you to tell us that the Earth is floating freely in celestial space. If you want to be reasonable, you must say that the Earth, like any great mass of rock, is somewhere resting on firm ground.” That is virtually the same as accusing Anthroposophy of having no firm ground to stand on. Naturally, people would appear foolish, even to themselves, were they to say that the Earth has something to rest on, but they do not see how foolish it is not to realise that Spiritual Science, which is carried by its own inner resources, just as the heavenly bodies move by their own impulses, cannot rest on the ground of experiment and explanation. Were they only to be consistent in their judgments, they would see how, in the Spiritual Science intended here, every step is made with the utmost exactitude, and full accountability is taken for every statement concerning the world and the beings of the world.

Thus, after death, a man enters a world which he at first experiences in common with souls who, like himself, have entered the spiritual worlds through the gate of death after an earthly life. A man thus grows familiar with the sphere of disembodied human beings and continues with them the earthly relations experienced spiritually at night.

But we have also seen how a man finds himself in the company of other spiritual Beings, the inhabitants of the Moon who were once dwelling with him on the Earth, and how, afterwards, he ascends to the community on the Sun. These Sun-dwellers also were once inhabitants of the Earth together with human beings, though in times far more remote. Here a man's first meeting is with the Beings who constitute the second Hierarchy, described in my Occult Science as Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. These are the Beings with whom he has to work in order that he may be able to manifest in his next earthly life the cosmically elaborated karma derived from his earlier lives on Earth.

Having passed through the realm of the Moon-dwellers, a man knows—not with earthly thoughts but with cosmic ones—what in a cosmic sense he has done wrong; he realises the worth for cosmic evolution as a whole of all he has done, thought and felt. But he cannot prepare his new earthly life with cosmic thoughts alone. Therefore in the Moon-sphere he comes to know what he is destined to be in his next earthly existence, though the actual preparations for it cannot be made at that stage. For this, he has to rise to the sphere of the Sun, where live the Beings who, no longer having to concern themselves with earthly existence, are occupied with the affairs of our whole planetary system.

So a man's experience of the Cosmos embraces two spiritual regions, together with the spiritual Beings dwelling in them. It embraces the soul-world of the Moon-dwellers, and the more extensive population of the spirit region. Whereas the Moon-dwellers, because they were closely connected with the Earth in comparatively recent times, have united their interests with the peoples of the Earth, and while the Moon is in a sense only a cosmic colony, occupied with and orientated towards earthly affairs, the Sun-sphere, whose dwellers live under the leadership of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, is a cosmic whole, concerned with the affairs of the entire planetary system—Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and so on, including the Earth and the Moon.

On coming into this vast sphere of the Sun, where our interests are substantially widened, we are able to work with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes on preparing the spirit-germ of a physical body which can then be born for us from human parents. No parents could ever produce a suitable physical body were it not prepared during long periods through work carried out in co-operation with the highest, most sublime spiritual Beings in the spiritual Cosmos. Our essential work there—a work far greater and more comprehensive than anything achieved during our little life on Earth—is to concern ourselves, together with Beings of a higher degree, with all that takes place among these Beings as spiritual events, just as here there are natural events; with all that takes place in them as art of the spirit, just as here we have the art of nature. All this finally enables us to bring together what has thus been worked upon into a great, spiritual, archetypal picture which is the spirit-germ—as it were the fore-shadowing—of what will later be born on Earth as our physical body.

When a man, having completed the three circles, starts on the return journey, his interest in earthly affairs revives. Then—still many years before birth—he looks down on the successive generations in earthly evolution, at the end of which will stand his father and his mother. As soon as he makes this complete change of direction in the Cosmos, he begins to focus his attention upon the Earth. He watches many preceding generations of his ancestry, one after another, until, centuries later, his parents are born. To them he can send down the potent, far-reaching spirit-germ, diminished in size, of his future physical body, so that this spirit-germ can be united with the physical embryo in the body of the mother.

The spirit-germ is at first majestic and great, like the Cosmos itself. While a man is making his return journey to the physical world, and watching the generations through which his parents descend, and while from the spiritual world he is actively concerned with this sequence of generations, the germ becomes smaller and smaller—until at last it arrives back in the Mars-sphere, the actual sphere of the Sun, and then, passing quickly through the Moon-sphere, it descends to its next life on Earth.

Some time before the man himself descends as a being of soul, he sends down in advance this spirit-germ, so that what he has prepared for his physical body enters the physical world before him. On completing his work for the new earthly life, he is able to enter into a different relation with the cosmos—a relation indeed to the whole cosmic ether. And, as the final act in his descent, he draws from spiritual worlds, out of the whole world-ether, the forces to form his etheric body.

When a man has already sent down the spirit-germ for his physical body—that is, when the spirit-germ has at last descended to the parents at the end of its long journey down from the spiritual world—the man himself, still in the spiritual world, gathers ether around him there, and for a short time becomes a being of Ego, astral body and ether, the ether having been drawn together from the world-ether. It is not until after conception, during the third or fourth week of the embryonic period, that the human being unites himself with the organism that has been formed by combining the spirit-germ with the physical germ, and bestows upon it the etheric body drawn from the world-ether. Man then becomes a being composed of physical body, an etheric body drawn together in the last moments of his cosmic existence, and the astral body and Ego which have gone through the life between death and rebirth.

Thus, after experiencing the purely spiritual, a man descends to yet another existence in the physical world.

From what has been said you will have gathered that while passing through life in the world between death and a new birth, we experience in memory past ages of the Earth's evolution—the evolution of worlds, one might call it. The world-memories thus lived through become a man's deeds, for he does something with these memories, in cooperation with the higher Beings of whom I have already spoken and will speak further. What he carries out, while active in memory and remembering in activity, gives a significant perspective into the past of the Earth and of the world.

The experiences he goes through while in connection with the inhabitants of the Moon conjures up in his soul a time during which he passed through earlier lives on Earth in a similar relation to them as now. He surveys a series of earthly lives resembling those of the present. He then looks further back to a time when, even while on Earth, he was more closely connected with the present dwellers on the Moon; to a time from which he is separated by what geologists call the Ice Age. He looks back to a phase in earthly evolution you will find described in my books as the Atlantean age. But he penetrates still further back to what is called the age of Lemuria, when man is still to be found on Earth, though under quite different conditions. He was not yet so closely bound to the Earth that he trod it with his feet; he lived more as an etheric being in the environment of the Earth, in its atmosphere. This he could do because at that time the atmosphere consisted mainly of a watery solution that has now been distributed between seas and continents, together with solutions of other substances that have since become the solid earth of to-day. Hence he lived more in the Earth's circumference during the age—here again names are unimportant—called the Lemurian, which corresponds to what natural scientists call, with some justification, the oldest period of the Earth.

We then look back to an age when man was still associated with the Sun Beings, with the inhabitants of the Sun, before in the course of cosmic evolution the Sun separated from the Earth. This does not mean looking back to an age when, as described in Occult Science, the Earth itself went through its Sun period—the second age in the evolution of the Earth—but to the recapitulation in earthly existence of that cosmic age. But this recapitulation does come into view. And so a man's knowledge, when supplemented by what he is able to experience between death and a new birth, becomes cosmological knowledge. Earth-evolution advances through repeated stages, in conjunction with the results of human deeds carried out together with higher Beings. The Earth's past, in its connection with the whole planetary system—Sun, Moon, and all the planets dependent on them—becomes apparent in the deeds of men. Out of it a man shapes the part of the future for which he is responsible—his next earthly life. At the same time, however, he is involved in the preparation of future worlds, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan existences, for into each of these in turn the Earth existence will eventually be transformed.

If we look deeply into such matters, we can understand how ancient cosmic times were part of the world-evolution of the Earth. We look back indeed into an age when the Moon-dwellers of to-day provided the instructors of mankind. Then, together with the latest great instructors, they withdrew into the cosmic stronghold of the Moon.

Over and over again on Earth, however, men were born with the capacity to remain throughout their karmic life in close connection with the experiences of those who now dwell on the Moon. Born again and again in the course of world-evolution, they were like ambassadors of the great community within the Moon. They appeared among the people of the Earth during the first, second and third postAtlantean culture-epochs and in the East they developed a lofty civilisation. These ambassadors of the Moon were called Bodhisattvas. They dwelt on Earth as men, but in them lived on the spiritual teaching that had been given directly by the great Moon teachers on Earth.

Now there are often times in the universe when the inhabitants of the Moon, because they are more nearly connected with the inhabitants of the Sun than with those of the Earth, develop a particularly intimate relation with these Sun-dwellers, so that, indirectly, through the Moon ambassadors—called in the East the Bodhisattvas—the wisdom of the Sun was able to reach men on Earth in the older oriental civilisations. Because of the progress made in the evolution of the Earth, it then became necessary that earthly civilisation should no longer be nourished, as it were, by the Moon Beings only. The whole evolution of the Earth would have had to take a course different from the one prescribed by cosmic wisdom, if only the Moon ambassadors had figured in it. For this reason there came about the great, momentous event we call the Mystery of Golgotha.

Whereas in more ancient times it was the Moon ambassadors who, to a certain extent, brought the Sun wisdom to Earth, it was the Leader of the Sun Beings Himself, foremost in the ranks of Sun Spirits, who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came down to Earth into the body of the man Jesus. Through this, quite different conditions arose for the evolution of the Earth. The wisdom of the Sun-dwellers was brought into it as impulse by Christ Jesus; and under this impulse the further course of Earth-evolution must therefore proceed.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so much Moon wisdom was still spread over the whole Earth that as Gnosis, as Pistis Sophia—which was old Moon wisdom—it was able to understand the nature of the Christ. Gnosis was essentially an endeavour to grasp His whole spiritual significance. But Gnosis has been entirely rooted out. In the phase of evolution which led to a temporary lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, the first act was the rooting out of the Gnosis—down, almost, to the very writings of its opponents.

Imagine that nothing were left of our present Anthroposophy except what its opponents have written about it, and this will give you some idea of what people know of Gnosis from external sources. Their knowledge is limited to the opinions of its opponents, perhaps to some acquaintance with the Pistis Sophia and so on, which they don't understand. That is all they know of the Gnosis, which is indeed a gift of the Moon, out of the past, to the first centuries of Christianity—particularly the first four centuries, for after that it was no longer understood. It was what could be said out of the old Moon wisdom, out of the Moon Logos, to the Sun Logos who had come to Earth—said, that is, to the Christ. Anyone aware of this can really understand the Gnosis, which has been greatly misjudged, and of which such strange things are said to-day.

It is not possible, however, for matters to remain thus, for the evolution of the Earth must continue. We have to progress from the old wisdom of the Moon to a new Sun wisdom, for which we must learn to have an immediate understanding. To-morrow I shall have to describe how it was essentially the old Moon wisdom—after it had come virtually to an end—which still spoke to human beings through a form of Yoga breathing, through a changed breathing process. It was a striving after the old wisdom of the Moon.

This Yoga cult is no longer suitable for Western people; they must attain to Imagination. For civilisation in general, that is the necessary next step—the endeavour to come to Imagination. But there are all sorts of obstacles, and this means that the evolution of human civilisation can advance only if a new impulse from the spirit is accepted. This depends on intimate human destinies. When Bodhisattvas appeared, they never found people generally hostile. Those ancient times may often appear to us outwardly as gruesome and terrible, but it was always possible to meet with good will when bringing impulses from the spiritual worlds. Hence the Bodhisattvas found men ready to receive the old Moon Logos—the reflection, that is, of the Sun Logos. But it will never again be possible to speak to mankind in that old way.

The old Moon wisdom, the old Moon Logos, however, cannot cease—like everything else, it has to progress. But it will have to be understood through the Sun Word, which, having lost its last legacy in the Gnosis, must be re-discovered. It will be impossible to speak to people in the true language of the Sun until they bring good will to meet it. Until they do so, they will wait in vain for the coming of a successor to the Bodhisattvas of old, for that depends upon whether human beings welcome him with understanding.

To-day there is a deep rift between the humanity of the East and the humanity of the West. And those who do not go deeply enough into these matters cannot see how East and West are divided, and how the East is waiting for the new Bodhisattva to bring them in his own way something of which the West has only the vaguest idea. The nationalistic struggles of to-day have not yet been sufficiently overcome throughout the Earth by the universal consciousness which must flow essentially from the Christ impulse. Men will never discover how to rise to this common humanity, this genuine Christ impulse, and will never be able to understand what a potential Bodhisattva would have to say, until they have developed enough spiritual longing in them to create a bridge for a world-wide understanding between East and West.

I am touching here on a theme we must go further into tomorrow—a theme that will show how different the present time is from the days when man waited expectantly for the coming of a Bodhisattva. Now, before the Bodhisattva can speak to men, he has himself to wait until they are ready to understand the words he will use, for men have now entered the epoch of freedom.

This entry into the epoch of freedom, in relation to our present theme, will be a subject for tomorrow. But all that mankind has to go through, in order to find the innermost impulse in the spiritual world above, is connected with many apparently insignificant cultural systems and symptoms of our civilisation.

Forgive me for intermingling the great with the trivial, but trivial symptoms can sometimes throw light on the great. A few days ago I said that in this region, where Imaginations take so firm a hold on the spirit, we get the disturbance of motor-cars. I added that I was not saying anything against motor-cars, for in Anthroposophy we cannot express reactionary views, and when necessary I am obviously very fond of travelling by car myself. One must take the world as it is. But anything one-sided must always be balanced by its opposite. Thus there is no harm in motoring—provided we take it, and everything of that kind, with a heart attuned to the spiritual world. Then, if other things besides cars come to disturb us, we shall be able to press on by dint of our own strength and freedom, for freedom had to come, and it must lead us back to the Bodhisattva.

Human beings will be able to help themselves, where things are concerned that do us good service mechanically. It can truly be said that men will be able to help themselves in face of what comes upon them in the way of cars, typewriters, and so on.

With gramophones, however, it is different—forgive me for concluding on such an apparently trivial note. With gramophones, art is being thrust down into a machine. When people develop a passion for such a thing—which is really a mechanising of what comes down to us as a shadow of the spiritual—when they show enthusiasm for the kind of thing represented by gramophones, then in this connection they no longer have the power to help themselves. At this point the Gods have to help.

Now the Gods are merciful, and to-day our hope for the future progress of human civilisation must be that the Gods in their mercy will themselves come to the rescue where—as in the case of the gramophone—men's taste has gone astray.

In the course of our observations about the world and about man, we have seen how he bears within him—if only in picture form—the past of the world, and how it is possible for him, by gradual training, to conjure up these pictures. In our ordinary daytime consciousness there is nothing of all this, but only memories of our experiences during earthly life. When, however, a man applies this ordinary consciousness to following the path I have indicated, then, as his spiritual consciousness grows clearer and clearer, more and more of the past evolution of worlds arises within him. And we have found how this experience of the past has to be renewed between death and rebirth.

We can therefore say: When things that are not perceptible for the senses become so for Imagination, a man looks back beyond the memories of his current life. He looks back on everything that has gone to shape him, on the forces of growth and nourishment which have formed him from within—all of which proceeds from the spirit.

And further, in Inspiration a man looks into pre-earthly existence, but not only into his own. We have seen already how he reaches out beyond the cosmic island of the Earth to the great cosmic ocean in which the stars have their dwelling, and he finds that the stars then become for him the dwelling-places of spiritual Beings.

Then, when Intuition arises, a man gazes back into past lives on Earth. At the same time the whole past life of the world comes into the range of his vision. He is, in actual fact, born out of the whole world; the whole world lives in his physical, etheric and astral bodies, and—during earthly existence—least of all as yet in his Ego. All this is included in a man, working and weaving within him. As human beings we bear within us the whole past evolution of the world, upon which countless generations of the spirit have worked. We bear this divine work in the building up of our organs, and in the forces weaving and living in them; we bear it within us when those organs flower into perception and thought. We carry within us the work that has gone into the whole past evolution of the world. When now, after we have—at least in thought—sharpened our vision into the past, we look out at the world surrounding us here on Earth, we see with ordinary consciousness only as much as the senses offer and whatever our intellect can make of our sense-observations. Behind the realm of sense-perception lies the all-embracing life of the spirit—a life active in all colours and sounds of nature, in everything we experience as warmth or cold, in every aspect of natural phenomena that can affect us as human beings.

Besides the physical nature revealed to the senses, there is a concealed spiritual nature—a hidden spiritual environment. This surrounding spiritual world, of which only the veriest surface is apparent to sense-perception, carries even now in its womb man's future evolution. Just as we bear within us in mighty pictures the entire past and are ourselves the outcome of those pictures, so in the concealed life of nature there works and weaves that which, in its further unfolding as world-evolution, will bring us our future. Thus we can set before us these weighty words: Man bears within him the past of the world; the outer world is the bearer of his future.

These are the two fundamental principles upon which world-evolution and human evolution are founded. And indeed they come to expression in individual human life. There is a great difference between all that tends more towards a man's head-organisation, and all that has more to do with the rest of his body. To put it rather crudely, one might say: Forces work up from the heart towards the head organisation and bring about the particular configuration of the head, with its covering of hard skull. This is filled with the most wonderful construction in all the world—the convolutions and interweavings of the human brain, in which the senses are embedded.

Everything living in these forces, all that flows to a man's head from his breast and heart, is an outcome of the past. This could become what it now is in man only because—as we have already said—innumerable divine generations of the spirit have worked upon it, through the metamorphoses of cosmic-planetary bodies. In my Occult Science I have pointed out how a Saturn-evolution, a Sun-evolution, a Moon-evolution, preceded in turn the Earth-evolution in which we are living and during which the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-evolutions have been recapitulated. We are now rather past the middle of the actual Earth-evolution, the evolution of man on Earth.

The forces which through long ages have been gradually developing, under the influence of divine generations of the spirit, all live in the physical body of earthly man, and stream from his heart up to his head. All that you bear continually in your physical, etheric, astral and Ego, as a streaming up from the centre of your being to your head, has been prepared and worked upon by generations of Gods through immeasurable periods of time. And the last element which lives in these up-streaming forces—though people to-day are still unconscious of it—is that which expresses itself as a man's karma—the past of his own Ego during his lives on Earth.

We can put it in this way. If we penetrate deeply into these forces of cosmic memory, we come first to karma; then to the various stages of Earth-evolution; after that to the metamorphoses, the planetary transformations which the Earth went through before becoming the actual Earth. Before the Earth could come into being, there had to be a cosmic body, Saturn, consisting only of tenuous warmth. Saturn had then to pass away before rising to a new existence as that Sun of which our Sun, now seen outside in cosmic space, is the residue. At that time the Sun was a cosmic body consisting of air alone; this again had to pass away and give place to a cosmic body consisting of water—the old Moon. Then the Moon in turn gave place to the firm mineral substance of the Earth, on which man, as an earthly being, could begin to evolve.

But just as we have these upward-striving forces, so do we bear within us forces with a downward trend. They have a kind of central point in the heart, and the circulating blood carries both forces to the movements of our limbs. These forces are active in every movement of our hands; when you take hold of anything, or perform any ordinary earthly action, they enter into every move you make. They do not now belong to the past; they belong to the hidden world around us. They will be taken up into the womb of the past—which will become the past only in the future—when a man goes through the gate of death, and exchanges his earthly existence for life among the stars. These are the forces in which a man's future is prepared.

The future comes about through the interplay of these forces with the forces concealed in external nature. Thus the world bears man's future within its own evolution. There is a sharp distinction in him between these upper forces and the lower ones. The knowledge that can be acquired after passing the Guardian of the Threshold bring out this distinction strongly.

For ordinary consciousness, everything below the heart remains unconscious. This does not mean that it is any less fully imbued with consciousness, but this is a consciousness beyond our normal reach to-day. Hence what a man experiences inwardly differs from the content of his consciousness. He is conscious only of what is on the surface, rising like an island out of his other experiences.

When we are able to penetrate further into the human being, we can see how he is still endowed to-day with these subconscious forces. We can then see how a man performs some deed which, for that moment of his earthly life, causes him pleasure and satisfaction—his head is satisfied. He may for some reason have done a thoroughly bad thing, but his head is satisfied, and the implications of his action evade his ordinary consciousness. But although his head may be perfectly satisfied, the hand that carries out the action is subconsciously affected by it—and the subconscious is really another form of consciousness—and his hand quivers. The quivering may be outwardly imperceptible, but in the etheric and astral bodies it becomes an actual trembling. So we can see inwardly how a man may be satisfied in his head with some deed that subconsciously causes a trembling in the astral and etheric organs connected with his arms or legs. In the satisfaction given to the head by a bad deed, consciousness is—we might say—benumbed; but another form of consciousness arises in the depths of a man's being, and there the deed causes a trembling.

In this trembling, future karma is being prepared. It is a trembling in face of the forces concealed in nature, forces of the hidden world. The trembling presages the judgment that will be passed upon the man by the Beings of the stars, when, from this little island of the Earth, he goes out into the wide starry ocean.

To sum this up: Within the human being, in diverse ways, both the past and the future of the world are living—even in the external form of his physical body. A man's head-organisation, that most wonderful, most perfect product of world-evolution, is to a great extent broken up, even spiritually, when he passes through the gate of death. On the other hand, his lower organisation, though merely physical in outward appearance, is in reality a physical picture of that which lives as soul and spirit in the arms and hands, in the whole metabolic-limb system. Through this system, through all you can see as flesh and blood shaped into arms and hands, spiritual forces flow. In a future life on Earth these forces will flow through the organs that bring about the movements of the upper and lower jaw. The bones of the head in their plastic formation will then be the transformed bones of arms and legs—naturally I mean the spiritual part of these, for the physical falls away. That which now constitutes your arms and legs will become in your next incarnation—to speak in terms of forces and dynamics—the configuration of your head. Hence the physical organisation itself affords a reflection of how a man has gone through earthly life. Anyone who studies in the right way the artistic shaping of a man's head can see in the very form of his head how he used his arms and hands in his dealings with other people and with the external world during his previous earthly life. For the deeds of arms and legs in one earthly incarnation live on in the formation of the head in the next incarnation. Ordinary phrenology is superficial in giving all kinds of intellectual interpretations of the shape of the head. But behind this is a deep, occult phrenology which considers the individuality of each man and does not conform to general rules—a phrenology that out of Intuitions is able to discern how the formations of a man's head have been prepared by the outcome of his movements, his behaviour and his actions during a previous life on Earth.

That, then, is how the human being stands before us to-day, and before himself, showing in what he has become how divine generations of the spirit have worked upon him through immeasurable periods of time. Naturally one can only indicate in outline how a man's life to-day illustrates in pictures all that these generations of the Gods have done for him, and for all mankind, through the metamorphoses of Earth-evolution—Saturn, Sun and Moon.

Let us take first three particularly significant impulses in the earthly life of human beings. If one looks quite simply, with ordinary consciousness, at the wonders revealed in the progressive development of the human being from the first days of his life, we can at least gain some idea, some feeling, of the tremendous depths out of which the soul and spirit struggle during those first days and weeks in order to give an increasingly definite form to much that in the infant is still formless; and then gradually to bring under control the chaotic movements of arms and legs. We come to feel that we are being shown how a spiritual activity, present in the endless depths of the hidden life of nature, is expressing itself in the human body. And we can say: There is nothing on Earth so wonderful to watch as the unfolding of the inner human being within the outer, during the development of a child in the very first years of its life. If we know how to watch this with true artistic-religious insight, then all that can be seen there, and the humility we can feel in face of this revelation of the spiritual, surpass all other artistic, scientific or religious impressions that can be received from the outer world.

But let us single out three things in the development of a child. In ordinary life we say: The child is learning to walk. In fact, this is something wonderful. In this learning to walk an extraordinary amount of movement is involved. All the limbs are called into play when, in order to stand erect, the child raises itself out of the position where its spine is parallel with the surface of the Earth. We take this for granted as something obvious, but it marks the moment in the child's life when it is learning to give all its forces a different, orientation on Earth, and, with the help of the symmetry of those forces and its own inner balance, is learning to establish itself within the Cosmos as a whole. At the same time, we are really watching how a human being is growing out of the animal world. For this is a moment that an animal can never experience. It remains essentially with its spine parallel to the Earth; for if it pulls itself upright, as the ape does, this is contrary to its natural organisation.

If we are to form a true conception of man, we must be able to see in the right light this learning to walk on the part of the child. Scientists have compared the bones of the human being with those of the animal, and have found them to be animal bones transformed, and men's muscles to be animal muscles transformed—and so on. Let this be so with every organ; the difference between man and animal will still not be found in this way. The difference can be seen only when we grasp how, in the moment of standing erect, a human being is freeing himself from his connection with the animal at the beginning of his life, and establishing his balance in the whole world. Never during his life would he have been able to acquire the skill for doing this had it not been prepared in the most remote days; the seed for it was already within the being of man during the Saturn-existence. Divine Spirits then laid down the seed of the skill that comes to light when the child learns, as we say, to walk. There were no animals then, for they came later, during the Sun-evolution. Hence the human being, as originally planned, is older than the animals.

All that lies in these invisible forces that enable man to walk leads us back to his origin during the Saturn-existence.

The second faculty arising in the child comes from his new orientation in space; this causes the forces to turn inwards and to appear in a different way. For instance, I take up a piece of chalk; a force comes in an inward direction, discharging itself in the internal organs. This inward-turning force, coming through the limbs from the direction of movement, makes its appearance in the child's development when it learns to speak. First, when the child finds its bearings in space, the forces take an outward direction; the same forces then turn inwards and the child learns to speak.

Science knows only a small part of all this. It knows that a right-handed person has his speech-centre in the left half of the brain, and a left-handed person has it in the right half. Everything in the brain that has to do with the development of speech, however, is first worked into it by the limbs when the child learns to walk, to grasp things, to move around and turn its attention to objects. This springs from the inwardly directed forces, which then go out from the brain into the organs of speech. Here, again, divine-spiritual Beings have been preparing the human organism through countless ages, so that the child should be able to speak. Those divine Beings, who during the Saturn period prepared the human being for walking, then worked during the Sun period to bring about his capacity for speech.

The third gift developed by the child, and by all mankind, through speech—for it could not come before speaking in earthly evolution—was the power to have thoughts. This was prepared by the divine-spiritual Beings during the Moon age. That is how human evolution took its course in the past ages of the world; generations of spiritual Beings have prepared for man his walking, speaking, thinking—through Saturn-evolution, Sun-evolution, Moon-evolution.

In the evolution of the world during the Sun age, animals made their appearance—naturally in a form different from that of to-day. They now have to feed on plants, which at that time they had no need to do, for then they were creatures of the air and consisted of airy substance. It was during the Moon-existence that the plants were added.

Then evolution passed over to Earth-existence, when the human being first developed a visible bodily form in which the forces of walking, speaking and thinking could dwell. At the same time the mineral kingdom arose and became an essential part of his organism. In this way man's past can be described.

If we wish to look at man's future, in the light of present-day conditions on Earth, we must start from his old age, which means describing something that is not at all apparent to-day. When a child begins to walk, speak, think, external signs of this are clear enough, but how the spiritual part of man is intensified in old age is far from evident to anyone without spiritual vision. I spoke of the most wonderful experience of watching the gradual revelation of soul and spirit in the growing body of a young child, and of how, if one sees it in the right way, one can be overwhelmed by the deepest religious feeling in face of all the meaning that this artistic process conveys. But it is also wonderful to see how all that a man has experienced through walking, speaking and thinking during his earthly life disappears into the spiritual. And then to see how his thoughts and words, everything he has worked and struggled for with his hands, is carried back into the life of the spirit when he passes through the gate of death. Just as that which comes to expression in the child's walking, speaking, thinking, points us back to previous stages in the Earth's evolution, to the evolution of Moon, of Sun, of Saturn, so does all that a man has experienced in his thoughts point us first of all to his next earthly life, and then to the great periods in the future evolution of the Earth.

So it is that the thoughts of men point towards the Jupiter stage in the evolution of the world and of man—a stage that can be reached only when the Earth has passed through death and risen to a new planetary existence. For thoughts will not then live in us in their present fluctuating way; they will take definite shape and appear in the very form of man.

To-day we are able to keep our thoughts to ourselves, and on certain occasions our countenance can appear perfectly innocent, although we are inwardly guilty. We shall not be able to do this during the Jupiter-existence. A man's thoughts will then engender the expression of his face. The human form will have lost its mineralised firmness; it will be inwardly flexible and will consist of a quite soft substance. A wrong thought rising up in us will instantly show itself to other people through a change in our expression. Everything in the nature of a thought will at once take shape; a man will then go about in the guise of his own enduring thoughts and temperament. Hence if, during the Jupiter-existence, a man is a regular scoundrel, or has only animal impulses, that is what he will look like. That is the first stage in man's future.

The second stage will exemplify the creative power of speech. To-day speech arises inwardly and is sent out only into the air. In the future, the spoken word will not fade away into the air but will continue to exist, and with it a man will create actual forms. So that in the Jupiter age he will have power to shape himself by his thoughts; in the Venus-existence he will give form to the world around him. If during the Venus-existence—when all substance will be as fine as air—he utters an evil word, something like a repulsive plant-form will come into being. Hence a man will be surrounded by the creations of his own speech. During the Venus existence creative feelings will arise, creative speech, and the feelings that create through the word.

During the last metamorphosis of the Earth, the Vulcan-existence, the activities expressed in our walking and the movements of our arms will develop further. To-day we go to our work and use our arms to carry out actions, but nothing of that is lasting. I go to some place; I have something or other to do. It may of course be something quite complicated—possibly even the waging of war. Then we go away again, and in the outer world none of our actions remain. During the Vulcan-existence, everything will remain. A man will not simply go about and perform actions; everything he does will leave its imprint on the Vulcan-existence. His deeds will be actualised, will become realities.

You see how the Earth-existence makes a radical incision between past and future in the evolution of the world and of man. Everything up to the time of the Earth was brought about by divine generations of the spirit; that which is to follow will be brought about by man himself. That is how freedom enters his life within the cosmos. He is placed into the world by the Gods, and given his free existence. From the Gods he has acquired his capacity for walking, speaking, thinking—even his form; but for the future evolution of the world he will have to bring into this walking, speaking and thinking what he himself is. He is now about to live himself out of the past into the future. Part of the past, it is true, lies in his own karma; part of the future lies in what he is willing to do for his own karma in the future. At present he is serving a kind of apprenticeship between past and future.

All this means that things cannot work out in exact conformity with the originally-intended plan I referred to yesterday. I spoke then of 2,160 years having to pass between two incarnations. But during his earthly life a man is far from absorbing all that he could absorb; hence for many people to-day the interval between death and a new birth proves to have changed—no longer 2,160 years for anyone, but essentially shorter.

Men who have given themselves up entirely to an earthly life, those with certain criminal tendencies, are very poorly equipped for sailing out into the ocean of starry existence; and after a short time between death and rebirth they very soon return to earthly life. Others need a long time in which to purify and perfect what they have made of their soul and spirit during life on Earth. So one can say that those with animal tendencies, who easily succumb to their instincts and desires, soon come back to Earth, while those with a normal spiritual development take longer to return. But there may also be human beings who, through a deeper insight during earthly life into the way things are going at the present time, are able to arouse in themselves a self-sacrificing wish to return as soon as possible in order to contribute to the future course of earthly affairs. For if a man has filled his spirit with love during his life on Earth, he can make the three to six transits, through Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, more quickly. When persons with lower instincts pass through death, they draw back trembling before these circles and do not complete them; they are particularly repelled by the region of the planetoids. To-morrow I shall be speaking of how human beings to-day are enabled to enter various circles by submitting themselves to certain influences in the world, in their personal life, in their national life, and so on.

Those who enter the region of the planetoids rightly will to-day spend seven or eight hundred years between one earthly life and the next. That is normal for people who are not of an actually degraded nature. But through deeper insight into things, and through love of the spiritual world, life between death and a new birth can be consciously shortened. Those who have gained much from their life on Earth can make a comparatively quick return, so that as soon as possible they can work on the transforming of earthly civilisation and culture.

I have had to take you in thought away from the earthly world into that of the stars and their inhabitants, so that, in a way suited to the present time, your attention may be directed away from the world in which human beings are generally engrossed, to a world they have to enter through deeper knowledge, if they wish to experience their future aright. To-day, people in general are little inclined to detach themselves from the claims of the material world and to seek the spiritual directly in the physical world around them. We have no time now to dwell on the obstacles met with when, in psycho-analysis, for example—to which I shall be referring tomorrow—attempts are made to investigate at least the spiritual part of man. It is, however, precisely from observing directly the sense-perceptible that a right path will open out for those who wish now to work entirely within the field of present-day science, if they really seek to discover the spiritual there. It can be done. Definite proof of this is to be found in the booklet just issued by our Institute of Physiology and Biology at Stuttgart. Here Frau Dr. Kolisko has published the results of a beautiful piece of research under the title Physiological and Physical Proof of the Efficacy of the smallest Entities.¹ You know how homeopathy likes to work with highly diluted substances. By this means, by bringing physical substance in a highly diluted form, a way is opened into the spiritual. Frau Dr. Kolisko has now succeeded in showing, by an exact method, that the smallest entities, the highest dilutions, are effective. She has been working most conscientiously for a long time on the lines I have indicated, and she has now succeeded in producing dilutions in the proportion 1:1 trillion.

If any substance is completely dissolved in a glass of water, half of which is then thrown out and the remaining half poured into a full glass of water, we get a dilution of 1:2. When half the water is again thrown out and the remainder poured into a full glass, we get 1:4, and so on. Now in our Biological Institute at Stuttgart, by means of exact scientific methods, a way has been found to produce precise solutions of 1:1 trillion—thus arriving at the so-called higher potencies. The results can be seen in the case, let us say, of antimony, about which I spoke in the medical lecture given during our days here. We find that plant growth, for example, the growth of a grain of wheat, is reduced to its slowest rate at about the twenty-first potency, and brought to its fastest rate at about the twenty-ninth or thirtieth potency. So, you see, a substance has been diluted in fluid to a high potency, and we find that the lower potencies have a different effect upon plant growth while the highest potencies accelerate growth, which means that they give the greatest stimulus to the life-force. In this way it has been found possible to break down the purely material, so that the spiritual can manifest there. For if you split up material substance, not into atoms as atomists would have it, but in such a way as to bring but the activity of its functions and forces, then you are showing willingness, I would say, to go over to the spiritual by permeating matter itself with spirit.

You can imagine now what this means for observing accurately how remedies work on the human organism, for the effect can indeed be seen. The dilution is prepared; you have it in a laboratory flask, and you drop into this potency a grain of wheat; then into the potency in the next flask you drop another grain, and so on—grains and grains of wheat. For in the course of this exact research whole rooms were filled with these germinating grains, showing the effect of each potency on the soil out of which the grains sprout. That is what must be done in science to-day, in order to drive material knowledge on into the realm of the spirit. You know what contention there has been between homoeopaths and allopaths concerning the effectiveness of the smallest entities in the higher potencies. The whole affair up to now has been a question of opinion—the allopaths holding to one view, the homoeopaths to another. Here, however, it is not a case of siding with homoeopaths, but of establishing scientifically the actual facts. In the future it will naturally be known when remedies should be applied in the direct allopathic way, and when in a dilution of the correct potency, so that they may have the desired effect on the patient—particularly on his etheric body, which represents the life-forces. We shall know exactly where to draw the line—here you must give an allopathic treatment, there a homoeopathic one. For just as other scientific experiments are carried out with the utmost exactitude, so in this case Frau Dr. Kolisko has shown in her booklet, with the same exactitude, how the smallest entities really work. What was formerly mere surmise has been raised to the level of an important scientific subject.

But all this points to something further. Just look in this booklet at the accurately worked-out curves which show how the forces of growth go up and down; notice how the curves have to be drawn according to whether the potency is strong or weak, how with certain dilutions there is a minimum of growth, and in more dilute solutions—higher potencies—a maximum; then a return to the minimum, back again to the maximum—and so on. Thus, in the remarkably conscientious tracing of the curves, one gains direct insight into a rhythm working in everything material—a rhythm that is indeed the expression of the spiritual. With human beings, we can turn from the metabolic system to the rhythmical system; it is possible in nature, also, to find in a quite exact, scientific way its rhythmical system. That is precisely what is to be seen in this work, which I believe may prove to be an important landmark, not only in the controversy between homoeopathy and allopathy but in all questions concerning our insight into nature. If the results of this research are estimated rightly, the laws of nature in future will no longer be sought only in the present atomistic way, by measuring and weighing; it will be recognised how in all material things there is a rhythm, and how in the rhythm of events in nature the rhythm of the cosmos is expressed.

I wanted to draw your attention to this as a way leading out from exact science that must be opened up. To-morrow I will go on to show how in psycho-analysis, for example, there is a kind of theoretical aversion towards any real setting out on the path leading from physical nature to the spiritual. But if men are to go forward and not backward in civilisation, they will be obliged to take this path to the spirit.

• 1. This treatise, translated into English, is included in a volume entitled Agriculture of To-morrow, published by Frau Dr. Kolisko in 1939. It is now (1966) out of print, but is obtainable from the Library at Rudolf Steiner House, 35, Park Road, London, N.W.1.

From the descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution. On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking, thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and rebirth into association with these Beings.

You will remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say, to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can work in accordance with these extra-earthly impulses.

In the present epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human beings by higher Powers.

When we survey this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.

If we look back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved—but with what result? At that time it would have meant upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral body.

Think of the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and its smaller part in his lower body—the middle man being between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence. In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course taken by his evolution.

It is impossible to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that, besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper part of man—not on its size as a whole—depends his power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.

If all human forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life would have come to an end through this complete decadence of mankind.

At this point there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun, it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time. Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the divine-spiritual Beings above man—Angels, Archangels, and so on up to the highest—had ever known death, but only metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the decline of the astral body.

And so the Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death—naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom. Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333 years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take place.

Human evolution on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333. Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal healing. Everything therefore done by man without Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for earthly and human evolution.

The situation I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries, where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of these matters—a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.

Thus, in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to discern anxiety—not about earthly affairs but about the whole course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked, to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great question for those we might call successors of the old Initiates.

From among those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form—although as a whole the poem was epic—powerful pictures of the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the Sun—in the way I mentioned—and the descent of Christ into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new, metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to mankind.

These poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries, or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a sacrificial act of some kind would be established.

The epic pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha, was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and went straight to the heart.

This is what that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it. Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the grave tones of an elegy.

Now, among those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language growing ever more lifeless—the Latin language. This carrying on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated poem.

Then came all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East, and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which it was losing vitality.

We must picture this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can apparently be found—for all this is only apparent—forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life—all of which has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden, Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same influence—all this came about so that, ultimately, human beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in freedom.

It is the present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation, are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”. We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the physical—right into the healing of the physical. Christ has become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the salt-forming processes in man. Christus verus Phosphorus—this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost poem I have described.

So, between past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which, influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of such an impulse at work therein.

After the fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed, but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem—though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form—and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's Commedia, though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what had been there in the first few Christian centuries.

Naturally I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation of history—I could make them myself. But recognising, as one must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools, and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time. Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true knowledge of nature and of the heavens—through spiritual investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only be necessary for men—if they wish to reach in their evolution the future intended for them—to transform, to a certain extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform their attitude to the truth.

To speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ must come again. This assumes that during the present century there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this, we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our approach to the spiritual—not so much where ideas and concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.

In the ideas and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact, however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day—with the general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions—we hear of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I remember his having a patient in whom physical examination could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time. Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious, creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects; it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is unconscious.

It was thought that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.

Cases such as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way, spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then became involved with other interests, particularly with those of Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist. The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual knowledge.

Hence this psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each other, they multiply: axa=a², or dxd=d²; thus dilettantismxdilettantism=dilettantismsquared. So it really comes about that something right, based on true foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not, therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.

Jung is indeed capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man, having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a conscientious person—and I would never fail to recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and precise—this really means: You are obliged to live with an untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must, however, be taken with all possible earnestness.

So on all sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise. Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance.

I have repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture. The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world—the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.

Please do not take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised, and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas, which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise present-day research into the spiritual realm.

In certain occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning about the whole Cosmos.

For this reason, after my Theosophy had appeared, it had to be followed by Occult Science. Here the pictures given in Theosophy are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are complementary to each other.

When in any sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them. Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called “occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing pictures from which there is no escape—a veritable prison of pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against man—the Ahrimanic spirits—then become active in nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.

A great part of what to-day is called the scientific outlook—not the facts of science, for they can be relied on—consists of nothing else than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall around man's soul—the spiritual wall of a prison house.

This prospect can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally, science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of soul.

When here we climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.

My dear attendees!

The extremely kind and warm words spoken by Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Collison in welcoming Dr. Steiner and myself, prompt me to say a few words today before the start of the lectures that begin tomorrow. I have been extremely gratified by Mr. Dunlop's wish to organize this summer course on anthroposophy together with his helpers, and I hope that the distinguished audience, whom I also warmly welcome here, will derive some satisfaction from the content of this summer course.

I am particularly pleased with Mr. Dunlop's choice of topic, because it will give me the opportunity to link what anthroposophy has to say about the present and the near future with the oldest wisdom and the oldest spiritual life of humanity. Of course, in a certain respect it is necessary – and I confess that I completely understand the inviting committee's point of view regarding the spirit of our time and civilization – that we are already somewhat out of step with the main purpose of the event, for an anthroposophical course, for anthroposophy in general. For in those most ancient times, which people like to remember so fondly because they revealed the most ancient wisdom of man about the spiritual home of souls, at those most ancient events in which this wisdom was cultivated, people gathered at times that they struggled hard to free themselves from the things that otherwise occupied them day after day in the course of the year. These were times that were, so to speak, set aside for the universe, for the cosmos, and when one did not ask: Do we have any worldly matters to attend to when we gather around the mysteries for these festivities of the year – which were read from the cosmos – for the cultivation of science, for knowledge of the spirit?

We cannot do this, because, for example, in winter, when we meet in summer schools, we all have something else to do. So we can no longer keep this old custom. And so today, since Anthroposophy is only to take hold of civilization in the future, we have to meet when we are on our summer vacations, when we have nothing else to do, so to speak. We have to go on summer trips and festival trips; we have to use our vacations to cultivate Anthroposophy.

Now, Mr. Dunlop has already mentioned what can happen to us; but even if we had lost one or the other suitcase on the journey, Anthroposophy would not have been in it, and we could still have brought it here safely. For Anthroposophy is precisely intended to lead us beyond what can happen materially in space and time. Anthroposophy will first be able to lead us up into the earliest times of human development when discussing the topic chosen by this committee, in which a living science was the basis for everything that civilization and culture have encompassed. What man was able to cognize on his path of wisdom were not dead ideas, but the living spirit itself, which then could flow into artistic creation, which could flow into religious experience, and which, through artistic creation, through religious experience, led man up into those regions where he can see those entities that otherwise speak only vaguely but still distinctly as ethical, as moral ideals.

In the course of human development, what was once an overwhelming unity – science, art, religion, moral-social life – has become separated. The one tree of human development has sprouted four branches: science, art, religion, morality. This was necessary within the development of mankind, because only in this way could each of these branches of civilization develop to the strength necessary for it and for humanity.

But today we stand at that important point in human development at which man can no longer unite those one-sidedness that have developed because that which was once a totality and developed in many branches can no longer be united with that which his entire being, from the soul, from the spiritual, from all subconscious and unconscious inner powers, must demand in order to fulfill his full humanity. We are truly at an important point in the evolution of humanity. Those brothers who have a mother - science, art, religion, morality, social life - after wandering alone in the world for a while, they demand to come back to the home where the common mother can be seen. And today we can no longer come to the spiritual light of humanity by the same paths that an ancient humanity took to do so. Humanity is in a living development. Today's humanity is different from that which strove in the old Indian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek mysteries for that which was once the mother of all knowledge and skill of humanity in the spiritual and material. We have to go new ways today because we have become a new humanity.

Anthroposophy would like to speak of these new paths, which are appropriate for the present and can lead into the future, of these new paths to the spirit, and it will perhaps be best able to express what is to be said for the present and for the near future if it succeeds in at least sketchily developing the theme that the esteemed committee has chosen for this summer course. And it will be particularly satisfying that we will be able to stage some performances of works from an art that is still in its infancy, but which, perhaps precisely because it is in a full struggle for its own essence, shows best how, in turn, an artistic work should and can be created from the spirit even today.

Of course, it is only possible to give a little of what one would like to present in the short time available to us. But still, when one's heart is filled with the feeling of the necessity to let Anthroposophy flow through the world today, one is also filled with warm gratitude from this heart towards those who make it possible to express in some way what Anthroposophy would like to strive for in the further development of human civilization.

Out of all these feelings, please believe me when I say from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of my heart, I thank Mr. Dunlop, Mrs. Merry, all the members of the committee who have contributed to making this event possible. This sense of gratitude, it really also arises from an understanding of what such a committee has to accomplish before such an event can begin.

Just as you, dear attendees, will not see the efforts behind the scenes for a eurythmy performance, for example, which I would like to mention in passing, just as often one does not think of all the broad, wide efforts that such a committee has. However, anyone who has been on such a committee not just repeatedly, but repeatedly squared, will see when they arrive at such an event the pale faces of the committee members and will then be able to appreciate enough what has gone before and what fears and worries still haunt the souls of such committee members immediately before and during the event. Those who are able to judge such things from the right experience of life, who thus understand the degree of pallor of the committee members with expert knowledge, can truly express their feelings of gratitude with full warmth. This should also be expressed, both on behalf of Dr. Steiner, who has been so kindly welcomed, and on my own behalf.

I only hope that through our contributions to the events of the next few days, we can make these days as satisfying for you as we can, and that we can at least fulfill some of the expectations that you have brought with you to this event. We also know that you don't lose your expectations when you pack your bags, you bring them with you in all their weight. And then it is extremely difficult to fulfill these expectations.

But anthroposophy as such is something that should speak so deeply to the soul of contemporary humanity, arising from the needs of present-day civilization, from the needs that each person, each fully human being, carries within them, that even if only relatively weak things can be achieved with weak forces, at least something can be achieved in intention. And we need these intentions. We see everywhere how humanity can no longer get by with the glorious external material culture it has built up over the last three to four centuries. This civilization is now like a material body that has spread in all material perfection over a large part of the earth, but which, like everything that is meant to be alive, longs for soul and spirit. And anthroposophy will ultimately give soul and spirit to what has so gloriously emerged in the external material civilization in modern times as a body. And just as she is inspired by this spirit in everything she does, so I may hope that this spirit will also prevail during the days of this summer school. And I myself would like to extend to you today, in the name of Dr. Steiner and myself, a most cordial welcome inspired by this spirit.

Dear attendees!

After the moving words that have just been spoken, let me say a few words of greeting and thanks at the end of this summer school endeavor.

Looking back on this time in Penmaenmawr, I can say that I see it as a time of deep satisfaction. It was this Summer School that provided the opportunity to bring anthroposophy to bear here in England on its own, to a greater extent and for a longer period of time. And that is what fills me with such deep satisfaction.

We must not underestimate the ideas that arise from a particular undertaking, especially in our anthroposophical field. The idea from which this summer school originated was developed by Mr. Dunlop when I visited him during his illness - he already mentioned it during my last visit to London. At that time, he was completely absorbed by the idea of adding something to what has been achieved for anthroposophy in such an admirable way, that would put the central core of the anthroposophical movement itself before the world. And he told me at the time that his particular idea was to present to the world in such a summer school what Anthroposophy can give in its content through the word, and also what has emerged from it through eurythmy. And he expressed a third idea, the realization of which was of course not immediately possible because it was too big for external realization in the first attempt. But we have gained the satisfaction of realizing the central anthroposophical element, that which appears as anthroposophy in itself, and that which has grown so intimately out of anthroposophy – I would like to say eurythmy – and to bring it to bear in Penmaenmawr.

This is not to say that the assertion of the individual currents that otherwise grow out of anthroposophy should be underestimated. But, ladies and gentlemen, for those who can examine more deeply the connections of the human soul, and especially the connections that arise between a movement such as anthroposophy and what can come forth from it into the world, it is clear that these other currents can only have an appropriate effect in the world if the Central Anthroposophical Society really comes into its own.

Believe me, my dear audience, the educational movement in all its aspects is truly close to my heart. But never, perhaps precisely because it is so close to my heart, could I ever give anyone the assurance that this educational movement, as it has grown out of anthroposophy, could be fully understood by itself with inner truth , let alone that by first winning an audience for what has grown out of anthroposophy as pedagogy, as an educational system, that this could lead to anthroposophy.

The opposite, in the truest sense of the word, must be the right thing: that it is precisely through anthroposophy itself, through the cultivation of anthroposophy in its most central areas, that a real understanding comes about for that which has grown out of anthroposophy, namely the educational movement, which is so important for the world. That is why Mr. Dunlop spoke so extraordinarily from my heart when he said that before taking care of the dependent movements, one must above all put what must be the source of everything: anthroposophy. Nevertheless, I would prefer to have a different name for Anthroposophy every eight days, so that the public does not get stuck on the name instead of asking about the matter. But that is not possible because of the letterhead and other organizational difficulties. And when I think back to that conversation, I have to say that anyone who is as immersed in the spiritual science movement as I am can give what they are able to give without needing to impose it on the world in any way, without needing to give it because it is expected of them, because it is expected of them in the right way.

Actually, this law should be much more recognized, that real occult spiritual science can only be given when it is requested, when it is requested in the right way. And it was requested in the right way at the time.

And so I may say: My opinion is that precisely from this Summer School in Penmaenmawr a tremendous fertilization can come to the whole anthroposophical movement and its ramifications in England. Therefore, we can look back with such satisfaction on the time we were allowed to spend here in Penmaenmawr. And I already express my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Steiner and to Mr. Dunlop and those who worked with him to make it possible to present the very core of anthroposophy and the eurythmy that has grown out of it to such a dear audience as the one present here. And we are no less grateful to this audience – I am also speaking on behalf of Dr. Steiner – for its attentive support. It is of extraordinary importance to be able to speak, on the one hand, about what one is trying to extract from the sources of spiritual knowledge, because at present it is that which should actually speak most deeply to the heart and soul of the human being. On the other hand, we live in a time in which it can be seen from all possible symptoms how necessary it is for modern civilization to receive a spiritual impetus, and how little that which has come down to us from ancient times is suited to advance civilization in a fruitful way. It would go backwards if it could not gain a new spiritual impetus. And here it may be said: when the opportunity arises, from such a context as has been expressed here, to point out precisely what the time needs, it fills me with the deepest satisfaction.

This morning, for example, I had to draw attention to the fact that civilization itself is threatened by a kind of occult captivity, and more than one might think, the entire intellectual life of our time is in danger of this occult captivity. We can point out this danger everywhere. This morning I mentioned the speech that Oliver Lodge recently gave in England to a very important assembly. I mentioned how one can see from this speech how longings are present even in the most abstract of sciences, longings that remain in the subconscious, but which, if they are properly understood and come from the right attitude, lead to what – in all modesty, let it be said – spiritual science can really provide. And if we follow up such things, we can see everywhere what the word of spiritual science must be in such a case.

You see, it is indeed a significant phenomenon that the remarkable book written by Oliver Lodge about his son's soul after his death, entitled 'Raymond or Life and Death', has grown out of the very way of thinking and attitude that is fully rooted in the most official modern science. I need only mention the fact, it will be known here. The point was that Oliver Lodge's son, who died in the war, was able to communicate through a medium and say things that went deep into the soul of the deeply saddened father.

When the brochure by the excellent man, Oliver Lodge, about Raymond Lodge came out, the world was amazed; for with an enormous erudition, which was truly taken from the most conscientious, exact, modern thinking, the spiritual world was pointed out by Oliver Lodge in the same. A tremendous amount of material had been collected to show how, through this mediumistic channel, one can really enter into the spiritual life of the world through a method similar to that of modern natural science. Particularly striking to the world was the fact that it was possible to speak through mediumship about a photograph that had been taken at the theater of war in France by Raymond Lodge and his colleagues. Two photographs had been taken in succession of Raymond Lodge and his comrades-in-arms; and as the photographer often does in the second shot, he turns the face slightly, raises it higher, and so on. These photographs were such that in England one could not know about them, because by the time one heard about them, Raymond had already died.

Through mediumship, as Oliver Lodge reports, the soul of Raymond Lodge spoke to him and the other family members, he spoke of these photographs that no one here in England had seen; they only arrived here three weeks later. Everything came true, down to the slightest change in the session and attitude. What could be more striking than this! What could be more striking than that something is described by means of a medium, stating that it is the soul of the deceased that is describing something, which was not yet known in England and only arrived later. |

Nevertheless, a terrible error crept in on this very point. Everyone who is well-versed in this field knows that under certain circumstances there is every possibility of premonitions. What the circle gathered with the medium saw by fixing their eyes on the pictures that only arrived in England later could be foreseen by the medium without the soul of the deceased being taken into account in any way – a premonition, albeit an extraordinarily delicate and intimate one, but a premonition nonetheless. One must be more than just a modern scientist if one wants to be critically correct in the spiritual world. Everything that comes in this field, even this excellent, serious, exact work by Oliver Lodge, tends to lead away from the real grasp of the spiritual world rather than to it. The habits of thought and research taken from the natural sciences today are such that, even when one is investigating the spiritual, one wants to proceed as one is accustomed to doing in the laboratory, that one wants to take every step by the hand of the material. But this way does not lead into the spiritual. Only pure spiritual paths lead into the spiritual, as they have been described here. And the person who believes that he can enter the spiritual realm through such a mediumistic path will indeed enter it, but into the spiritual that takes place on the physical plane, in the physical world. Because it was a foreshadowing of two things that took place in the physical world; what has been described only appears to be something that was projected from the spiritual world. Certainly, the physical world is filled with spiritual phenomena everywhere, but people are mistaken about the relationship between the earthly world and the supernatural world if they do not have the opportunity to direct their attention to real, truthful spiritual research. And so what I mentioned this morning is this: this desire to create only from scientific thoughts, as is customary today, and to only allow what comes from scientific thoughts, that is what brings the walls of occult imprisonment. And once inside these occult prisons, attempts are made that in truth go completely awry; for they do not represent the truth, they represent terrible errors that tend to lead further away from the truths; especially when the hearts are as much a part of it as they are in the case of what is written in the book about Raymond Lodge. And we must, because in the realm where the spirit begins to speak, there is such a strong echo coming from our hearts, because the hearts have so much to say, because what can easily be human prejudice creeps into the hearts, we must use all means to prevent the possibility of being surrounded by the spiritual walls of occult imprisonment.

I would not mention these things here if the seriousness of the times did not demand it. And the seriousness of the times demands it. Because it is true: humanity needs to take a decisive step towards the spiritual.

I have been asked many questions during this summer course. Some questions could not be answered in full, not because the subject matter was too difficult, but because the time has not yet fully arrived in the development of humanity when we can speak quite openly about some things. This applies particularly when questions are asked about the spiritual relationships between individual nations. I have also been asked how the spiritual world deals with the fact that one nation conquers another and makes it dependent on itself.

Oh, spiritual science could of course provide the appropriate information on such questions. But the time is truly not yet ripe – believe me, my dear audience, – to speak about these things in complete candour. Because we still do not fully accept the consequences of those truths that begin, for example, like this: One should only ask oneself whether the external aspect is really always the only one when one nation has made another dependent on itself in physical terms, in the material affairs of the world. And one does not always see how the nation that has made the other materially dependent on itself has become spiritually dependent on the one that has made it materially dependent on itself. But this is only the beginning of truths that must also become popular throughout the civilized world. And we will come to that universal understanding of such things, which can then also gain their full significance in practical life, only if we really have the inner courage to engage with the actual spiritual truths.

And so it is ultimately also with the question: Yes, are there individualities in the world today that have some kind of higher truths, that somehow convey these truths to the world and that perhaps are related to each other?

I have already pointed out that it does not depend solely on certain individuals sending truths into the world, but that it also depends on the extent to which the world is willing to accept these truths. I have pointed out many obstacles that exist today and that could be expressed as follows: The Bodhisattva is already waiting; but people must first, in a sufficiently large number, make themselves able to understand him. And when the question is raised as to whether those who have something spiritual to say to the world should communicate this spiritual knowledge to humanity, then it may be said that the fact that something is printed on paper with printed letters does not yet mean anything. I would just like to mention that today much can be written on paper with printed letters that reveals the deepest wisdoms and wisdoms. It always depends on whether these wisdoms and wisdoms are also understood. And there are many means of understanding; there are also many means of understanding that can be applied. But, my dear attendees, communication among people who have something to say from higher worlds was easier in the time when it was spoken from sacred places, such as the Druidic circles that are found here, and when the thought waves that went out from such places into the world did not encounter the waves of wireless telegraphy.

Again, wireless telegraphy is not mentioned in a reactionary way. It is, of course, a material blessing for humanity. But the point is that if spiritual messages are really to go out into the world, stronger forces are needed at the time when spiritual waves meet wireless telegraphy waves than at the time when this is not yet the case. If only people would realize the basic concepts, the fundamental, profound truth that precisely in our time, in which our material culture has reached such a high level, precisely in this time, it is all the more necessary for the spiritual to be written into the hearts of people with great intensity and to spread out from the hearts of people.

There was a really good, great opportunity for this here. For we lived as if in an atmosphere that actually still radiated something wonderful in those old shrines here - and I was also able to draw attention to that in the course of the lectures. Therefore, it was a lucky choice to choose this place, where, in a certain way, what was in Central and Northern Europe before the Mystery of Golgotha went out into the world could spiritually revive. What was waiting for the Mystery of Golgotha, but which then initially found no continuation, as Christianity - as I described this morning - came up from the south. In a sense, it is still waiting.

Because, esteemed attendees, when you come up to that remarkable solitude where these stone circles stand, you can still encounter the real echoes of what once worked with great power here in the northern regions of Europe. And there was much in the stream of power in those days that can no longer be today, because human souls must progress and with today's progress they could not bear it, it would inhibit their freedom. Thus it is precisely because that which was once derived from the Sacred Mysteries by the deepest occult knowledge has gradually passed into the cosmic memory, which, like luminous clouds, hover around the hollows of the mountain peaks in which these sanctuaries are located; precisely because of this, this special atmosphere is spread over everything that can be done here for a newer spiritual life. These are the things that, in the deepest sense, call for Dr. Steiner's and my most heartfelt thanks, that through the efforts of Mr. Dunlop, Mrs. Merry and others, we can include this Penmaenmawr enterprise in what the anthroposophical movement is.

It has already been beautifully mentioned here how many people have worked behind the scenes to make all this possible, and just as you all, my dear listeners, are being expressed the most heartfelt thanks for the beautiful attention you have shown to such a beautiful place for anthroposophy, eurythmy and so on, these thanks also go to all those who prepared this so beautifully and then continued to carry it forward in such a beautiful way during the summer school days themselves. I have already mentioned that anyone who knows how much effort is required to accomplish something like this, and who has often been there themselves, is indeed in a good position to judge these things. And, you see, he also knows something else: those who were around me in the old days and had to prepare such things themselves always sent their skin first to the tanneries, because basically you can't really satisfy everyone. You can't satisfy everyone, but you still get your kicks afterwards. And it's good to have a tanned skin for these days – especially for all those who are behind the scenes and have set up the whole thing.

The anthroposophical movement really did start from a small beginning, ladies and gentlemen. Recently in Dornach I pointed out that twenty-one or so years ago the anthroposophical movement was initiated within the theosophical movement through the journal Lucifer-Gnosis. It was not discontinued, but the work piled up to such an extent that it could no longer be continued. It had a far from adequate, but overwhelming number of subscribers at the very moment when I could not continue it. But the anthroposophical movement started with it, on a very small scale. I wrote most of Lucifer-Gnosis, so to speak; then I had to go to the printer myself to make the corrections at the printing house, then we received the issues, and Dr. Steiner and I placed the cross bands over them, wrote the addresses ourselves (we didn't even have printed addresses, nor did we have a typewriter), then each of us took a laundry basket, put the issues in it and took them to the post office. The anthroposophical movement began on a small scale. Even when giving lectures, one was not allowed to look at the fact that there are such elegant, wonderful rooms as the one here. I once gave a lecture in a room where I had to be careful not to let my legs fall into holes in the floor with every step I took when walking through the hall. Therefore, it did not surprise me that it rained again here the other day – I could almost say, to remind us – because the ceiling here in the city hall also has holes. These things, when compared to the beginnings of the anthroposophical movement, look very much like real festive occasions compared to what could not yet be present in such a solemn way. I am not ashamed to say that in Berlin, for example, we once had to hold our lectures in a room that was separated from the rest by a so-called “Spanish wall”; behind it, the sound of beer glasses could be heard, because behind it was a beer bar. And when we were once unable to get this hall, we were told: This hall is filled with more important things today, go to the only other room we have — which was something between a cellar and a stable. So the anthroposophical movement has had to struggle. And that is why it also knows how to be grateful, insofar as it lives in the hearts of people. And you will understand that what has happened here during these days should be fully appreciated, especially by our side.

In these words of thanks I would like to summarize everything that I feel at this moment of deepest, most heartfelt satisfaction about these days in Penmaenmawr. Finally, I would just like to say: It is indeed always a challenge when I am supposed to work here in England for anthroposophy, that the audience has to spend twice as long at the lectures because everything has to be translated. But from a certain point of view I am not sorry, and that is from the point of view that it has shown something that is basically quite extraordinary - Mr. Kaufmann's excellent translation skills have been demonstrated. He will also have to translate what I am saying now, and as always, I ask him not to omit these last words, otherwise I will threaten him by saying that I will ask Dr. Baravalle to translate these words. I also express my gratitude to Mr. Kaufmann for what he has once again done in such a dedicated manner, even though he almost got sick because he didn't bring his winter coat here, where you really need winter coats. He has taken on this work tirelessly, and as I know for certain, to the deepest satisfaction of the audience. Above all, he deserves the warmest thanks, because I must say: what should I do if Mr. Kaufmann were not there to convey what I would have liked to convey to you so much. And so, at the end of this undertaking, I believe I have the right to express the warmest thanks in my name and in that of Dr. Steiner to everyone: Mr. Dunlop, Mrs. Merry, Mr. Kaufmann and all the others who have worked in front of and behind the scenes. And let it also be said that the memory of what we have experienced here at Penmaenmawr will remain a truly warm and lasting one.

With these words, which should bind us together for the future, since I believe we have been here in harmony, in a harmony also consecrated by historical memories, I would like to conclude my greeting and expression of thanks for these wonderful days in Penmaenmawr.

Since it has been requested that I speak about the therapeutic principles that have grown out of the anthroposophical world view on one of our evenings, I am very happy to comply with this request, but it is difficult to speak briefly about this subject in particular. It is difficult because the subject is an extremely broad one and it is hardly possible to give a proper idea of the essentials in a very short lecture, which can only be aphoristic. On the other hand, certain considerations that have to be made are somewhat remote from general human consciousness. Nevertheless, I will try to explain the things that are important as generally as possible this evening.

The fact that there is also a medical current within the anthroposophical movement certainly does not stem from the fact that we as anthroposophists want to be everywhere and want to poke our noses into everything. That is certainly not the case. But as the Anthroposophical movement sought to make its way in the world, physicians also joined the movement, physicians who were seriously striving, and a large, relatively large number of such physicians had come to a more or less clear awareness of how shaky the views of today's officially accepted medicine actually are, and how the foundations for the actual understanding of disease processes and their healing are often lacking.

Official science lacks these foundations because what today claims validity, scientific validity, actually only wants to rely on the natural science that is generally used today. And this natural science, in turn, only believes it is walking securely with what it can determine in a mechanical, physical or chemical way in external nature. And it then applies what it finds through physics and chemistry about external natural processes to where it wants to come to an understanding of the human being. But even if a kind of concentration, microcosmic concentration of all world processes, is contained in the human being, the external physical and chemical processes in the human organism itself are never present in the form in which they take place outside in nature. Man takes up into himself the substances of the earth, which are not merely passive substances, but which are actually always imbued with natural processes and phenomena. A substance only appears on the surface to be something that is at rest. In reality, everything in the substance is alive and in motion. And so man also takes up into his organism these processes, this weaving and living, as they take place chemically and physically in nature, but he transforms it immediately in his organism, he makes it into something else in his organism.

What becomes of the natural processes in the human organism can only be understood by truly and truly observing human beings. But today's natural science, by wanting to rely solely on the physical and chemical, actually excludes from its field of study what actually takes place in the human being as human, and also, for example, in the physical body of the human being as human. For nothing takes place in the physical body that is not at the same time influenced by etheric, astral or ego processes. But because natural science completely disregards these ego processes, these astral processes, this etheric life and weaving, it does not actually get anywhere near the human being. Therefore, this natural science cannot really look into the human interior in such a way that it can clearly see how the external chemical and physical processes in the human being then continue to work, how they continue to work in the healthy person, and how they continue to work in the sick person.

But how can one judge the effect of a remedy in the right way if one cannot understand how some natural thing that we introduce into the organism, or with which we treat the organism, continues to work in the human organism.

And so we can say that the greatest conceivable progress in the medical field in modern times has actually only been made in the field of surgery, where it is a matter of external, one might say mechanical, handling.

On the other hand, in the field of actual therapy – not in my opinion, but precisely in the opinion of those doctors who have become aware of all this – there is great confusion because one cannot see the connection between any natural thing and its effect on the disease if one actually excludes the human being from scientific observation due to one's particular view of natural science.

Now, since anthroposophy is based precisely on getting to know the human being in his innermost being, both insofar as he is a supersensible being and insofar as he is a sensual being, knowledge can also be gained from anthroposophy about treating people with these or those natural remedies in the event of illness.

In fact, we are already faced with a certain limit to our knowledge in medicine if we only ask about the actual nature of the disease. What is the disease? Based on today's scientific knowledge, this question: What is the disease? — cannot be answered at all. Because, according to these scientific views, what is the sum of all the processes that take place in a healthy person? From the head, from the outermost end of the head to the last end of the toes on the foot, these are the natural processes. But what then are the processes that take place in the liver, kidneys, head, heart, wherever, during an illness? They are natural processes. Everything that is a healthy process is a natural process; everything that is a disease process is also a natural process. Why is it that, under the one kind of process, the human being is healthy and under the other kind of process, he is sick?

The point is that one does not speak in generalities, speaking so nebulously: Well, the healthy natural processes are normal, the unhealthy natural processes are not normal. — There really comes “in due time”, when one knows nothing, “a word”!

The problem is that if you only apply general natural science, as is common today, you approach the human being in such a way that you prefer not to approach the living human being at all, but rather the corpse. You take some piece of the organism here or there and imagine what healthy or diseased natural processes are taking place within it. And so you don't really care whether you take tissue from the head or the liver or the big toe or something like that. Everything can be traced back to the cell. Histology, the study of tissue, has actually become the most highly developed of all human studies. Well, if you go into the smallest parts and omit all the interrelationships of forces, then, just as all cows are grey in the dark, all organs in the human being are the same. But then you get a nocturnal “grey cow science”, not a real science that deals with the specificity of the individual organs in the human being.

What must serve as the basis for this, I only dared to express a few years ago, although it has occupied me for more than thirty to thirty-five years now. But one usually only imagines that spiritual science comes to its results so easily. One need only look into the spiritual world and one would discover everything, whereas it is more difficult when one has to work in laboratories, in physics cabinets or in a clinic; there one must make an effort — at least that is what one thinks. In spiritual science, one only has to look into the world of the spirit and one can discover everything. But it is not like that. Especially conscientious spiritual research requires more effort and, above all, more responsibility than working in a laboratory or at a clinic or an observatory. And so it is that although the first conception of what I now want to briefly indicate in principle was before me about thirty-five years ago, I was only able to express it a few years ago, after everything had been processed and, above all, verified in the context of the entire official natural science of the present day. And it was precisely under the influence of these principles about the structure of the human being that the therapeutic current within our anthroposophical movement came into being.

We must not forget that, even when we have a person before us in their physical form, we must distinguish three distinct limbs. These three different limbs can be named in a variety of ways. However, the best way to approach them is to characterize them by saying that the human being has, as the one system of their physical being, the nerve-sense system, which is mainly localized in the head.

The human being has a second system, the rhythmic system; this includes breathing and blood circulation. But it also includes, for example, the rhythmic activities of digestion and so on. This is the second system of the human being.

And the third system of the human being is the connection between the movement system, the limb system and the actual metabolic system. This connection will be immediately clear to you when you consider that it is precisely through the movement of the limbs that the metabolism is promoted, and that actually the limbs are always connected with the metabolic organs in a very organic way. Anatomy will also show you this immediately. Just see how the legs continue inwardly into the metabolic organs and how the arms also continue inwardly. So that we can distinguish three systems in the human being: the nerve-sense system, localized mainly in the head; the rhythmic system, localized mainly in the chest, around the heart; and the metabolic-limb system, localized mainly in the limbs and the attached metabolic organs.

But we must not imagine this human anatomy in the way that a professor once did in an attempt to discredit the anthroposophical movement. He did not try to penetrate what was actually meant by this structure, but he tried to blacken this structure of the human being and said: These anthroposophists claim that the human being consists of three systems, the head, the trunk - chest and stomach - and the limbs. Yes, of course, you can immediately ridicule a thing in this way.

For it is not the case that the nervous-sensory system is only in the head. It is mainly in the head, but it then extends over the whole organism, so that the human being has spread his head organization over the whole organism. Similarly, the rhythmic system extends up and down over the whole organism. Man is thus, again, a rhythmic system in space, and also a metabolic-limb system. When you move your eyes, the eyes are limbs. These systems are not juxtaposed in space, but are structured into one another. They are interlocking, and one must become accustomed to precise thinking if one wants to properly assess this structure of the human being.

Now the two systems, the first and the third, the nervous sense system and the limb metabolism system, are actually polar opposites. What the one produces, the other destroys; what the other destroys, the one produces. So they work in completely opposite ways. And the middle system, the rhythmic system, establishes the relationship between the two. There is a kind of oscillation between the two, so that a harmony can always take place between the destruction of one system and the building of the other. If we consider the metabolic system, for example, the metabolic system naturally works with its greatest intensity in the human abdomen. But what is going on in the human abdomen must evoke a polar opposite activity in the human head, in the nerve-sense system, if the human being is to be healthy.

Now, if you imagine that this intense activity, which is actually the activity of the human digestive system, extends to the nerve-sense system due to its intensity being too strong and too great, so that the activity which should actually be in the metabolic system, encroaches on the nerve-sense system, then you have two, albeit natural processes, for my sake, but you can immediately see how the one natural process becomes abnormal. It just belongs in the metabolic system, and it breaks through, as it were, into the nerve-sense system.

This is how the various forms of a disease arise that is treated by medicine today as a somewhat neglected disease, but, I would say, by a large part of humanity as a less neglected disease, because these various forms of the disease are known everywhere. This is how what is known as the various forms of migraine arises. And in order to understand migraine in its various forms, one must grasp this process, which, in its intensity, as it is there, is supposed to take place in the metabolic system and which breaks through into the nervous sense system, so that the nerves and the senses themselves are treated in such a way that the metabolism shoots into them instead of remaining in its actual place.

The reverse can take place. The process that is supposed to be most intense in the nerve-sense system, which is quite contrary to the metabolic process, can in turn break through in a certain way after the metabolic system. So that in the metabolic system, instead of there being only a very subordinate nerve-sense process, an intensified nerve-sense process takes place, so that, as it were, what belongs to the head breaks through and occurs in the abdomen, head activity thus occurs in the abdomen. When this happens, the dangerous disease of abdominal typhus arises in the person.

Thus, by thoroughly understanding this threefold human being, we can see how the process of illness develops out of the healthy process in the human organism. If our head, with its nervous-sense system, were not organized as it is, we could never have typhoid fever. If our abdomen were not organized as it is, we could never have migraine. But the activity of the head should remain in the head, and the activity of the abdomen in the abdomen. If they break through, then these types of disease arise.

And as with these two particularly characteristic forms of disease, one can point to other forms of disease that always arise from a certain activity that belongs to a certain organ system asserting itself in a different place, in a different organ system.

If you proceed only anatomically, you see how the smallest parts are arranged in the organism's tissue. But you do not see this effect of polar opposite activity. You can only study the nerve cell to see that it is organized in the opposite way to, say, the liver cell. If you can see the whole organism in such a way that it appears to you in its threefold structure, then you also notice how the nerve cell is a cell that constantly wants to dissolve, that constantly wants to be broken down if it is to be healthy, and how a liver cell is something that constantly wants to be built up if it is to be healthy. These are polar activities. They interact in the right way when they are properly distributed in the organism, and they interact in the wrong way when they penetrate each other.

The rhythmic system is in the middle and always wants to create a balance between the opposing polar activities of the nervous-sensory system and the metabolic-limb system.

I would now like to select a specific example to give you a sense of how – I can of course only discuss it in aphorisms – we can find the relationship between the healing agent taken from nature and its forces and the forces of illness and health at work within the human being.

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Let us turn our attention to a very specific ore found in nature, the so-called antimony ore. Antimony has an extraordinarily interesting property when you look at it externally. It forms in nature in such a way that, so to speak, skewers arise, rod-shaped, spear-like structures that lie next to each other, so that one finds the antimony ore in nature in such a way that, if I draw it schematically, one could draw it something like this. It grows almost like a mineral moss or a mineral lichen. You can see that, to a certain extent, this mineral wants to arrange itself in thread-like form. It can be seen even more clearly how this mineral, this ore, wants to arrange itself in thread-like form when it is subjected to a certain physical-chemical process. Then it becomes even more fibrillar. It arranges itself in very thin fibers. But what is particularly significant is what happens when this antimony is subjected to a certain kind of combustion process. You get a white smoke that can attach itself to walls and then become shiny, mirror-like.* This is called antimony mirror. It is not very well respected today, but it was used a great deal in ancient medicine, precisely because of the ancient knowledge from which I have repeatedly spoken to you in the morning lectures. This antimony mirror, that is, what develops only from the combustion process and can be deposited on walls, making them shiny as glass, is something extraordinarily important.

Another property is added to all this. I will just emphasize this: If you subject antimony to certain electrolytic processes and bring it to the so-called electrolytic cathode, you only need to exert a small influence on the cathode after you have brought the antimony and subjected it to the electrolytic process, and you get a small antimony explosion. In short, this antimony has the most interesting properties imaginable.

If we introduce a certain moderate dosage of antimony into the human organism, we can study the various processes to see how the same forces that behave as I have described in antimony actually do experience their continuation in the human organism, and how they take on all kinds of forms of force and all kinds of forms of action there.

These forms of activity – I cannot, of course, go into the details and evidence here, I just want to briefly sketch out the inner connections – these processes that occur in the human organism are particularly strong, for example, wherever blood coagulates. So they strengthen and promote blood clotting. But if we now examine the human organism using methods that also belong to the threefold structure of the human organism, which gradually allow us to look into the human being and recognize how the individual systems in the various organs behave, if we look into the human organism in this way, we find that what lives in antimony does not merely live outside in the mineral antimony, but that it is actually a context of forces that lives in the human organism itself, that is always present in the human organism, in a healthy organism, and that it also takes on forms in the sick human organism, as I have explained to you now.

This antimony process, I would like to say, which is present in the human organism itself, is polar opposite to another process. It is opposed to the process that occurs wherever the plastically active forces, for example the cell-forming forces, the cell-rounding forces, occur, where that which actually forms the cell substance of the human organism occurs. I would like to call these forces, because they are preferably contained in the protein substance, for example, the albuminizing forces. And so we have in the human organism the forces that we find outside in nature, in antimony in particular, when we subject the antimony to combustion, for example, and bring it up to the antimony level. The forces that work outside in the antimony, we also have them working in the human organism. But we also have the opposite forces at work, the albuminizing forces, which bring the antimony forces to a standstill, remove them.

These two systems of forces, the albumino- and antimonio-metallizing forces, now counteract each other in such a way that they must be in a certain equilibrium in the human organism. It must now be recognized that, for example, the process which I described to you earlier in principle and which underlies abdominal typhus, is essentially due to the fact that the equilibrium between these two systems of forces is disturbed.

In order to gain a true insight into the human organism, we need to be able to draw on what I have just discussed from a wide range of perspectives – albeit non-medical – in these morning lectures during this course.

We have seen how the human being not only has this physical body, but also an etheric or formative forces body, an astral body, an ego organization. And just yesterday I was able to explain to you how the physical body and the formative forces body, on the one hand, and the I and the astral body, on the other, are intimately connected, but how the astral body and the formative forces body or ether body are more loosely connected, because they separate every night.

This connection, which consists of the interplay of the forces of the astral body and the etheric body, is now radically disturbed in abdominal typhus. In the case of abdominal typhus, the astral body becomes weak and is unable to work intensively into the physical body because it works for itself, causing a preponderance that effectively pushes down the nerve-sense organization, which is mainly subject to the astral body. Instead of being transformed into the metabolic organization, it remains as such, as astral activity. The astral body works for itself. It does not properly work into the ether body. This is how the symptoms of the disease arise, which give the symptoms of typhoid fever.

Now, what occurs in antimony is that the antimony, so to speak, denies its mineral nature, becomes crystallized in a bourgeois way, that even the antimony mirror, where it is deposited, appears like snow flowers on a window, thus also showing the inner crystallization power as in nature, this crystallization power This crystallization power, which becomes active in antimony, works when we process it in the appropriate way as a medicine and introduce it into the organism, so that it supports this organism, so that it can push its astral body with its forces in the right way into the etheric body, and bring these bodies back into the right relationship.

With the remedy made from antimony in the appropriate way, we support the process that is opposed to the typhoid process. And in this way, with the antimony remedy in particular – to which, depending on whether the disease takes this or that course, other substances must be added, which in turn have a similar relationship to the human organism – one can fight the disease with this remedy, to which other substances are added, disease by stimulating and supporting the processes in the organism, so that it develops its own, I might say antimonizing power, which then tends to bring about the right rhythm in the interaction of the etheric body and the astral body.

Thus, anthroposophical observation leads us to see the relationship between what works outside in nature, in natural things, as I have shown you with the example of antimony, and what works inside the human organism. You can follow these albuminous forces, which have a plastic, rounding effect, and the forces that work along lines, right into the germ cell.

For those who have really acquired knowledge in this field – however unpleasant it is for them to say so, because they know that they will arouse the hatred and antipathy of the corresponding people – and who can see into the workings of the human organism, the otherwise truly most wonderful microscopic examinations of the ovum, of the germ cell, seem extraordinarily amateurish. They observe the ovum as such on the outside, the development of the so-called centrosomes – you can read about this in any embryology book – without knowing how these albuminizing forces, which also control the whole organism, work in opposition, polar opposition to the antimonizing forces. The rounding of the ovum as such is caused by the albumino-coagulating force; the centrosomes after fertilization are caused by the antimonio-coagulating processes.

But this happens in the whole human body. And by preparing the remedy in the right way and knowing, through the diagnosis, where the human organism needs support, we supply the human organism with the forces it needs to counteract a disease process.

By introducing anthroposophical perspectives into medicine, we are actually achieving the goal of considering the real and correct relationship between the macrocosm, the whole world, and the human being. And just as I have pointed out antimony to you – I would of course have to say a lot about antimony if I wanted to discuss it scientifically in detail now, but I just want to hint at the principles – and the processes that it can bring forth, that it has within it when it is treated in one way or another, I could now for example, I could also show you the whole behavior within nature and its processes, let us say for that which is called quartz as a mineral, silicic acid, silicea, which is mixed with granite as one of its components, which crystallizes transparently in its deposits and is so hard that it can no longer be scratched with a knife, and is precisely a component of granite. If this substance is treated in a certain way, when it is administered to the organism – in the right dosage, of course, which must be determined by diagnosis – it acquires the property of supporting whatever is to take effect in the nerve-sense system, whatever the organism is to muster in the nerve-sense system as the inherent forces of this nerve-sense system. So that one can say: what the senses are actually supposed to do, one supports when one administers this remedy, which is prepared from silicon, from quartz, to the person in the right way. One must then, depending on the secondary symptoms, add other substances, but in the main it is about the effect of what lies in the silicic acid formation process. When this silicic acid formation process is introduced into the human organism, it supports an activity in the nerve-sense system that is too weak. It then has the right strength. Now, when this nerve-sense activity becomes too weak, the digestive activity breaks through to the head. Migraine-like conditions arise. If we now support the sense activity, the nerve sense activity in the right way with a remedy that has been produced in the right way from silicic acid, from quartz, Silicea, then the nerve sense system in the migraine patient becomes so strong that it can in turn push back the broken-through digestive process.

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I am, of course, presenting these things to you somewhat crudely, but you will see what is important from this. It is essential to really understand the healthy and sick human organism, not only in terms of its cellular composition, but also in terms of the forces that act in the same sense or in a polar or rhythmic way in this human organism, in order to then seek out that which can combat this or that pathological process in the human organism when it is at work in nature.

Thus, for example, we can find how the process contained in phosphorus is a process in the external nature that, when introduced into the human organism, has a supportive effect on a certain kind of internal inability of the human organism: namely, when the human organism, in relation to certain forces that should always be at work within it when it is healthy, becomes incapable of allowing these forces to work in the right way, when it has too little strength to allow certain forces to work within it that are actually a kind of organic combustion process that is always present when substances are transformed in the human organism. Organic combustion processes occur with every movement, with everything that a person does, even with those things that are done internally. Now, the human organism can become too weak to regulate these organic combustion processes in the right way. They must be inhibited in a certain way. If they are not inhibited enough, they develop in a vehement way. The organic combustion processes actually always have an immeasurable, unlimited intensity by themselves, otherwise there would immediately be too much fatigue here or there, or one would not be able to get any further than a moving person. These organic combustion processes actually have, I want to say, unlimited intensity, and the organism must continually have the possibility to inhibit them.

If these inhibiting forces are absent, either in an organ system or in the whole organism, if the organism has become too weak to inhibit its organic combustion processes in the right way, then tuberculosis arises in its most diverse forms. I would say that it is only through this organic powerlessness, through this inability to inhibit the combustion processes, that the suitable breeding ground for the bacilli is created; these can then be found on this breeding ground.

Nothing should be said here against the bacillus theory. The bacillus theory is very useful. From the different way in which the bacilli appear here or there, one naturally recognizes various things; for diagnosis, an extraordinary amount can be recognized from it. It is not my intention to speak out against official medicine, but rather to continue it where it reaches certain limits. And it can be continued by applying the aspects of anthroposophy to it.

If phosphorus is now added to the organism, these abilities to inhibit the organic combustion processes are supported. However, it must be taken into account that this inhibition can originate from a wide variety of organ systems. If, for example, it originates from the system that works primarily in the bones, then the phosphorus effect in the human organism must be supported by specializing it, so to speak, specifically for the bone side. This is done by combining the phosphorus remedy with calcium or calcium salt in some way that is revealed by a more precise study of the matter. If the patient has tuberculosis of the small intestine, some copper compounds will be added to the phosphorus in the correct dosage. If the patient has pulmonary tuberculosis, iron, for example, will be added to the phosphorus. But then, because pulmonary tuberculosis is an extremely complicated disease, other admixtures may also be considered under certain circumstances. So you can see that the possibility of a real therapy is based on how the chemical and physical processes in the human organism continue, how they continue to work inside.

Official medicine often starts from the view that just as the antimony forces work out there in antimony, so they also work in the human organism. That is not the case. We must be clear about how these processes continue to work in the human organism. And that can be seen in particular if we apply the actually anthroposophical insights to the experiments at issue.

As we saw with antimony and its powers, antimony establishes the rhythm between the astral body and the etheric body or formative forces body. In the case of the forces at work in silicic acid, quartz, and quartz, in the silicea, can be seen to be particularly suitable for establishing the correct relationship between the ego and the astral body when it is disturbed, in order to have a healing effect on the nervous and sensory system. While it is the case with lime – especially with the lime used from the lime secretions of animals – that you get remedies that establish the right relationship between the formative forces body and the physical body.

So one can say: The correct view of the human being leads one to use lime or similar substances, namely substances secreted by the animal organism, such as oyster shells, to restore the right relationship when it is disturbed, which always manifests itself in physical processes, in disease processes. To restore the right relationship between the etheric body and the physical body. In the preparation of remedies, one must reflect on this in the case of such chalky or similar secretions.

If one is dealing with an arrhythmic interaction between the formative body and the astral body, one must pay attention to such things as are present, for example, in antimony, but also in numerous other metals, but especially in the components that of the plants, that is to say, they are particularly strong in the leaves and in the trunk, while those forces that correspond to the phosphorus process are preferably contained in the flower organs of the plants, and those processes that correspond to the silica process are contained in the root organs of the plants. So that one can also find the relationship between the forces that are in the different parts of the plants. The root forces have a definite affinity and relationship to the human head and nervous-sense system. The leaf and stem organs have a special relationship to the rhythmic system and the flower organs have a special relationship to the abdominal, metabolic system. Therefore, if one often wants to help the digestive, metabolic system in a simple way, it is often enough simply by choosing certain flower organs to make into tea, after having diagnosed in the right way. In this way one helps the digestive organs. While one must extract the salts of the roots through a special extraction process if one wants to obtain a remedy that acts particularly on the nerve-sense process, on the head organs, for example.

And so, on the one hand, you have to understand nature and, on the other hand, the human organism. Then you can really find the remedies in nature in such a way that you can see how the two things are connected, that you don't just have to try clinically: “How does it work?” and then, you see, you make a series of cases and you note that ninety or seventy per cent of them show some favorable result, and that you were mistaken in forty cases. Then you treat the matter statistically and according to whether the statistics favor this or that, you regard it as a remedy or not as a remedy.

I can only deal with these things briefly and aphoristically in order to show you how, without falling into amateurism or medical sectarianism, a strictly scientific approach can be taken to deal with disease processes using remedies that come from human observation.

Just as important as recognizing the right natural substance and natural process to be processed into a remedy is the particular way in which it is used.

Precisely because one can act either on the nerve-sense system, in order to bring about recovery in the indicated manner from it in the right way, or on the rhythmic system, or on the metabolic-limb system, precisely because one must act on these individual systems, it is important, it is essential to also know how the method of treatment is to be administered. Because almost every remedy can be used in three different ways. Either it is introduced into the human being through the mouth into the stomach and so on, so in the way the human being takes in the remedy, one counts on the human being's metabolism, on the metabolic system and on how the metabolic system then affects the other systems. Therefore, there are remedies that are used in this way in particular: they are introduced to the human being through the mouth and stomach and so on.

But then there are also remedies that, in the most eminent sense, have to be used in such a way that they already affect the rhythmic system through the way they are used. In this respect, antimony is particularly suited to finding the right treatment method for this point. This is where injections and injection methods come in. And the remedy that is inoculated into the blood, or is otherwise injected, is the one that is counted on to have an effect on the rhythmic process of the human being.

For those remedies used in baths and ointments, or even where it is a matter of treating the human organism externally and mechanically, for example in massage processes or similar, where the aim is to apply the remedy or the healing process to the person in a more external way, it is assumed that the healing method will act on the nerve-sense system.

And so, in turn, one can work through any other system in a variety of ways to achieve the healing process. Let us assume we have Silicea, a quartz. It makes a difference whether we have a remedy that we prepare and that is to be taken orally, or whether it is injected. If we assume that it is taken orally, we want to introduce the quartz processes through the digestive system by way of how it is processed in the digestive system and the digestive system in turn sends forces into the nerve-sense system. But if we expect that they should be sent more into the nervous-sense system, by inserting them into the blood organism, the respiratory rhythm, whereby in turn healing can take place indirectly through this rhythm, if we thus intend this, then we inject.

If we intend to bring any aromatic-ethereal substance, such as that contained in a plant blossom, to bear through the digestive organ, we make a tea that we introduce into the stomach through the mouth. If we want to work by bringing the essential oil, which has an aromatic effect on the nerve-sense system, directly into effect or through the nerve-sense system on the rhythmic process, then we make some kind of bath out of the juices of these flowers, by adding the juice of these flowers to the water and preparing a bath out of it. There we act on the nerve-sense system.

And so you see how the healing effect also depends on the way the individual substances are treated in relation to the human being.

In order to achieve something in this way, our clinical-therapeutic institutes with their corresponding laboratories and other enterprises have been founded by physicians who have joined our anthroposophical movement, so that on the one hand remedies and healing methods can be tried out, and on the other hand the remedies can be produced. We have such clinical and chemical-pharmaceutical institutes in Arlesheim near Dornach and in Stuttgart.

In particular, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim should be mentioned, which is under the excellent leadership of Dr. Wegman, who has a particularly beneficial effect on this institute because she has what I would call the courage to heal. For it is precisely when one looks into the complexity of the natural processes from which the healing processes are to be drawn, on the one hand, and into the tremendous complexity of the health and disease processes in the human being, on the other, when one is confronted with this immense field – and one is always confronted with this immense field, even if one only has a certain number of patients – then healing requires courage.

An International Pharmaceutical Laboratory is affiliated to this Arlesheim Institute, where the remedies are produced. Today they can be used all over the world, if only the right ways and means are sought. The laboratory produces the means; people just have to find the means and ways to the laboratory, that is the point. People have to find the right means and ways to get to the remedies. The work is not done in an amateurish way, nor is today's science denied; rather, today's science is only continued.

Once this knowledge has taken root in the broadest circles, we can be truly unconcerned about the success of such a movement as the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim. But it is difficult to really bring to bear in the world a therapy based on a full understanding of the human being, with its remedies, in the face of today's purely materialistic direction. Here one would actually have to count on the insight of every person who cares about the health of their fellow human beings.

Now, by first pointing out what can be achieved through natural remedies and their appropriate use, it is of course not ruled out what can be achieved by taking a more spiritual-soul approach to healing. In this area, particularly fruitful observations are made. If we now look at the hygienic-therapeutic aspect, which must always be included in a proper education, we see how the way we affect children's souls and spirits through teaching – when I give educational lectures, I discuss these things – can have the most diverse healing and pathogenic effects, perhaps not immediately, but over the course of the life process. I will mention just one. For example, the teacher can proceed in the right way with regard to the child's memory by not expecting too much or too little of him. If he proceeds wrongly, if he demands too much of the memory in the eighth, ninth, tenth, or eleventh year of life, if he does not have the right pedagogical tact in this direction, then what the soul must accomplish in an excessive memory activity, in an artificially cultivated memory activity, will later in life express itself as all kinds of physical illnesses. A connection can be demonstrated between diabetes and incorrect memory methods in teaching. While, on the other hand, the disruption of memory in another way can certainly affect the child in an unfavorable way.

I can only mention this in principle, because time is already so very advanced. But from this one can see how not only health and illness are affected by natural remedies, but how the soul itself works in a very special way for health and illness.

And from there, we can also find our way to those methods where we try to bring about healing processes through purely spiritual-soul influences from person to person, which I cannot describe in detail today, of course, due to the limited time. But it is very easy to fall prey to amateurism in this area. One can, for example, entertain the belief that so-called mental illnesses are most easily cured by spiritual influences. Mental illnesses are characterized by the fact that it is actually almost impossible to reach the patient on a soul-spiritual level. That is precisely the case with so-called mental illnesses: the soul closes itself off to external influences. But one will always find that especially in the so-called mental illnesses, which actually go by their name wrongly, physical disease processes are present somewhere hidden. Before dabbling in mental illnesses, one should actually correctly diagnose the physical source of the disease, which is sometimes very hidden, and then one will be able to work charitably by healing the physical organism.

In the case of physical illnesses, it will be much more a matter of helping through all kinds of spiritual and psychological influences, which are usually applied in a very amateurish way today – I don't want to go into that now. In this respect, much blessing can be bestowed in this regard, in many ways the external process, which is to be brought about by remedies and the like, can be supported.

I can only hint at this. The methods based on anthroposophy certainly do not exclude therapeutic influences of soul and spirit, but include them. We prove this by the fact that at the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim-Dornach, in addition to physical healing methods, you can find so-called eurythmy therapy.

This eurythmy therapy consists of transforming what you see here as artistic eurythmy in the moving human being, in the human being in his or her structure, but moving in space, transforming the vocalizing in such a way that the person moves in healthy movements, but ones that are derived from eurythmy, that one applies the vocalizing movements in such a way that one supports precisely the forces that I mentioned earlier as the albuminizing forces in the person. While the consonantizing forces support the antimonisizing forces in many ways.

In this way, consonant and vowel eurythmy therapy can work together to restore the balance between these two types of forces. And it can be seen, especially when things are done properly, not in a dilettantish way, how other healing processes, especially chronic illnesses, can be greatly supported by this eurythmy therapy.

This eurythmy therapy is actually based on the fact that spiritual and mental processes are evoked by what a person performs with the limbs of his body. If we know which movements arise spontaneously in a healthy human organism, then we can also find the corresponding movements that have a healing effect when we work back from the limbs, from human movement, to the processes of the internal organs.

At the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, for example, it is possible to seek out this eurythmy therapy and see how it can be a special branch within the whole healing process, which can be found on anthroposophical ground, based on real human knowledge.

It would, of course, be going too far to go into details in this area in particular. The principle is actually given in what I have presented.

So it has just happened that we have had to develop this therapeutic current within the anthroposophical movement in the most diverse ways because, so to speak, medical experts have approached us. It has arisen out of the conditions of our time. It has been demanded, so to speak, by present-day civilization. Anthroposophy has basically only given the answers to questions that were put to it.

Today I have only been able to give you an aphoristic account of the principles; more is not possible in this already all too long time. And if I wanted to explain just a few things so that it would be, I would like to say, in its entirety, then I would have to do something similar to what I rejected the day before yesterday in the eurythmic lecture; I would have to invite you to stay overnight and listen to me until tomorrow morning, when we would then come together for tomorrow's morning lecture. This is something that can make people ill, and surely no one who wants to talk about healing can make people ill in this way! So it is better to send them home to a good night's sleep with a shorter presentation.

following a lecture by painter Arild von Rosenkrantz

It was requested that I add something to the interesting remarks of Baron Rosenkrantz about art and its future task, and that I also give a picture of the Goetheanum as it will look in the future.

I would like to answer these questions only with a few suggestions, suggestions that relate more to the elaboration of an artistic impulse or artistic impulses in the future — although I do not mean that these artistic impulses can be undertaken arbitrarily or deliberately by any human beings; but to a certain extent one sees them in what is currently being prepared, in the direction that art in particular will have to take in the near future. I mean this in the following way.

On the one hand, we see the old impulses of human work and human civilization persisting in all areas, in the fields of science and artistic creation, and in the realm of religious feeling. But on the other hand, we also see how, in a great number of people, in more people than one would usually think, vague undercurrents prevail, longings for something. These longings one would like to fathom in the field of anthroposophical work; one would like to get to the bottom of them, so to speak. And it seems to me that in fact a large part of what anthroposophy wants to assert itself as in the present day actually meets such vague, more or less unconscious longings of numerous people in the present.

And precisely because in the past three to four centuries, intellectuality has basically flooded everything, because intellectuality has taken deeper root in human souls than one might think, that is why people today find it so difficult to bridge the gap between an indefinite longing and that which can give this indefinite longing a revelation in earthly work. We see this when we look at spiritual science itself.

During my lectures here, I have often had to mention how this spiritual science must be extracted from research into the supersensible worlds through imagination, inspiration and intuition, but how, when this research presents its results, ordinary common sense can approach these research results with complete understanding. And it is actually only the clinging to old prejudices when one does not find enough strength in the soul to approach the results of spiritual science without prejudice.

What people today so often object to about the results of spiritual science actually stems from an undefined fear deep within the soul. Basically, people are afraid of the results of spiritual science. Everything that the last few centuries have brought forth in human civilization so completely contradicts spiritual science that it appears as something completely unknown to most people. One always fears the unknown; but one does not want to admit this fear to oneself, and so one dresses this fear up in so-called logical refutations, in logical criticism.

Those who can see through things will recognize everywhere how the logic of the opponents of spiritual science is basically nothing more than an excuse of the soul for the fear that one has of it.

And so it is in the artistic field. One hears it said extraordinarily often: Yes, spiritual science wants to ascend to the higher worlds through ideas, through scientific discoveries; but science suppresses free artistic creation. Those who really want to create artistically must, so it is said, be free of all ideas, of all knowledge; they must create out of pure imagination. And there are very many poets, painters, musicians, in fact artists in all fields, who now have the very fear that if they approach spiritual science too much, their imagination will dry up; that they will then no longer be able to let their imagination unfold freely, but would in a sense only reproduce through colors and sounds what occurs in spiritual science.

Yes, you see, my dear attendees: there were indeed many struggles at the old Goetheanum. It is true that those who do not have a profound artistic impulse come to a kind of outer symbolism, outer allegory, out of a certain misunderstanding of this school of thought. I can readily admit that there have been an extraordinary number of anthroposophists and theosophists who have sought the artistic in ideas that are then painted, or for that matter sometimes even composed, and the like. When you entered such an anthroposophical or theosophical space and saw these symbolic and allegorical, straw-like images, you could despair! All artistic feeling had been driven out! I can say that there were certainly well-meaning friends who, when the old, burnt Goetheanum was being rebuilt, began to want to add all kinds of symbols. But I always resisted this in the strongest possible way! With this Goetheanum, everything had to be created out of a truly artistic form. Every line, every form had to be created in such a way that the matter was viewed purely from an inner artistic perspective.

Therefore, the forms of the Goetheanum were not really to be interpreted, but basically only to be looked at. When friends or other external visitors came to the Goetheanum, they always wanted to be shown around, and they then asked to be accompanied by this or that person and for explanations of how the columns are designed, the capitals are designed, the architraves are designed – how things are painted. They should be given the inner meaning everywhere.

When I myself led friends, I usually said as an introduction: What I am about to say to friends or visitors is extremely unpleasant to me. And I have never been more possessed with such antipathy towards what I myself say than when I had to explain these forms of the Goetheanum; for they were not there to be explained, to be grasped in concepts, but to be looked at, to be grasped artistically, aesthetically!

And why was this so? This can best be illustrated by the human being itself. You see, you can study the human being — study it according to what science has produced as such science over the last three to four centuries. But you can only get so far, only as far as the physical organism. At the moment one wants to go higher in the higher links of human nature, one cannot do so without letting the world enter into an artistic understanding of the human being, because the world itself creates artistically where it creates spiritually. So that no one can understand the human being who cannot let the scientific pass into the artistic in his own inner vision.

Modern science then comes along and says: Yes, the one to whom it happens that he passes from science into artistry, he strays from the path of logic, from the observations of logic that must be present in science. He is no longer a scientist.

One can continue to declaim for a long time, my dear audience, but when nature does not create as one declaims, when nature at a certain point no longer begins to be so naturalistically logical, but rather to be artistic itself, then only he who becomes artistic in the last moment can approach nature.

And so it is precisely with true anthroposophy. It does not want to and cannot, because that does not correspond to its essence. It does not want to be something merely alive and ideal, but at a certain moment, what is vividly and scientifically expressed in ideas, passes directly into the artistic and the creative. And that is why every time one only begins to describe the human etheric body, even the description, which for my sake is still similar to the currently used science, will immediately turn into artistic expression, into artistic visualization.

And as soon as one comprehends this intensively, one will find everywhere that anthroposophy, that truly spiritual science is not something alien to art or even hostile to art, but that it will lead precisely into a truly artistic future.

This was truly demonstrated in practice in the old Goetheanum. The old Goetheanum had such a ground plan that if you drew a center line, the axis was symmetrical on both sides; but then there was no further symmetry, except for the left-right symmetry.

The columns of the auditorium had capitals that were not all the same, but were in a progressive development, in such a way that the capital of the first column on the left and right was relatively simple. The second column had a somewhat more complicated capital. And so it went on. But the artistic creation of these capitals was such that, inwardly, in the sensation of the line, in this contemplation of the curves, everything in the form of the second capital emerged directly from the first, and the third from the second. And so one surrendered purely to the life in lines, surfaces, curves.

And so it turned out that, I might say, one was finished with the seventh column by itself. There one had a form with the lines, curves: one could not go beyond that, one had to stop there.

Now people see the seven columns and think: that is a deeply mystical number, it is based on an old formula, on something that lives on in superstition and the like. But that is not the case! If you create purely artistically, you have to stop at seven. Just as the rainbow has seven colors, the musical scale has seven notes from the prime to the octave - the octave is the repetition of the prime - so you have seven columns.

But something else becomes apparent in the course of such work: Now, the second capital has emerged from the first through metamorphosis, from the second through experienced metamorphosis, and so on, and seven have been created. Then you stand and look at it. You look at your own work and discover all kinds of things in it that you hadn't even thought of! For example, when I had the seventh pillar capital, I compared it with the first and discovered that, of course artistically manipulated, all the forms that were concave in the first were convex in the last; and all those that were convex in the first were concave in the last. So that if you turned some around, you could put the last one into the first: the seventh into the first, the sixth into the second, the fifth into the third, and the fourth remained in the middle by itself. That happened all by itself.

You see, you had the certainty that you had not read anything of human arbitrariness into things, but that you had worked from the life of the forms themselves; that you had connected yourself with the creative cosmic world itself; that you also this, that one also grasps what lives and rules in nature on another level; that what one did was not human allegorizing, but that one has, so to speak, woven oneself into nature's creation, and now creates like nature.

But this is also true artistic creation, and all the arts in the future will more or less return to this. That was the artistic creation in all great art epochs. And that is what has also shone through in all the individual examples given in Baron Rosenkrantz's excellent lecture. That is what you can see everywhere, especially where new artistic impulses emerge in the evolution of the earth. From new impulses one then receives the courage and hope that new art forms can really arise out of what can be experienced in spiritual science.