The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So next Wednesday, gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gentlemen, the question that has been asked is:

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

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

What causes albinism or leukopathy in black people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Burle: Pretty much!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confirmed by Mr. Müller.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, more on this on Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, see you next Saturday.