The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] I have often emphasized how necessary it is—in order to prepare people for the great tasks of the present, which today actually fall to every human being—to gain an awareness of the course of human development on Earth. This course of human development can only be understood, after all, by bringing to mind the deeper forces of those beings who intervene in the entire course of Earth’s development and also in human life as such.

[ 2 ] I have now shown, from a wide variety of perspectives, how we humans live within a development that proceeds, in a sense, normally, and how we can gain an overview of this development precisely through spiritual scientific investigation over long periods of time. But I have also drawn your attention to how, on the one hand, certain beings intervene in this, in a sense, normal human development—beings who pursue a different goal with humanity than those beings who wish to guide humanity through its normal development across the various incarnations on Earth, beings we must regard as Luciferic; and that, on the other hand, beings intervene whom we designate as Ahrimanic. We have spoken about these things repeatedly. Yet the seriousness that is so necessary for human beings today cannot truly take root in our hearts unless we confront the direct intervention of these Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in human life.

[ 3 ] If you recall how, in sharp contrast to what had happened before, a new era of human development began in the 15th century, you will be led to ask about the various differences between human life in our present era—which began precisely in the 15th century—and that of earlier times. We can say that among the many peculiarities of the present era is the fact that, above all else, thinking—intellectualism—has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humanity, in the great education it undergoes throughout the entire course of Earth’s development, had to pass through this education of intellectualism as well. It had to, so to speak, experiment with how human life can be lived when the intellectual principle of thinking is given priority. Humanity could never have been educated toward true freedom without the entry of the intellectual principle into its very being. Today, people have no clear idea of just how different people before the mid-15th century were from people of the present, particularly in this regard. After all, we take for granted whatever has been given to humanity; we do not give it further thought. And so today we also believe—because the people of the civilized countries with whom we deal primarily live according to intellectualism—that it has always been this way, that people have always thought this way. But that is not the case. The way of thinking was different among people before the mid-15th century. Such abstract thinking did not exist among these people to the same extent as it does among people today. Their thinking was much, much more vividly connected to the things of the external world itself. They were much more connected to what can be experienced within a person through feeling and will. We live very much in our thoughts, but we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of where this way of thinking—this intellectualism—which we take for granted today, actually developed from. And we must go back far and ever farther in human evolution if we want to truly understand where this way of thinking, this intellectualism, developed from. We must also ask ourselves: Are there still any remnants today of the human activity from which thinking arose?

[ 4 ] As you know, ancient forces of development persist into later times alongside those that normally arise in later times. And this is also true of our thinking. We experience reminiscences, echoes of thought—an activity similar to thinking—in dreams, in that world of images that emerges from our nightly sleep. Through experience, we learn to distinguish how this world of thought—which we develop within ourselves from the moment we wake until we fall asleep—relates to the world of dream images experienced entirely passively. But if we trace human evolution back, we find more and more that the waking life of the soul was also very similar to how people today experience their soul activity in dreams. Today’s thinking is a later product of evolution on a path whose earlier stages saw the human soul unfold a more dreamlike activity. And if we trace this dreamlike activity of the human soul very, very far back, we go beyond all that constitutes Earth’s evolution; we arrive at the Earth’s preceding cosmic incarnation, which we have come to call the “ancient lunar evolution,” within which human beings also lived, though in a form entirely different from today’s. And during this lunar evolution—that is, during the previous incarnation of our Earth—that still entirely ethereal human being, who is the true ancestor of present-day humanity, did indeed develop a dreamlike, a pictorial-dreamlike soul activity. This pictorial-dreamlike soul activity, however, had the peculiar characteristic that it stood in a completely different relationship to the external world than our thinking soul activity does. I would say that with our thinking soul activity, we stand quite isolated in the world. The world is out there; it has its own processes. We reflect on these processes within ourselves, but precisely when we believe we are thinking most deeply about external processes, we do not feel at all immersed in them. We often even feel that we can think about external processes best when we isolate ourselves from them, when we withdraw entirely into ourselves. Our human ancestors, who—if I may use the expression—still thought in a dreamlike way, did not have such a feeling. When he developed in his dreams what we develop in our own way, spiritually, in our thinking, he knew that he was intimately connected in his experience with the events of the world. We see the clouds; we think about the clouds; yet we do not have the feeling that the same forces that govern the clouds also govern our thinking. But the feeling that the same forces that govern the cloud also govern his dreamlike thinking—that is what the human ancestor had. The human ancestor said—if I am to translate into our language what he said in his own, a language that is actually silent compared to ours: “The forces that weave and live out there in the cloud bring images to life within me.” — He did not conceive of himself as any more isolated from that universe in which the cloud unfolds its being than my little finger can conceive of itself as isolated from me. If I cut it off, it withers and is no longer my finger. Our human ancestor felt that he, too, could not exist otherwise than as a part of the universe to which he belongs. The little finger would have to say: The blood that pulses throughout the entire body also pulses within me, and my entire organic existence is governed by the same laws that govern the organic existence of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: “I am a part of the universe, and what pulses within me as I develop images is the same as that to which these images point; it is the same force that weaves and lives in the formation of clouds.” Thus, this human ancestor felt deeply related to and intimately connected with the entire world.

[ 5 ] But because we feel so isolated in our thinking from external events—cut off, as it were, from the truly essential causes of existence in the world—we do not sense in our everyday lives what is actually pulsing through the universe. Our thinking has taken on an abstract character. Our thinking, in a sense, reveals nothing at all of what lives and weaves within it. The very possibility of becoming free human beings rests on the fact that in our thoughts we do not feel: “Something else is thinking within us”—but rather: “It is we ourselves who are thinking.”—Our human ancestors, however, could not imagine themselves as so isolated from the totality of the world. Our human ancestors knew—since they felt connected to the existence of the world—that there are not only abstract forces of nature out there in this worldly existence, but that beings reign there as well, even if these beings are different from human beings, beings that do not have a physical body like humans, yet with whom human beings could conceive of themselves as united in a kind of global citizenship. They did not perceive something like “forces of nature”; they felt a sense of community with natural beings. Just as we say today: “What takes place in nature, in which we ourselves are included, unfolds according to natural laws”—so it was only natural for the ancestors of humanity in ancient times to say: “What takes place out there in nature unfolds according to the impulses of will of the natural beings.” — We say: The Earth attracts the bodies on its surface through its gravity in accordance with a law whereby this gravitational force decreases with the square of the distance, and we call this the special case of a law of nature. — When we speak of nature, we are referring to such an abstraction. The ancestor of humankind was aware that what we today abstractly call gravity contained something essential.

[ 6 ] But this relationship with human beings—which had been established by special beings that, in a sense, were part of human evolution—normally came to an end at the very moment when human beings’ actual earthly evolution began. At that point, human beings were, so to speak, released from the guidance of those supersensible beings whom they had sensed in their pictorial thinking during the ancient Lunar Age as something flowing into them and floating within them. And we must ask ourselves: What was it, in fact, that caused human beings to be separated from the guidance of these beings, with whom they belonged—even if only in their unconscious awareness? —It was the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into the human being. For in those ancient times of which I have just spoken to you, human beings did not yet carry the mineral kingdom within themselves. He had an organization that, admittedly, would not have been perceptible to today’s sense organs—an organization that did not yet contain mineral inclusions within itself. If one wants to understand this, if one does not want to approach such a matter with prejudice, then one must at least try to grasp what it actually means for a being to encompass the mineral kingdom within itself. In this regard, people today think in an extraordinarily superficial way. One looks at a mineral, a stone, and rightly regards it as what it presents itself to be from the outside. But today people look at a plant in exactly the same way as they look at a stone, whereas what one sees is, in reality, not the plant at all. The plant is, in reality, something entirely supersensible. Imagine an organization of forces that has a certain pictorial character and that relates to the mineral kingdom in such a way that, while otherwise invisible, it imbibes the mineral kingdom and also the forces at work between the individual members of the mineral kingdom. I have the plant before me: it is an invisible structure of forces; it merely imbibes from the mineral kingdom. As a result, within that part of space—which is an invisible structure of forces—the mineral aspect also appears before my eyes. I look at this mineral aspect, but it is only that which the supersensible plant has imbibed. I must first find the supersensible plant in a completely different way than the way in which what it has absorbed appears to me. This is already the case with the plant. In fact, when we speak of plants today, we speak only of the plant’s mineral content, not at all of the plant itself.

[ 7 ] What matters is that we recognize in plants what is true to an even greater extent in animals and humans. So in the ancient Lunar Age, human beings lacked this mineral component. They were created on Earth in such a way that they need it—that they, so to speak, imbibed the mineral kingdom and its forces. What did this give him for his entire human being? Above all, he received a mineral body for his former pictorial imagination. In his further development, this then evolved through the mineral body into intellectual thinking—and this happened relatively late, only since the middle of the 15th century, after a long period of preparation.

[ 8 ] The fact that human beings today think in an intellectualistic way is due to the fact that they have received a mineral body as an inclusion. As human beings, we need this mineral body for nothing more than for our thinking. But it is precisely through the role of the mineral kingdom in the earthly realm that the old pictorial thinking—which had developed not through the mineral kingdom but through the realm known as the third elemental kingdom—has been transformed. As a result, this pre-earthly imagination has been transformed into earthly, intellectual imagination. Consequently, however, in the context of the cosmos, those beings with whom human beings had to imagine themselves connected for their pictorial imagination in that ancient time of which I have spoken have, in a sense, been set aside. Yet we must conceive of these beings somewhat differently than we are accustomed to conceiving of non-human beings. For as soon as people begin—even out of good will—to acknowledge a supersensible realm, they may become too anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism takes hold of human beings when they conceive of everything beyond their own sphere in human terms. Then it is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Büchner of anthropomorphism. We have indeed experienced much of this kind. We have seen that in the West, a legal way of thinking has developed according to which earthly offenses and crimes are judged by earthly judges and punished, and so on. Gradually, the supernatural—conceived in the sense of an imperfect Christianity as the rewarding and punishing of sin—has come to be thought of very much along the lines of an earthly court of law. Our religious conceptions in the West contain a great deal of human legalism. We have the gods carry out punishments just as we are accustomed to seeing in earthly courts. But if we truly wish to transcend the human realm, we must resolve not merely to imagine things in anthropomorphic terms, but—which is precisely what is essential in human life—to actually think beyond the anthropomorphic. We must apply this kind of thinking if we are to realize that those entities which gained influence over human imagery during the ancient Lunar Age have been superseded in the normal course of human development, yet do not accept this of their own free will. One might well ask: Why do they not submit to the will of the gods who normally guide humanity? — They do not — and this must be accepted as a fact. They were actually destined to exert influence in the human context only on dreaming and on everything related to dreaming. In our context, we call these beings Luciferic beings. Their domain would be, first, everything that is a dream, and second, everything related to dreaming. But they are not content with that. They drive their nature into that which has developed out of their domain: into human thinking bound to the mineral realm. And to the same extent that we allow into our thinking all that which should otherwise govern only our dreams and our fantasies, to that extent we fall prey in our thinking to the Luciferic being—to the influence of those entities that were meant to act only during the time of human ancestors upon the old, pictorial human thinking, but which held back their power and which now, while they should be limiting themselves to our dreaming, our fantasizing, and our artistic creation, continually seek to influence our thoughts and make these thoughts dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in prehistoric times. Much still flows into our thinking that comes from this side, from this Luciferic side.

[ 9 ] Therefore, particularly with regard to human development, the serious question is justified: From what forces do these influences enter our thinking? — Yes, they come from the realm in which we humans still, quite rightly, dream and sleep above all else; they come from the realm of feeling, of sensation, from the realm of emotions. After all, we experience our feelings only in the same way we otherwise experience dreams, and we experience our will as we otherwise experience sleep. There we are, quite rightly, still entangled in the world that, at the very moment it unfolds for our thinking, is the Luciferic world. That is why we cannot cope with our human development unless we make a point of cultivating thoughts that are independent—and increasingly so—of our mere feelings, our mere emotions, and of what, so to speak, rises inwardly from the dreamlike inner experience even of waking daily life. This cannot be achieved through theoretical principles, but only through life itself. But here we see how the soul habits of present-day humanity are in direct opposition to the spiritual cultivation necessary in this area, so that we must be very attentive to this resistance. We are experiencing this very thing in our own time: people do not want to accustom themselves to listening to that which does not arise from their inner prejudices, their preconceptions, or their inner preferences, but rather to that which is, so to speak, determined independently of the human being, so that the human being has no choice but to submit to it. I would like to cite a _small example_ with which I once tried to make it clear to someone how an important distinction applies with regard to what a person thinks.

[ 10 ] Many years ago, I once gave a lecture in a city in southern Germany—which is no longer a city in southern Germany—on the wisdom teachings of Christianity. As you know, every lecture must have a specific topic, and one must speak within the context of that topic. Thus, if someone hears only a single lecture, that single lecture—especially if it is presented objectively—sometimes makes one impression on one person and another on someone else. In any case, no one can really glean anything from a single lecture about the entire worldview from which that lecture stems. For, of course, when one is speaking, for example, about the wisdom teachings of Christianity, one cannot infer from the content of the lecture how the person giving the lecture actually thinks about, say, the relationship between light and electricity; thus, the situation that occurred back then could happen again. So I spoke about the wisdom teachings of Christianity, and two Catholic priests were there. They came up to me afterward and said: There is actually nothing to object to in what you said today—though it has been many years now—but we must say that even if we say the same thing, we say it in a way that everyone can understand. You express it in a way that can only apply to people who are already prepared.” — I said at the time: “Yes, Reverend, the matter is this: Whether you or I feel, out of an inner sense, that we are speaking for all people—that is not the point, for that arises from a subjective feeling.” It’s only natural: If we rely solely on our feelings, then I must also think that I’m speaking for all people, just as you do; that goes without saying—otherwise we’d do things differently. But we live in an age today where what we believe to be justified doesn’t matter. We must train ourselves to speak the language of facts. We must learn to question the facts. So, based on your subjective feeling, you think you’re speaking for everyone. But let me ask you a factual question: Do all people still go to church with you today? That would show whether you’re speaking for everyone. Well, you see, for those who don’t go to church when you speak—that’s who I’m speaking for! For those who also have a right to hear about the wisdom teachings of Christianity—that’s exactly who I’m speaking for. — That is what it means to follow the language of facts.

[ 11 ] It is necessary for us to break free from subjective feelings, for if we do not, then the Luciferic element will creep into our thinking. We would not have been able to experience the entire terrible campaign of untruth that has swept through the world over the past five years—as the ultimate consequence of something that has long been in the making—if people had learned to guide themselves, to the necessary extent, by the language of “facts” rather than by the language of emotions, with nationalists being the most terrible instigators of such emotions.

[ 12 ] On the one hand, there is today an absolute necessity for us to train our minds to accept even that which does not lie within ourselves. And on the other hand, there is people’s aversion to this truthfulness, which seeks its guiding principle in the facts.

[ 13 ] Only those who rigorously discipline themselves through the external world of facts can ascend to the higher worlds and their insights. Anyone who has become even slightly accustomed to appreciating a factual account often suffers terrible torment when people in the present try to tell them something. For they very often hear things like this: Someone tells them, “Someone said something—it was terrible, it was horrifying!” — “Yes, but what actually happened? The fact that it was so horrifying only shows me how you felt about it. But I’d like to hear what actually happened.” — “Well, it was just something terrible that happened...” — And that’s why people don’t understand you at all when they constantly describe their feelings about a matter subjectively, whereas you’d like to hear an objective account of what they actually observed. Especially when people tell you something that someone else has told them, it’s usually impossible today to tell whether they’re simply passing it on or whether they’ve verified what they’re telling you. In this area, it must be emphasized time and again that truthfulness in the supersensible realm can only be attained for the sake of knowledge if one trains oneself, here in the ordinary sensory world, to represent as far as possible only what is an immediate fact. And only in this way—by training oneself to perceive facts—can a person overcome the Luciferic influences that flow into their thinking.

[ 14 ] These Luciferic influences are what humanity today is exposed to on the one hand. On the other hand are the Ahrimanic influences. As we have had to say: This earthly thinking has actually developed out of earlier stages of human soul life solely through the fact that human beings have, so to speak, become imbued with a mineral body. This mineral body is already the organ of earthly thinking. But through this, it has primarily entered the realm of those beings who are called Ahrimanic.

[ 15 ] Human beings can, of course, become aware that they must educate themselves in that “world of facts” that weans them from relying solely on their subjective emotions. But they should not succumb to that kind of thinking, which is nothing more than an inner human activity arising, in turn, from the mineral body. In this realm lies a truth that is highly unpleasant for many people.

[ 16 ] Isn’t it true that some are idealists or spiritualists, while others are materialists? There is much debate in the world over whether spiritualism or materialism is the correct view. All this debate has absolutely no value whatsoever for certain areas of human organization. For human beings can, in fact, develop in two ways. They can use their mineral body—with which they have imbued themselves—as an instrument for their thinking, as they must as earthly beings; otherwise, they would merely be dreaming. But they can then rise above this, using their thoughts to transcend the instrument; they can ascend to a spiritual perception, to a spiritual vision. If he does the latter, he has indeed thought with his material organization, but he has used it to reach a further stage of human development by ascending with the result into the spiritual world. He can, however, also remain at this stage as an earthly human being, allowing his mineral body to think; for it can think! That is precisely the danger: that materialism is not wrong—especially not when it comes to thinking. This mineral body is not merely a photograph. It is something that can think for itself; it simply remains, with its thinking, within the realm of earthly life. Human beings must first elevate what they experience with their mineral body into the realms of the supersensible.

[ 17 ] So one can say: Certainly, it could be true that what human thoughts are is merely an outgrowth of the human mineral organization. That could be true, but human beings must first achieve it properly. Human beings can, out of their own free will, develop on Earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not progress to the point of developing thought through mineral inclusion. Animals are not free to validate the materialist view. Human beings are free to validate the materialist view; they need only will it out of a materialist mindset.

[ 18 ] The nature of human freedom is such that humans are even free to bring materialism to fruition for the human realm—that is, to shape this earthly human being in such a way that he is absorbed into matter. It is therefore, in essence, a matter of choice to be a materialist. If one is strong enough to actually bring to life what one preaches to humanity as a materialistic mindset, then this mindset only becomes a reality through human beings.

[ 19 ] What affects human beings in this form comes through the Ahrimanic beings. They want to keep everything that constitutes Earth’s evolution at the stage that was first reached by human beings through Earth’s evolution: the mineral organization. They want to perfect human beings, but only as mineral organisms, whereas the Luciferic beings want to keep human beings—even after they have incorporated the mineral organization into their being—at the earlier stage that was appropriate to their condition before they acquired the mineral organization. This is the tug-of-war between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings. The Luciferic beings wish to develop human beings in such a way that they ultimately shed their mineral body and undergo a development for which the earthly remains, so to speak, secondary—for which the earthly was, in a sense, merely an episodic experience. The Luciferic beings intend to gradually eliminate the earthly from the entire development of humanity. The Ahrimanic beings intend to truly seize hold of this earthly, mineral nature of the human being, then tear it away from the ongoing development and set it apart on its own. In this way, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings pull in different directions.

[ 20 ] But it is now very important that we learn to apply what we can characterize in such broad terms to the most everyday aspects of life—that we truly, just as we do not regard a semicircular piece of iron as an ordinary horseshoe when it is in fact a magnet, do not view human life as if it could be characterized solely by its outward appearance. Someone who shoes a horse’s hooves with magnets fails to take into account that something different lives within the magnet than within the horseshoe. Anyone who characterizes human life in the way it is often done today, however, acts exactly like someone who shoes their horse with magnets instead of horseshoes. People have no qualms about speaking of positive and negative electricity when referring to the inorganic world, or of positive and negative magnetism, but they hesitate to speak of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic in relation to human life—even though these are forces that are just as active in human life on a higher plane as positive and negative magnetism is in the realm of the inanimate. It is simply that positive and negative magnetism are simpler concepts. One does not need to exert as much effort to grasp them as one does when seeking to understand the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Therefore, one can only come to terms with what today passes for a cliché—and turns into a lie through that very cliché—if one knows: the Luciferic being is at work here. — And one can only cope with all that appears here and there as a materialistic mindset if one knows: the Ahrimanic being is at work there. — For with merely external characteristics, one will no longer be able to gain anything for the understanding of human life in the future; one will merely talk in circles and commit the greatest follies when attempting to apply them to reality; but one will not understand human life in such a way as to be able to derive social impulses from one’s insights for human institutions and organizations. This is something that is intimately connected with the profound seriousness that must overcome one when one considers all that lies in the current trend of human development. We cannot today arrive at an understanding of the life in which we are immersed unless we lift our gaze upward from the earthly to the extraterrestrial. There is something peculiar at work here.

[ 21 ] When we look back at earlier periods of human development—periods that are now less ancient than those described earlier—people today tend to judge them solely on the basis of external historical documents. There are even historians with very famous names who say: The history of humanity consists of everything that can be gleaned from written sources. If one defines history from the outset in the manner Ranke did, it goes without saying that one will arrive at a peculiar account of history. But writing itself is part of history; it, in turn, developed from something else, and such definitions are actually of little use in reality. Yet if one goes back even as far as the Chaldean-Babylonian or Egyptian periods, one sees that within this epoch of human development, humanity’s entire relationship to the cosmos was also different. Today, people simply do not understand what was actually meant when, in those times, human beings linked their lives to the movements of the stars and planets, or to their relationship to the fixed stars and the zodiac; all of that has become the emptiest of abstractions today. Do you believe, then, that the astrologer who today pores over the ancient astrological works—and it is still a good thing if he merely studies them and does not create new ones, for the new ones are terrible— and compiles horoscopes—that, in his abstraction, in his abstract way of thinking, he still has a sense of that living connection in which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans still saw themselves as human beings in relation to the outer earthly course and the positions of the stars? Everything has changed today. One must say: Something important in the development of humanity since those times consists precisely in the fact that this entire human consciousness has been narrowed down to the physical. How much did such an Egyptian know about the earth? To him, it was a piece of land. He knew more about the heavens. His experience extended upward into the vertical. The Greeks, too, did not yet possess horizontal knowledge; their experience, too, extended upward into the vertical. This vertical experience became increasingly restricted as the horizontal expanded, and the maximum limitation of human knowledge of the heavens coincided with the expansion of human knowledge of the Earth—when people learned to sail around the globe to convince themselves: If one sails westward, one returns from the east. But this narrowing of human knowledge in the vertical direction was bound to occur. Humanity had to be cut off from the universe at some point in order to seek within itself the power that alone could lead it to its human freedom. For from this human freedom, morality can now emerge in turn.

[ 22 ] Now that people have ceased to have experiences in the extraterrestrial realm in a vertical sense, as the Greeks or the Chaldeans did, and now that we have received the education that we can only obtain through the purely horizontal plane, we must once again ascend into the moral-ethical realm and come to understand human life as it is influenced by those forces that are not perceptible in the course of external existence. These are precisely the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces.

[ 23 ] People today, however, are preoccupied with other matters, and I sometimes have something to share with them about our anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, which has made it its mission to carry out its work in light of the gravity of our times and to listen to the language spoken, as it were, by the extraterrestrial cosmos—a language that tells us we must learn once again to recognize the connection between the human being and the entire cosmos. Into this context, then—forgive the abrupt transition—resound the things that already point to the most peculiar perspectives from which opposition to such deliberate human progress asserts itself. I can read you a passage from a letter that is quite characteristic. As I said, please forgive the abrupt transition, but we do have an obligation to acquaint you with all manner of things happening in the present that seek to undermine and destroy this movement, which is striving precisely to grasp the task of our time.

[ 24 ] In Norway, a man is making his presence felt who has set himself the task of destroying our movement. To assure himself that he has the right to do so—as is customary today—this man writes to the authorities; he turns to the publication known as the “Political-Anthropological Monthly.” This monthly journal has now provided him with the following information: “Dr. Steiner is a Jew through and through. He is connected to the Zionists—in fact, tied to them—and is in the service of the Entente.” And the editor adds, “that they”—namely, people of this sort—“have long kept their attention focused on him.”

[ 25 ] I just wanted to mention this at the end, as yet another example of a trend that is becoming increasingly common—one that we encounter almost every day. This, then, is how anthropologists today view the goals pursued by the anthroposophical movement.