The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Humanity in the Past, Present, and Future from the Perspective of the Development of Consciousness I

[ 1 ] For the topic of the lectures I will be giving during this conference, I have chosen to present an account of the human being—how it has unfolded and developed over a certain period of the past, how it stands in the immediate present, and what its prospects are for the future of human development on our planet Earth. After all, every worldview that has meaningfully influenced Western civilization—including its American offshoot— has sought not only to situate humanity within its present reality and to point out how the individual human being fits spatially within the bosom of the entire human population of Earth; rather, it was characteristic of precisely those worldviews that had the prospect of being incorporated into Western civilization it was characteristic of them to always place human beings within the course of the historical development of the Earth’s population, to link contemporary humanity with humanity of the past—either up to a certain point, as the Old Testament did, extending beyond Earth’s history, or even further back to trace planetary and cosmic developments. This was less characteristic of Eastern worldviews and also of the older worldviews of Europe, insofar as these do not yet belong to modern civilization. They were more content, so to speak, to place human beings within space. Our sensibility, our feelings—shaped by everything we have been taught through Western development—cannot be satisfied with such a spatial placement of humanity within the world. Out of a certain spiritual instinct, it demands, so to speak, a fraternal union not only with the people of the present in space, but also with the people of the past, who, after all, together with those of the present and the future, constitute the entire human race. Now, we cannot arrive at a satisfactory understanding of this historical development of humanity—in the narrower or broader sense—if we look only at external anthropological findings. For human beings are, after all, beings whose development cannot be grasped through external documents, no matter how ingeniously they may be interpreted. Human beings are physical, soul, and spiritual beings; they are beings in whom the spirit has always shone through—to a greater or lesser degree—so that consciousness has lived within them. And the way human consciousness develops presents itself to observation in such a way that one can perceive the entire nature and essence of the human being in this unfolding of consciousness, just as one can ultimately perceive the essence of a plant in its bloom.

[ 2 ] And so, above all else, let us today consider this most important aspect of human development: the development of consciousness. When we consider human consciousness today, we see that we can distinguish the following: In the ordinary waking state, which lasts from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, we develop a more or less clear and bright imagination—an imagination that grows, like a flower from a plant, out of the foundation of our emotional life. This stands in contrast to the clear, bright life of imagination as something more or less semi-unconscious, dark, inwardly surging and weaving, which never actually becomes entirely clear. In a sense, even deeper than the feelings—which, after all, also impel our life of imagination in a very direct way—much further down within our being, the will surges. And I have, after all, often explained to anthroposophists how, when it comes to volition, human beings are essentially asleep even during the waking state. For what lives within the human being in the realm of volition does not actually come to consciousness at all in today’s waking state. We have an idea that we will carry out this or that; there is no volition in that yet—there lies the intention of volition clothed in the idea. Then what lies within this intention sinks down into the depths of the human being, which, to consciousness, are no clearer than dreamless sleep. And it resurfaces as volition, manifesting in what our arms and hands, our legs, and our feet perform—what we accomplish with the objects of the external world. That which we thus carry out through volition with our own bodies, that which we alter in the external world through our volition—this, in turn, comes to our consciousness through our imagination, through our imagination to which feelings are attached. But in ordinary consciousness, we are aware only of the beginning and the end of volition: the intention within our imagination, and the observation—in accordance with that imagination—of our own movements or movements in the external world that arise from these intentions. What lies in between—how our intentions flow psychologically into our organism, how the soul stimulates body heat, blood circulation, muscle movement, and so on, in order to transition to volition—remains as unconscious as the phenomena of dreamless sleep. For it is certainly the case that anyone who is truly able to observe these experiences must say to themselves: I am actually awake only in imagination, I dream in feeling, I sleep in volition. — And in fact, it is no different with this volition than it is when we wake up in the morning and notice that our organism has, in a certain way, recovered and refreshed itself. We perceive the experiences of sleep as we wake up; we have intentions to will this or that; we also send them unconsciously down into our organism; they lead a sleeping life as they pass into action, into deed; and we only wake up again through the deed itself and see the results of what has taken place within us, yet which eludes our consciousness.

[ 3 ] These are, in a sense, the broad outlines of the inner experience of human beinghood while awake, dreaming, and sleeping. For even the dreams of the night—the dreams of sleep—have little to do with our imagination. They follow laws entirely different from the logical laws of our imaginative life. But if one observes, if one engages with these things—if one is capable of doing so—then one will find that the course of dreams, this wonderful drama that dreams often undergo, bears an extraordinarily strong resemblance to emotional life. If, in the waking state, we were able to do nothing but feel, so to speak, then although the feelings would not resemble the images of dreams, their inner drama, tensions, resolutions, impulses of desire, catastrophes of inner experience—as they can surge in feelings—present themselves to the feeling with all that so-called indeterminacy, or, if you will, determinacy, just as they occur in dreaming, except that the ‘dream lives in images’ and emotional life in those peculiar experiences that we designate with the terms of the inner sensation of feeling. Thus, we can count feeling and actual dreaming as part of the dream state in the present consciousness of humanity, and we can count the processes of volition and the processes of actual dreamless sleep as part of the sleep consciousness of present-day humanity.

[ 4 ] We must now realize that even what we describe in this way as the fundamental characteristics of contemporary human consciousness has undergone a development over a relatively short period of time—a development that people in today’s materialistic world are simply reluctant to acknowledge. But one can no longer understand things that have been preserved as records of human thought from as early as the first Christian centuries unless one realizes that what lived within human beings as thought in those days was something entirely different from what lives within the soul as thought today. And in particular, it should be pointed out that it amounts to nothing less than spiritual ignorance to approach—say—a book such as The Division of Nature by Scotus Eriugena from the 9th century, or to approach the ancient alchemical-chemical descriptions, with what one has been educated to regard as one’s imaginative life today. With the thinking of our time, one cannot possibly understand what was meant back then. One reads the words, but does not understand what was intended at that time. For human thinking has, since the 15th century, taken on a very specific character, and this character—even though it has developed slowly and gradually—has, relatively speaking, already reached its peak today. This way of thinking, which, as I have explained, represents the actual waking state in the life of modern humanity, is in fact one in which modern people, at heart, cannot find happiness. People think that what they experience while awake is the only thing of luminous clarity; they think it is the only thing through which, drawing from within themselves, they can also piece together the most marvelous results of the sciences. But deep down, people do not find joy at all in this present mode of thinking in relation to their inner experience of longing. For in reality, people lose themselves in this present mode of thinking. They lose themselves in such a way that, while they experience this thinking as the only clear content—much clearer, for example, than blood circulation or breathing—those other processes remain obscure and unclear in the lower regions of consciousness. One senses that a reality lives within them, but one actually sleeps through this reality and is awake only in imagination, in thinking. But then one realizes—especially when one is, for my sake, somewhat predisposed to practice self-reflection—that in the thinking that is actually the only thing that fills one’s inner life, one is in fact losing oneself. And this losing of oneself in thinking can be grasped, so to speak—I would say, in two ways; of course, this is meant as a mental image—with one’s own hands.

[ 5 ] There was a thinker of more recent times: Descartes (Cartesius). This is the source of the modern maxim: “Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am.” — Yes, that is what a philosopher says. But modern humanity does not echo this, nor can it. For modern humanity says: If I merely think something, experience it through thought, it is still not real; and if I think of myself, I am still not here: these thoughts are, at most, images; they are the surest thing within me, but I do not grasp any being in thought. — After all, one also says: Something that one merely thinks is only a thought. And so, for Descartes, it is a desperate assertion: One would like to exist and has no other points of reference in modern thought to grasp this human existence; therefore, one seeks it precisely where, according to common sense, it most certainly does not exist: in thought. For every instance of sleep refutes this statement by Descartes. In sleep, one does not think. Does that mean one does not exist? Does one die in the evening and is reborn in the morning? Or does one simply exist from the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up? The simplest truths do not take current worldviews into account. The statement “I think, therefore I am” represents a desperate clinging to existence—not some kind of inner experience. That is one thing.

[ 6 ] The other relationship worth noting is this: In addition to thinking—of which modern humans are quite proud—we also have the findings of modern natural science: the results of observation and experimentation. Well, yes, but the fact is that these do not allow us to glimpse the true essence of things, only their changes, their transience. And yet, modern man considers a thought legitimate only if it is derived from this external existence, which, however, reveals itself only through its manifestations. And so modern man has, in general, ceased to grasp his existence within himself. Thinking is far too ethereal for that. But whatever else is within him, he finds it, at most, in the same way that the natural sciences discover the external realms of nature. Yet it is there that modern man then seeks being. And so he believes in himself only insofar as he is nature. And so nature, with its existence, becomes the Moloch that actually robs modern man of his sense of being. Certainly, many people today will say, “I don’t feel any of that; it isn’t so.” But that is merely an opinion. The feelings of people today, who are only just beginning to engage in a little self-reflection, are in fact entirely the result of the mood I have just described. And this modern human being is encapsulated within this experience of his own being and his relationship to the surrounding world. And whatever emerges for him within this encapsulation, he then projects onto his consciousness of the world. For example, he looks at the stars with his instruments—the spectroscope, the telescope. He records what is revealed to him there, and from this he develops a purely spatial astronomy, astrophysics, and so on. He does not realize that he has actually merely projected onto the heavens what he has observed and calculated regarding earthly matters.

[ 7 ] If I have a light source here, everyone agrees that when I am so-and-so many thousand miles away from the light source, the light in that space has already grown faint—perhaps it is no longer visible at all. Everyone knows that the intensity of light decreases with distance. And it is a law of physics that gravity—as it is called in physics—also decreases with the square of the distance. But people do not think any further than that. That the intensity of gravity here on Earth has a certain magnitude and decreases with the square of the distance—people understand this because we live here on Earth, formulate laws of nature, explore earthly truths, and summarize them. Where gravity has a certain intensity, these truths hold. Gravity decreases, and so do these truths. What is true on Earth ceases to be true as we trace its extension throughout the world. Therefore, we have just as little right to simply apply by analogy what we investigate here in physics and chemistry to the cosmos as we have to extend the strength of Earth’s gravity—that of the immediate Earthly environment—out into the cosmos. We must not view the truth that prevails in the celestial spheres in the same way we view the truth here on Earth. We know that, to people of the present day, such a statement sounds incredibly paradoxical, even fantastical. But that is precisely how things are today: the encapsulation has become so strong in the general consciousness that if one were to pierce this capsule even slightly with the slightest remark, a paradox would immediately emerge. All of this is connected to the fact that modern people are actually completely bound to the Earth, so that their cognition—and often not even their reflection—extends beyond what they experience on Earth. And just as they do with cosmic space, so do they do with cosmic time.

[ 8 ] You see—I have often discussed these truths in anthroposophical circles; what I am saying now is simply a repetition using a single example— this was particularly striking when, at the invitation of our English anthroposophical friends, I was to give a series of lectures in the second half of August in Penmaenmawr, Wales—where the island of Anglesey lies off the west coast of England. It is indeed a very remarkable region, one that shows that there are actually quite different geographies across the Earth than those found in ordinary school textbooks—even in those intended for the highest levels of education. People today believe they have come quite far by incorporating the character of the vegetation, fauna, and flora into geographical descriptions, and by taking into account the geological and paleontological composition of the rocks, and so on. But there are far more profound distinctions across the Earth’s surface than those currently accepted as “geography.” Here in Penmaenmawr, where this lecture series took place, one need only walk a few steps—say, an hour to an hour and a half—into the mountains to find remnants of the ancient Druidic cult everywhere: simple, weathered rock formations. For example: Stones are arranged in such a way that they enclose a space like a small chamber, covered by a capstone, so that a sort of chamber was enclosed in which sunlight was blocked out in a makeshift manner—in other words, it was dark inside. It is not to be disputed that such cromlechs were also intended to serve as burial sites, for throughout history the most important places of worship have been erected over the graves of fellow human beings. But there is something quite different at play here; even these simple cromlechs possess something special, as the so-called druid circles demonstrate. It was actually a very beautiful sight when, one day, I visited such a hill near Penmaenmawr together with Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth, where two Druid circles, situated very close to one another, can still be seen today in their last sparse remnants. The stones are arranged in such a way that one can still see today that there were once twelve of them in a circle. And anyone who wants to understand what this was really all about looks closely and sees that it came down to this: as the sun travels its path through the cosmos—whether in the course of the day or in the course of the year—it always cast its shadow in a specific way. From one stone in one way, from another stone in another. And by tracking the shadow as it changed over the course of the day and the year, one tracked the sun’s path.

[ 9 ] People today are sensitive to light, especially when light is also the carrier of heat, or heat is the carrier of light. Of course, people today are also aware of the difference between summer sunlight and winter sunlight, because it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. And one notices even subtler differences as well. But the same differences that one perceives so clearly in the light—that one is cold or that one is warm—are also evident in the shadow. It matters whether the October sun or the July or August sun casts the shadow, not only in terms of direction but also in terms of inner quality. And part of a Druid priest’s task was to possess the ability to perceive the quality of the shadow—that peculiar tinge, one might say, of a reddish hue in the August shadow, or a bluish hue in the November or December shadow. And so, through the training they received as Druid priests, they could read the sun’s daily course in the shadow. One could read the sun’s annual course in the shadows. One can still see from these things today that one of the rituals performed there consisted of precisely this. There were many other elements that belonged to this cult. A sun cult, but one that was not merely some abstraction, not even merely the abstraction of devotion and humility. It would be a complete mistake to believe that, even though one certainly need not underestimate devotion and humility. But abstract devotion and abstract humility alone were not the decisive factors here; rather, the cult encompassed something entirely different.

[ 10 ] You see, the seed of wheat, the seed of rye—they must be planted in the ground at a specific time of year. It is not good if they are planted at the wrong time. The one who knows these things well knows that a great deal depends on whether the seed is planted a few days earlier or later. And there are other such things in human life. The lives of the people who once lived in that geographical region where the Druidic cult existed—perhaps three millennia ago—were certainly extraordinarily simple: farming and livestock raising were their primary activities. But let us now ask ourselves: How were these people supposed to know when to sow and harvest properly, or when to attend to other matters related to the course of nature throughout the year? One might say: Today, in the countryside, there are farmers’ almanacs from which the farmer can read what needs to be done on this day or that. — These things are very insightful. Yes, we live today in an age where human consciousness is such that these things are recorded and can be read in print. People don’t even think about the fact that they’re reading them from print, but that’s how it is. Yet none of this existed back then; not even the most primitive beginnings of reading and writing existed in the time when the Druidic cult was in its heyday. But it was the case that the priest could stand in such a Druidic circle and observe its [the circle’s] shadow, and based on the shadow, he would declare: “In the next eight days, the farmer must do this or that; in the next eight days, the breeding bull must be led through the herd, for that is the right time for the cattle to mate.” People read the cosmos and had the means to do so. Standing on the earth, and in order to do what needed to be done on earth, they read what the sun itself told them through its signs, which were evoked by those monuments that are preserved today in these sparse remnants.

[ 11 ] Yes, that was an entirely different state of mind, and it would be a troubling arrogance on the part of people today—simply because they can read and write a little—if they were to underestimate the art that consisted in allowing the necessary earthly deeds and tasks to be grounded in such heavenly revelation. I would like to say that in those passages one is compelled to recall many other things as well that can be explored specifically through spiritual science.

[ 12 ] I have often spoken among our anthroposophists about how everything that must be explored through spiritual science cannot be conceived through ordinary thought, but must instead be conceived through imagination. I hope you are all familiar—although it was disputed this morning, I believe those present were the exception—with what I said about imaginations in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. One must always have these imaginations—not ordinary mental images—in one’s soul when describing something based on direct spiritual observation, rather than on external sensory observation. Thus, the actual spiritual-scientific descriptions that have been given here at this location or over at Landhausstraße in Stuttgart have been spoken precisely out of such imaginations. But these imaginations are, in fact, much more vivid than merely abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are such that one actually grasps not a trace of what exists, but only images of what exists within these thoughts. The imaginations, however, one perceives, as it were, through active thinking, just as one perceives tables and chairs. One is permeated by existence in a much more tangible way when one perceives not in abstract concepts, but in imaginations. The person who speaks from these imaginations always has them before him, just as if he were writing. He simply does not write those cruelly abstract characters that make up our writing, but writes in cosmic images. Now, in our region here, what is the situation with these imaginations? Anyone who is familiar with them knows that it is relatively easy to access these imaginations here, that they are relatively easy to form. If one is conscientious, if one is aware of the responsibility one bears when describing anything at all derived from spiritual science, then one will naturally only accept such an imagination—that is, write it down in one’s mind—for speaking it aloud is merely an articulation of what has been written—if one has turned it over in one’s mind many times and examined the matter thoroughly. One who speaks from the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility certainly does not have a loose tongue. But nevertheless, one can say: In regions such as ours, such imaginations are relatively easy to write down, but they are just as easily erased. And for the one who creates spiritual content in imaginations—there is no other way to describe it—it is as if, in our regions, one were to write something and then immediately erase it: it fades away quickly. There, in that region where sea and land meet, where the tides come in and out every day, where one is thoroughly buffeted by the wind—in the hotel where we were staying on the ground floor, one not only felt the wind blowing in through the window, but one walked on the carpet as if on ocean waves, because the wind was blowing through beneath the carpet— you were really buffeted by the wind; moreover, the weather there is so changeable and joyfully lively that downpours often alternate with sunshine from one hour to the next, so one is already living within a nature that is quite joyfully dynamic; this literally prompts one to recall once again how this nature revealed itself to those who, long ago, as Druid priests—I might also say Druid scholars, for it is indeed the same thing—looked down upon this nature from their exalted seat. How, then, did the earth appear to the inner eye of these Druid priests, given that the sky looked as I have just described?

[ 13 ] It is extremely interesting to observe. But one can only fully recall these experiences if one now understands the specific geographical characteristics of that place. If one wants to form these mental images there, one must exert much more effort than, for example, here. They are, so to speak, difficult to imprint on the astral atmosphere. But they persist there for a long time; they are firmly anchored and do not fade away so quickly. Now one realizes how precisely such places—where the spiritual, which approaches human beings, is already strongly expressed, as it were, by the very nature of the place—were sought out by these ancient Druid priests for their places of worship, for the more important ones. Take, for example, those very Druid circles we visited back then: If one had risen into the air in a hot-air balloon and looked down from above at the smaller and the larger circle—they were, after all, at a distance from one another, though this would not have been apparent from above at a certain distance—one would have perceived the two circles as the floor plan of the burned-down Goetheanum. — What a wonderful location! As you walk up the mountain, you have sweeping views of the mountains and the lake from a wide variety of vantage points. Then you reach the top. These Druid circles lie where the mountain dips into a basin-like depression, so that you find yourself standing inside a ring of mountains, and within this ring of mountains are the Druid circles. There the Druid priest sought what was wisdom to him, what was science to him, what was knowledge to him. There he sought his solar wisdom, but there he also sought his wisdom of nature. For as the Druid priest immersed himself in the connection between what was on Earth and what streamed down from the heavens, the entire growth of plants and the entire growth of vegetation became something entirely different to him than it could ever be to later, abstractly thinking people. Once one has grasped the nature of the sun—on the one hand, the sensory rays of the sun that penetrate our eyes, and on the other, the shadow with all its nuanced gradations—and has taken this into consideration, then one knows: the spiritual essence of the sun lives on in the nuances of the shadow. For it is only the physical aspect of the sun’s rays that is blocked by the shadow cast on other bodies; the spiritual aspect penetrates through. In the cromlechs, as I have described them, there is a roughly enclosed, dark space. Only the outer, physical sunlight does not penetrate there, but the effects do penetrate, and through these effects the Druid priest grows into an inner permeation with the secret forces of cosmic existence; he grows into the mysteries of the world. And so, for example, it became clear to him what the sun does to a plant. He saw that this plant thrives during this season, when the sun’s influence is of a certain kind. He traced the sun in its spiritual nature, how it flows in, pouring itself into blossoms, leaves, roots, and so on. He traced what the sun’s influence was or is in animals. By being able to perceive the sun’s influence inwardly in this way, it also became clear to him how other cosmic influences—such as the moon’s influence—pour into these solar influences. Now he said to himself: The sun does to the plant what is the sprouting, growing life, which wants to go on and on. And the Druid priest knew that if a plant emerging from the ground were exposed only to the sun, it would grow into infinity. The sun seeks sprouting, burgeoning life. The fact that this is held back and shaped—that leaves, blossoms, fruit, and seeds take on a specific form, that what strives toward the infinite is limited in manifold ways—stems from those lunar influences, which do not lie solely in the sunlight reflected back by the moon; for the Moon reflects all these effects, and they are manifested in what grows upward from the roots in plants, in what lives in the reproduction of the animal kingdom, and so on. |

[ 14 ] Let us consider a specific case. The druid priest looked at the growing plant. He watched the plant grow upward; he observed, in a living way, what Goethe later explored in a more abstract manner in his “Metamorphosis.” He saw the sun’s forces streaming down, but he also saw the reflected sun’s forces in what shapes the plant; in his scientific understanding, he saw the sun and moon working together in every single plant, in every single animal. Thus he knew what the sun and moon do to the root, which is still sunk into the earth and depends on absorbing the earth’s salts in a certain way. The sun and moon do something entirely different to this root than they do to the leaf, which breaks free from the earth and reaches out into the air. And he saw yet something else in the flower, which breaks free from the earth and strives toward the light—the light of the sun. He saw all of this as one unified whole: the influence of the sun and the influence of the moon, mediated by the influence of the earth. Plant growth and animal life—he saw these as one unified whole. Then, of course, he already lived just as we have lived here, surrounded by the winds that so often rage, winds that tell us so much about the landscape’s configuration, about those uniquely beautiful weather phenomena that play out so vividly. For example, at the beginning of a eurythmy performance in a hall built of wood, the audience sat there with umbrellas because a downpour had preceded the performance and was still continuing as the eurythmy began. The curtains got completely wet. This close connection with nature—which one can still experience quite well there today—was, of course, also experienced by the Druid priests. Nature was not so aloof; it embraced them—and still embraces one there today. One is—I would say, in fact, it is something extraordinarily beautiful—almost drawn into the forces of nature, accompanied by them; one feels oneself right within those forces. I’ve even met people who said you don’t really need to eat there; within these natural forces, one eats as if by itself. Yes, within these natural forces—but now with his full solar initiation—the Druid priest stood, observing, as I have described, the interplay of sun and moon, mediated by the earth’s influence, plant growth, the growth of roots, leaves, and flowers; all of this not in abstract natural laws, as we do today, but in living elemental beings. Different elemental beings—different solar elemental beings, different lunar elemental beings—are at work in the root than in the leaf, than in the flower.

[ 15 ] But now the druid priest knew how to trace that which lives within beneficial limits in the root, leaf, and flower of the plant, even across the vast horizons of nature. Through his imaginative gift, he saw the tiny elemental beings confined within narrow limits in the root. He knew that what lives as a beneficial force in the root can emancipate itself and grow into something gigantic. And so he saw the great forces of nature as the small natural forces of the plant that had become giants. And just as he spoke of elemental beings living in the root, so he spoke of the root beings—one might say—that had grown to giant proportions in a cosmically incorrect way, which became visible in the formation of dew, frost, and hail. He spoke of the root beings that work in a beneficial way and of the frost and hoarfrost giants, which are the same as the root beings that have grown to gigantic proportions in nature. And he spoke of the small elemental forces in the plant leaf that interpenetrate with what acts in the air. And once again he traced this into the vast horizons of nature, and he spoke of how that which lives in the plant leaf, when it emancipates itself and strives out of its beneficent bounds into the vastness of nature, encompasses that which is carried on the waves of the wind. The giants of wind and storm are the fully grown elemental beings of the plant leaf. And that which simmers within the flower toward the sunlight—and which produces the essential oils of a phosphoric nature within the flower—when it emancipates itself, becomes the fire giants, of whose lineage, for example, Loki was. And so, in this science of suns and moons, the Druid priest saw as one and the same both what lives within the confined space of the plant and what emancipates itself to live in wind and weather.

[ 16 ] But he continued, saying to himself: What lives in the root, leaf, and flower—when confined within the benevolent boundaries into which the good gods confine it—there it unfolds its normal plant growth. When it appears in frost and ice, it is a product of the enemies of the gods. The elemental beings that have grown into the enemies of the gods—they give rise to the destructive, harmful aspects of nature’s workings. As a human being, I can absorb the destructive effects of the enemies of the gods; I can gather, in an appropriate way, the frost and the ice, what the storm carries with it, and what can be caught on the waves of the wind or in the rain. I can use it for what I create by harnessing the giants’ powers—by burning the plant, turning it to ash, turning it to charcoal, and so on. I draw their powers from the giants in order to protect what constitutes normal plant growth by applying the forces of frost, hail, raindrops, other formations, and whatever the fire giants carry within their powers—forces that often grow to the point of causing harm. I wrest all of this from the giants in order to treat normal plants with it, to make remedies from the plants—which are kept within their normal limits by the benevolent elemental forces—by treating them with these forces that oppose the gods. — And that was one of the methods for making remedies from plants by using frost, by using what lives in snow and ice formations—which could be achieved through burning, calcination, and so on. And so the druid priest saw himself as the one who took from the enemies of the gods—the giants—that which carried within it the power to harm, in order to return it to the service of the good gods. And so we can trace these things in many different ways.

[ 17 ] Why are we exploring these things? Because we want to make it clear—using this example, which I cite because I feel that the Penmaenmawr course is indeed one of the most important events in the history of the anthroposophical movement—how the consciousness, the entire state of mind of humanity, was quite different in a time not so very long ago than it is today. People today, with their consciousness, simply cannot relate to what lived in the consciousness of that earlier humanity. And what I have told you about this earlier humanity, I could also tell you about other peoples. We are looking into an entirely different state of mind. What we experience today as our abstract thoughts, that humanity did not yet experience. All their thinking was even more dreamlike. This humanity did not live in such sharply defined concepts and ideas as we do today. They lived in spaces that were actually much more vivid, richer in content, and more saturated—yet even while awake during the day, they were as if in a continuous dream. And this dreaming, which never fully gave way to wakefulness, alternated—just as our waking state today, with our abstract notions of wakefulness, alternates with dreaming, and sleep with dreamless sleep; but back then it was not as it is today. Rather, when a person awoke to their dreamlike daily life, they felt: Something from sleep lives within me, even when I am awake. It is something that fills me like inner nourishment for the soul, which I have absorbed during sleep—that which makes itself felt within me, indeed even makes itself tasted within me. — In those days, people still felt the aftertaste of sleep throughout their entire organism. And there was a third state, deeper than our sleep, a state that no longer occurs in human consciousness. There was a third state, the state of being embraced by the earth, from which, upon waking, a person felt: Not only have I slept, but beyond the fact that I slept—which I can still taste—I was, as it were, taken into a kind of nocturnal grave by the forces of the earth’s gravity; the earth’s gravity covered me; I was embraced by the earth.

[ 18 ] Now we can say: Today, human beings experience the states of consciousness of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. And so we must say: Human beings in a certain bygone era experienced the states of dreaming, sleeping, and being enveloped by the earth. And just as everything that has developed over the course of history is connected in a certain way to the present, so do some human souls in later times reveal how something special arises within them in a later earthly life—something like a real memory of ancient times that is connected to their earlier earthly life. Such people then reveal, in what shines forth within them—something that is unusual in their own times—something like a living, spiritual monument. Such spirits included, for example, Jakob Böhme; Swedenborg was another such spirit. In such spirits, that which is connected to human development shines forth from a very distant past into the more contemporary humanity.

[ 19 ] But as for the unique nature of Jakob Böhme’s spirit, and that of Swedenborg—so that we may understand humanity’s past through their spiritual dispositions—and as for what the three states of consciousness of humanity in the future will be, I will address these topics tomorrow in the continuation of these reflections.