The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Since it is possible that we are still speaking with one another here today, I would like to touch on a few points that are related in one way or another to what we have been considering over the course of time. First, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the attitude I spoke of last time—an attitude of a certain rejection of the spiritual worlds, the truly concrete spiritual worlds—is actually quite common in today’s outer world, whereas, fundamentally, the attitude of to approach the spiritual worlds in order to draw something from them to enrich and strengthen life is present only among a small handful of people. I think we can see that.

[ 2 ] One can only come to terms with these things intellectually if one realizes that, even today, not many people are familiar with what will become increasingly widespread throughout the world: the tragic struggle with knowledge. The feeling that one needs the insights of the spiritual worlds, but that one can attain them only through a patient surrender of the soul to the spiritual worlds—this feeling, this inner struggle with knowledge—could not yet exist in ancient times, when knowledge reached people, so to speak, through atavistic clairvoyance.

[ 3 ] It is precisely from the facts I have discussed here in recent weeks that this struggle with knowledge can take shape in our time. And so it happens that in our time, whenever knowledge or the pursuit of knowledge is at stake, people are all too inclined to delude themselves. On the one hand, people today want to be free from any belief in authority; on the other hand, people today have fallen prey to the worst kind of belief in authority. For when someone presents something—I have often discussed this in other contexts—that is cloaked in the guise of scientific rigor, belief in such “scientific” claims becomes widespread. People do not want to bring themselves to engage in what is truly an individual quest for knowledge. In truth, without realizing it, they are too comfortable, too sluggish, to activate those powers of the soul that come into play precisely when one wrestles with knowledge. And so people seek to lull themselves into a state of calm—as if with a spiritual anesthetic—through what is generally recognized as authoritative and scientific. They want to simply accept what is so widely accepted, so that they do not have to set their individual quest for knowledge in motion. Fundamentally, the resistance to the worldview of Spiritual Science stems largely from the fact that this worldview demands of individual souls that they activate their own powers—that they think for themselves and feel deeply. But people do not want that. They want to be handed a certain body of authoritative knowledge on a silver platter.

[ 4 ] However, souls who, by their very constitution, are deeply immersed in the struggles of our time—and “our time” means, as we have always shown in this context, the last three to four centuries—that is, those souls who are so deeply immersed in the struggles of these centuries, sense intuitively how necessary it is for them to to summon up everything that lies in the depths of the soul in order to reach the spiritual worlds, to connect their own souls with that which weaves and surges spiritually through the world. We can then study such souls to see how they feel immersed in the struggle of the times.

[ 5 ] We drew attention to such souls last time. I cited significant works of literature from which we can perceive such a struggle of the soul within the impulses of the times. But those souls who sought to numb themselves, as it were, with a spiritual-psychic narcotic, immerse themselves in a certain worldview into which they were born or raised. There are certainly a great many such souls in our time who, through their karma and what is connected with it, are more inclined toward materialism. They adopt what materialism has produced as a worldview. Others are more spiritually oriented souls; they adopt what spiritualism or idealism has brought into the world, and they numb themselves with what they adopt, without developing the will to engage in that struggle into which the soul enters when it is truly to enter the spiritual worlds.

[ 6 ] Today, however, I would like to discuss an example of a struggling soul—I would say, a struggling soul who, despite his significance, remained humble—a soul who fully shared in the spiritual struggles of the 19th century. Back then, when the great philosophical wave swept through the era, the man I wish to speak of was young. He engaged with all those great ideas that the idealist philosophers put forward at the beginning of the 19th century—the idealist philosophers and natural philosophers who, like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, believed that through intense intellectual effort—individual thought—they could enter the sphere where the mysteries of the world are revealed. This individual went through that philosophical wave, which—arising primarily from a certain rigid one-sidedness of thought—sought, one might say, to construct the entire world. Then he experienced the transition to the era when it was believed that this kind of thinking was utterly worthless, that one could not possibly arrive at any revelation of the world’s mysteries in this way. He therefore grew up during a time when people said: Thinking is of no use at all; one must turn one’s gaze to the vast field of external, sensory experience; one must measure and weigh sensory experiences, compare them with one another, and derive them in an external manner. - It must be added: he is still influenced by those who still believe in the power of thought, whereas in the second half of the 19th century a certain distrust of thought prevailed, and the view held that only external, sensory observation was what one, as a human being, could believe in. Then this same man made very significant discoveries in this external, sensory realm—precisely in a sphere that is extraordinarily illuminating from an epistemological perspective.

[ 7 ] But by living through this transition—I would say, from a time oriented toward thought to a time oriented toward the senses—everything within him that constitutes the soul’s inner forces has been stirred and shaken, those forces that grapple with the question: How can human beings even find a connection to true reality, to the truth in the universe? Then peculiar moments come over the human soul—moments when the human soul feels as if standing on a dark precipice, when it says to itself: No matter what one tries to develop internally in the form of intellectual constructs and all manner of ideas, where is the certainty, where is the criterion to ensure that this, too, has not simply been drawn from the soul, that it is not humanly subjective, that it might not even lose its full meaning with death—and thus, in essence, fail to lead one into the very workings of the world?

[ 8 ] Then again, there are moments when the soul asks itself: Why should one even try to draw something out of the soul itself? After all, there is no certainty there! When one conducts chemical or physical research, when one relies on the external, physical world, one can at least feel oneself being guided along the thread of the external world.

[ 9 ] One must simply regard such states of mind as moods—moods that toss the soul back and forth between seeking and rejecting every form of seeking. When one observes such a soul, it is usually precisely one of those that possess genuine, true drives for knowledge, but which in our time are placed in a peculiar way within the workings of the world—namely, where these worldly workings themselves strive for knowledge—because such a soul can easily say to itself, when looking at the people around it: How easily, how easily these people convince themselves to believe in this or that as something that cannot be refuted! One need only open one’s spiritual eyes a little to see how fragile such a belief is.

[ 10 ] For example, the soul I am referring to might find that people—including those who bear responsibility for certain things in the world—see this or that seemingly important invention or discovery being touted as something grand and mighty, and they consider it important, and then for a few years nothing comes of it. In particular, the soul I am referring to was deeply moved by the way things are with various remedies—how here and there a remedy is discovered, which is then trumpeted to the world as a sure cure for this or that disease.

[ 11 ] People who take the easy way out in life think such things are wonderful; but those who know better also know that such things rise and fall again. Thus, toward the 1830s, a certain soul had found—one might say, as a remedy—a cause that had taken off: the Jodine. But the man could not simply say to himself, “I’ll go along with all this Jodine hype”—for he was all too familiar with the ease with which people, for the most part, acquire insights out of sheer convenience. And so there he stood—it was the year 1821, iodine had made its name—and wrote in the second edition of a small pamphlet—the second edition was published in 1832—that the moon consists of iodine and that one can therefore also heal through the moon.

[ 12 ] “The first edition of this little book was published in 1821, at a time when iodine was beginning to attract attention as a remedy. It was actually intended to address a temporary and, in part, local interest; I will leave it open as to what extent anyone might still be interested in it today.”

[ 13 ] “Iodine is a remedy of extraordinary efficacy. Very natural. It has not yet been a year since it began to be effective against goiter, and thus it has not yet lost any of its initial potency due to age. For we find with every remedy that it exhibits unsurpassed effects at the beginning of its use and renders all remedies previously applied against the same disease completely superfluous; but as soon as it has lain for a while in the cabinet of the Materia Medica, it becomes a useless and powerless commodity, just as children in whom one observed an excellent intellect in their early years usually become fools in later life. We saw a striking example of this kind with ratanhia root a few years ago. Did it not, in its arrogance, threaten to drive all our tonics and astringents out of the apothecary’s cabinet, and did it not even put China—which otherwise always knows how to command respect—to shame with the miracle cures it boasted of? Now Ratanhia would like to cure itself with Ratanhia, since—as is often the case with doctors—it is most frequently afflicted by the very diseases it cures most often, is most often infected by them, suffers from such a chronic weakness that she forgets all her boasting and calmly sits down next to Tormentil and Columbo, whom she otherwise looked down upon with such an air of superiority; and while there was formerly no phlegm or blood discharge that did not tremble at the mere mention of Ratanhia, we now frequently see these unruly diseases laughing right in the face of the great master and displaying a defiance of which, according to all reports, she had never experienced a trace at the beginning of her practice. In light of all this, one cannot advise physicians strongly enough to use iodine as often as possible now, while it is still in the prime of its youthful vigor, before senile marasmus renders it useless as well.

[ 14 ] In fact, there is probably hardly a goiter that iodine has not cured completely; and that is not all. A new remedy first attacks a person at a weak point; but it spreads like a cancer; and so iodine has already attacked scrofula and diseases of the uterus; and there is no doubt that it will continue to spread from there. Remedies are like intelligent people: Many years can pass before anyone thinks to use them; one is barely aware that they exist; but once they have shown skill in one matter, one gradually piles so many functions, honors, and dignities upon them—whether they are suited to them or not—that, since they cannot accomplish everything at once, they now accomplish nothing at all and merely live off their old reputation. The iodine, however, has not yet reached that point; it must still be vigorous and active before it, for its part, can retire. Support it in this; one will all the sooner have the pleasure of being able to move on to another remedy. However, there is no need to issue a special exhortation on this matter, since in recent times it has already become possible to chase a remedy through all diseases until it finally gives up, exhausted; Moreover, we now have the advantage of achieving results twice as quickly as before, because while a remedy for half of all diseases is prescribed by allopathy, it is always used at the same time by homeopathy against all diseases of a directly opposite nature, so that no disease can so easily escape its grasp. Thus, we will surely soon see that some will recommend iodine for obesity, because it makes people thin, and others for consumption, also because it makes people thin: and since, for this reason, iodine is capable of producing two directly opposite effects, I do not know what in heaven or on earth iodine could not be capable of effecting, simply because it makes people thin.

[ 15 ] Incidentally, I would be pleased if iodine were now first used to treat consumption. It has indeed been far too long since Herz, in Hufeland’s Journal, assigned Phellandrium aquaticum its place in the prescription tables at the patient’s bedside as a symptom of consumption—a condition that can sometimes be recognized by this alone, even when the other symptoms are absent (in which case particularly successful cures have been achieved with it); it may now, at any rate, cede its place to iodine; and iodine will gladly concede another disease to it in return. Certainly, all it takes is this suggestion to enable a physician to set the matter in order.

[ 16 ] Of course, these and similar proposals remain nothing more than wishful thinking unless we can find a way to obtain iodine in greater quantities than has been possible thus far. In homeopathy, the dilemma lies not so much in how to obtain a great deal of iodine, but rather in how to obtain very little of it; for if we were to give all homeopaths combined a single grain, they would scurry about it like ants around Chimborazo, in despair at ever being able to carry it away and reduce it to nothing—yet the allopaths, who are less frugal, still wish to cure. For them, it would indeed be highly desirable if a mine of iodine were now discovered that could supply the necessary quantity of hundredweights required for annual consumption. For even now, all the species of Fucus in the world’s oceans are no longer sufficient to meet the necessary demand for iodine, since we still have nothing more of it than the tincture. What will become of the situation, then, once they have produced a whole array of ointments, plasters, pills, and other preparations—in the polygyny of other remedies—that such a potent remedy simply cannot do without? Since no trace of such a treasure trove has yet appeared, I therefore make the following proposal for its discovery. In the future, let only miners afflicted with goiters and scrofula, and women suffering from menstrual irregularities, work in the mines. If it is then found that a goiter shrinks here, a swollen gland disappears there, or a woman’s menstrual cycle resumes, this provides proof per se that this mine must contain iodine, and one can now confidently use the earth from it—in appropriate compounds—as an iodine-containing remedy against the aforementioned diseases. In a similar manner, the effectiveness of brownstone against scabies was also discovered; only here I am reversing the conclusion, though I hope I have not violated the rules of logic.

[ 17 ] I will now move on to the main topic of this booklet by briefly examining the conventional methods that have been used to date to investigate and demonstrate the presence of iodides, and at the same time showing to what extent these methods have yielded useful results—or not.

[ 18 ] A pharmacist named Courtois was the first to discover iodine in the ashes of kelp, a marine plant. Immediately, suspicion fell upon all sea creatures, that they were concealing this remedy; the strictest search was immediately conducted throughout the entire sea, and the money-hungry Spaniards could not have treated the poor Indians any worse than we treated the sea creatures: for what torture, what trial by water or fire was left untried in our chemical laboratories to extract a confession from the poor sea creatures that they were hiding iodine; and as such, a red vapor—which was usually forced from them by boiling sulfuric acid—was generally regarded as evidence. Such a red vapor was sufficient—just as the red eyes of a witch are usually enough—to condemn all individuals of the species to the pyre, which were now dragged from their hiding places with relentless severity so that iodine could be extracted from their ashes. This is still the most common method of seeking out and producing iodides, and every marine creature can therefore thank God that it is free from this dangerous substance. Of course, it was soon noticed that this method yielded only a very meager yield, and, frustrated that so little could be extracted from the children of the ocean, people even turned on old Oceanus himself, poured him into a distillation flask (in fact, they tested seawater for iodine), and sought to force him, through boiling and simmering, to confess his riches; but so far he has steadfastly endured the torture.

[ 19 ] What to do now? The doctors needed iodine, and the pharmacists couldn’t get any. So they devised a far more ingenious way of detecting the presence of iodine than had been attempted before, and were indeed fortunate enough to find it in this manner in substances in which the chemist, with all his reagents, could detect not a trace. And how did these people go about it? Well, they dismissed chemistry and made logic their servant. Logic threw all of chemistry’s retorts and flasks out the window, sat down at the bellows, stoked the fire for a while with syllogisms and sorites, and lo and behold, in no time at all, a beautiful brown grain of iodine lay there among a multitude of substances—one could not have wished for a more beautiful one...”

[ 20 ] “Since we have established as the foundation of our investigations the principle that every substance containing iodine cures goiter, let us now list the remedies that are said to possess this property to a remarkable degree. These are as follows: burnt sponge, which has already been mentioned above; Extractum Cicutz; Digitalis; Antimonium crudum; Mercurius dulcis; burnt eggshells; birch bark; and rags. Now there is no doubt whatsoever that all these remedies truly contain iodine, which could also be very easily isolated from them using our method of decomposition; and even the scalpel used to excise the goiter can accomplish this only through its iodine content; however, it is to be feared that, in our increasingly scrofulous age, all these remedies will ultimately prove insufficient, and I have therefore, in order to prevent this shortage in advance, I have considered whether another substance might be discovered that contains iodine in even greater abundance, and lo and behold, I have stumbled upon a magnificent discovery that no physician, no chemist, and no physicist has ever even dreamed of—and which, I can proudly say, will stand out like a brilliant meteor in the annals of science. Hear this and be amazed! The moon—yes, the moon—is nothing more than a large lump of iodine. As a true product of the sea, it floats there in the blue ocean of the sky to banish goiters from this earth—as even every old woman knows—and thereby so beautifully attests that nothing is placed in its place without purpose or benefit. One might then ask, of course, what purpose the little specks of iodine—the stars—serve. Well, surely to cure warts, those smaller deformities of the hands and face, the removal of which was otherwise mistakenly attributed to the moon. What a rich source of iodine this view suddenly opens up to us! How beautifully it brings all phenomena on and in the moon into harmony, and to what brilliant results it will lead us still further—so that I can assert that the entire century has produced no discovery more far-reaching or more important for science.

[ 21 ] Incidentally, I would not need to cite any further evidence for the moon’s iodine nature, since, when the moon is tested against the touchstone of our principle cited above, it passes the test so admirably; but I wish to show the world that I need not shy away from a closer examination of my discovery, and at the same time draw attention to the important conclusions that follow from it.

[ 22 ] Only now are we able to explain the periodic waning of the moon in a completely satisfactory manner: for since we find that the moon cures goiter only when it is waning, it follows quite naturally that this very high consumption by goiter patients causes the moon to lose substance, which is replenished every month in a manner still unknown to us—a phenomenon we are, however, just as unable to explain as why the crab regains its claws.

[ 23 ] This view of ours also lends new credibility to the long-held belief that the Moon is an excretion—or, so to speak, sputum—of the Earth, which it has vomited up, likely after becoming overloaded. At the very least, this explains quite satisfactorily why so little iodine is now found on Earth, for when a great deal of bile has been expelled, the stomach becomes clean.

[ 24 ] Furthermore, we are now finally getting to the bottom of the origin of the so-called moonstones. Until now, they have often been regarded as a kind of deserters and defectors from the moon to Earth. However, if they had truly originated from the very flesh and bone of the Moon, iodine would necessarily have to be detectable in them—or rather, they would have to consist entirely of iodine. Since neither of these points has yet been demonstrated by the defenders of their selenitic origin: I certainly find one of the following two opinions much more plausible: either that they should be regarded as a kind of gouty concretion formed in the atmosphere—the synovial fluid between two celestial bodies, which one might well compare to the bones of the universe—or that they are a cheese-like coagulation of the ether, which, like milk, curdles through electrical and galvanic processes .. .”

[ 25 ] “But if moonlight isn’t true light, what is it? — Well, of course, nothing more than an effusion of iodine. — But it looks yellow, doesn’t it? — Well, that’s simply due to the different potentization that the iodines have undergone here, I reply, and I hope to have answered a natural philosopher clearly and comprehensibly; and since I write only for intelligent people, every natural philosopher will immediately know that I am satisfied as long as he has understood it. Incidentally, this also explains why cold arises in moonlight—a phenomenon that always occurs when a substance volatilizes, and thus also during this volatilization of iodine.

[ 26 ] "After all this, I would strongly advise that a chemist collect the moonlight in a bowl and subject it to chemical analysis...»

[ 27 ] “I will now simply add the following to the description of the Moon as a lump of iodine: the jaundiced complexion of the Moon is in any case due to the property of iodine to turn the skin yellow—a property it first tested on its own surface; and the evening and morning glow in the sky can be very plausibly explained by the fact that the Moon probably sweats more in the evening and morning than at other times of the day; which may be due to a feverish state on its part, since it often loses mass so noticeably in the process; and it is well known that iodine sweats a beautiful red or violet color.

[ 28 ] Through these last two views, I hope to have reconciled myself with ordinary chemists, who may not have been entirely satisfied with me throughout the course of this treatise, since the conclusions on which the proofs are based, rejecting all speculation, rest solely on pure facts.

[ 29 ] And so I take my leave of everyone here in peace and tranquility, and my only remaining wish is that Jodine may enjoy a longer youth than I was able to predict for her in my *Prognostikon*.»

[ 30 ] It is something that seemingly every enlightened person would quite rightly call absurd. But that does not prevent this enlightened person from making a similar mistake once every hour. He simply does not notice it when it concerns something he has included among the objects of his faith. The man who wrote this in 1821—he called himself Dr. Mises at the time—is the same man you know from the scientific literature as Professor Gustav Theodor Fechner, the same man who, in the 1850s, attempted to establish an aesthetics from the bottom up, based on sensory and intuitive experiments, rather than from the top down, that is, from the material of thought and feeling within the soul. This was a man who, one can truly say, went through all the torments of the 19th-century struggle for knowledge. He was the same man who had a dispute with the botanist Schleiden over the moon’s influence on various processes on Earth. I have told you how Professor Schleiden’s wife and Professor Fechner’s wife were then to decide which of the two was right. This is also the same man who attempted, out of his intellectual struggles, to arrive at a kind of idealistic-spiritual worldview. You can see how he attempted this from the account I gave of Gustav Theodor Fechner in my *Riddles of Philosophy*.

[ 31 ] One might say: in such a soul one truly sees reality as that which a human being can perceive—the reality in which he lives through his quest for knowledge, provided he pursues this quest with the utmost seriousness. But Spiritual Science is, in fact, the very thing that can make clear to us the full seriousness and significance of the matter. When a person like Gustav Theodor Fechner says something like what is written in that little pamphlet—“Proof that the Moon Consists of Iodine”—he intends, as it were, to show how superficial human thinking is, and how easily human thinking fails to come close to reality—indeed, stands far removed from it. People simply do not perceive the full gravity, significance, and weight of human evolution. Spiritual Science therefore seeks to broaden the horizon we survey with regard to the human being, beyond what is possible with today’s accepted science. It seeks to point us toward distant epochs of human development—for example, the Atlantean era—to show us what human beings were like in Atlantis, and then to reveal the transformative process of development in which these human beings are actually engaged.

[ 32 ] Let us then simply keep one thing in mind as we allow what we have learned about ancient Atlantis to pass through our souls: what is it like when we cast our gaze upon the animal and human worlds that live around us today? All of this was quite different in the time of ancient Atlantis! Let us bring to mind what we know in this regard. We know that it was only during the time of ancient Atlantis that human beings, as souls, descended from the journey they had undergone in the world of the stars. Only then did they once again choose human bodies that had been formed for them from the material, the substance of the earthly realm. And we know from the description that has been given how different these human bodies were in the Atlantean era. I have repeatedly pointed this out—and you can also read about it in my writings—that the human body at that time was still soft, supple, and malleable, such that the souls descending from the heavenly worlds were still able to shape the bodies.

[ 33 ] Suppose a woman—or, so as not to be one-sided—a man becomes angry today, truly angry, and harbors malicious thoughts toward another person. Isn’t it true that this isn’t expressed all that strongly in the changes to the face? A little, yes, but not that strongly. People today can be very evil, and it isn’t expressed that strongly in their physiognomy. It used to be different in the ancient Atlantean era. Back then, when a person had something evil in mind, the face became a complete expression of their inner being; it transformed entirely, so that in those days it wouldn’t have been inaccurate to say, “He looks like a cat.” — A person really did look like a cat or a hyena when they became completely corrupt. Back then, a person’s outward appearance was still a complete expression of their inner self. So, in those days, human beings were highly capable of transformation.

[ 34 ] In animals, this capacity for transformation was already less pronounced, but it was still present; their physical bodies were already much more solidified than those of humans, and any transformation took place only very gradually. Specifically, animals were capable of transformation within their species, not in the sense that they inherited characteristics in such a rigid, stereotypical manner as they do today. Everything has thus become increasingly solidified in the physical human body—I would say, cast into fixed forms since the Atlantean era. Although humans today still have the ability to move their hands and to display a certain range of facial expressions, in a certain sense the form of their body has nevertheless become fixed. And the forms of animals are completely solidified, which is why they display rigidity in their physiognomy. This was not yet the case to the same extent with animals in the ancient Atlantean era.

[ 35 ] When we want to characterize a person, we can generally say: Today, his physical body is highly rigid, while his etheric body is still quite flexible. The etheric body therefore still takes shape according to the person’s inner nature. Thus, it has greater significance—even a certain reality—when, for example, someone becomes evil, in that outwardly their face takes on a slightly hyena-like appearance, and their etheric body becomes more hyena-like. The etheric body is still capable of metamorphosis; it still possesses something that allows it to be transformed. But it is just as much on the path toward rigidity as the physical body. Just as the physical body has taken on fixed forms from the Atlantean epoch into our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, so too will the etheric body, moving from the fifth into the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, take on stiffer, more fixed forms, and the consequence of this will be—as I have hinted at in various lectures—that this etheric body, which, with its forms, re-enters the physical body, will assert itself very strongly. We are in the fifth period of the first post-Atlantean epoch; next comes the sixth, and then the seventh period. Thus, in the sixth and seventh periods, this etheric body, in its rigidity, will exert a great influence on the physical body; it will make the physical body its faithful image.

[ 36 ] This has important implications. It implies that in this sixth period of our post-Atlantean earthly evolution, human beings will be born with bodies that very specifically express their inner moral qualities. One will encounter people and, from the way they look, know that they are of one moral disposition or another. Moral physiognomy will then be particularly pronounced, while the factors that currently define physiognomy will recede into the background. At present, a person’s physiognomy is largely determined by heredity: they resemble their parents, their ancestors, their people, and so on. This will no longer have any significance whatsoever in the sixth period. Then, through their succession of incarnations, human beings will shape the character of their appearance themselves. People will be very different, but they will have a distinct character. One will know exactly: You are now encountering a benevolent or a malevolent person. Just as one knows today: You are now encountering an Italian or a Frenchman—so one will then know: ‘You are now encountering a malevolent or a benevolent person,’ with all the various nuances in between. — Thus, it will become increasingly common for moral qualities to be expressed in the face. The external physiognomy of the environment will also undergo manifold changes during this sixth period. In particular, those animals that people today specifically choose for their meat diet will have become extinct. Then people will sing the praises of a meatless diet, for it will be a distant memory that their ancestors in ancient times even ate meat. It is not the case that all animals will become extinct, but only certain species; particularly those that have taken on the most rigid forms will have disappeared from the earth. Thus, the outward appearance of the earth will also have changed somewhat.

[ 37 ] You see, this being caught up in such a rigid moral framework—as will come to pass later—will consequently be like a fate to human beings, like a true fate, like a destiny imposed upon their very being. Within himself, he will then be unable to find the possibility of doing anything against this fate, against this destiny. Now imagine the tragedy of it! Humanity will then actually have to say to itself: In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, there were individual materialists who believed that if the parietal lobe did not extend precisely over the cerebellum, then people would inevitably become criminals. For these people, it was merely a theory back then, but now it has actually come to pass; now that which they said could not be formed—namely, the etheric body—has become firmly established. We are truly moving toward the tendency to, so to speak, bring the theories of the materialistic worldview to life. They are not yet a reality, but we are moving in that direction. Here we find ourselves at a peculiar point in the mysteries of worldview. Those who would vehemently resist being called prophets are the true prophets; they are the ones who say today: “One is a criminal because the occipital lobe does not cover the cerebellum.” These will prove to be the forerunners of a truth; that is certainly how it will be! Today’s materialists are the worst prophets; they just do not want to be. Today there is still the possibility that, through education, such a peculiar formation of the physical body—such as an occipital lobe that is too short—can be counteracted by a balancing force; in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, this will no longer be possible, for the etheric bodies will then no longer be malleable. Stronger means will be needed then—entirely different, stronger means—to prevent this.

[ 38 ] If this is not prevented, then the very state described by the materialists will come to pass and become a reality: then the state that you find depicted in such a pain-racked manner in the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, which were read aloud today, will come to pass. You can relate these poems to a time that is already foreshadowed, a time that will truly come to pass in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. One can easily sense in the poems: this is a soul who, through what she can gain as present-day insight, feels as if plunged into nothingness. She wants to move forward, but has nothing yet that serves as an antidote, and then an image comes to her of what it will be like if materialism were to continue in this way in the near future! And in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, people could worry about nothing else but what Delle Grazie is already expressing today, if no antidote were created against the direction of development that humanity will one day take out of the forces it simply possesses.

[ 39 ] None of the world’s religious systems to date could prevent humanity, in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, from being subjected to a terrible fate—the fate that, in its face and in its entire physical physiognomy—against which it could do nothing if it left everything as the currently prevailing worldview dictates— his moral qualities would be expressed.

[ 40 ] These are serious reflections—incredibly serious reflections. There would be a good way to turn the materialists’ dreams into reality, and that way would be for those people to prevail in terms of worldview—the ones who say: “Spiritual Science dreams that humanity will one day see etheric forms—first Christ in etheric form, and then other etheric forms as well; that is what Spiritual Science dreams of!” But those who say this are fools; we’ll lock them up in the madhouse. — These are the sensible people who regard such things as delusions. If this worldview were to prevail, then what I have described would come to pass. But this worldview must not prevail; that must be our unshakable conviction. We must realize: if our etheric bodies are to be strong enough to correct the errors of our physical bodies, this strength must arise from people learning to take seriously and as truth what comes to meet them from the etheric world. Then this will have an increasingly healing effect on the future. To this end, we must above all embrace Spiritual Science so that we may prepare ourselves when the time comes for us to see the etheric form of Christ, so that we may know how to take it with the proper seriousness.

[ 41 ] We could draw a major dividing line in the development of humanity. Previously, the etheric aspect was at work within human beings and was still shaping the physical; but on the other hand, the time will come when the physical and the etheric will be firmly established. Humanity must grow accustomed to seeing the etheric realm outside itself, in all manner of forms and shapes, and it will be the etheric realm that we must orient ourselves toward as sensory perceptions present themselves to us. We must move toward a time when we will first find Christ, and in his wake, more and more of the etheric. This etheric realm will then have the power to make us into individual human beings. There are many mysteries lying behind the becoming of the world, and many of these mysteries are profound. There was once a Homer. If you read with understanding what I have said in various cycles and also in the little book *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity*, you will have to ask yourself: How did Homer become Homer? It was because a higher spirit guided him. — Homer surely knew this. That is why his poems do not begin with the words “I sing,” but rather with the words: “Sing, O Muse... .” This is to be taken quite seriously. He knew that a higher spirit inspired him. Only our present age regards this as a mere phrase, just as it regards Goethe’s words as mere phrases:

“The sun resounds in the ancient way,
a contest of song in the spheres of the brotherhood,
and its prescribed journey
it completes with a thunderous roar”

[ 42 ] and so on. Insofar as Homer is now reincarnating, it is the “human being” who will reincarnate, but not the spirit that guided him back then. But one will encounter in the etheric realm the figure who inspired Homer at that time, or the spirit who inspired Socrates and Plato, insofar as they were indeed inspired. We must begin by understanding the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. The rest will then follow naturally. But if we do not begin with Spiritual Science, then we are heading toward a time that will impose a terrible fate upon humanity.

[ 43 ] The materialist worldview need not be true, but it possesses an inner truth. This can be said about that inner truth: What the materialist worldview depicts about human beings is what would come to pass if this materialist worldview were to prevail. And it is in the hands of human beings to prevent this materialism from prevailing through a different worldview. The matter is not so simple that one could say the materialist worldview is false; rather, it is such that it is in the hands of human beings to defeat it—not through the feeble act of refutation, but through action. And the more people there are who open their eyes to the spiritual, the more people there will be who realize that the realization of materialism can be kept at bay, and the greater the possibility that materialism will indeed be kept at bay.

[ 44 ] For now, people still sit and sense this or that—perhaps they are poets or artists—and say: “I feel my genius within me!”—Certainly, this will continue for a while. But this mood will disappear; it will disappear completely. For there will come a time when people will say: “There was a specific moment when an ethereal being appeared to me and communicated this or that to me. I am the instrument through which this spiritual being works into this world!” — The spiritual world must increasingly become a conscious reality.

[ 45 ] Certainly, the spiritual world exists; but people can turn away from it. And the materialistic worldview can be called: the great conspiracy against the spirit. This materialistic worldview is not merely an error; it is a conspiracy—the conspiracy against the spirit.

[ 46 ] I hope that, despite the few brief strokes with which I was able to hint at this, it will touch your souls, so that your souls may engage with these thoughts. It is precisely those who profess the Spiritual Science worldview who should have some understanding of the impulses of world development in which humanity lives. And it is, of course, possible that many people will come and say: “That is not so, that is not so, that is not Christian; Christianity is different,” and so on. When such people come, if we have grasped—with depth, seriousness, and dignity—what moves the world through Spiritual Science, we will be able to sense eternal fundamental laws in our meditative life. Let people claim that we are dreamers or whatever else they may say; we know the reality of human and world development. And the One who, for our sake, passed through the Mystery of Golgotha—He also sees what arises in our soul as the expression of world development. “Christ sees us”—let us hold fast to this.