The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It will be relatively easy—I am saying relatively, of course—for a person to take up more or less theoretically what we understand by the spiritual-scientific world outlook, or anthroposophy. But it will not be easy to fill our whole being and life itself with the impulses coming from spiritual science. To absorb anthroposophy theoretically, so that you know that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and so on, in the same way as you know that one or another tone has so-and-so many vibrations, or that oxygen combines with hydrogen to make water, is the way we have grown accustomed to learning things through the natural-scientific approach mankind has gradually acquired over the last few centuries.

We are less accustomed, however, to allowing our feelings and attitude of mind to be affected by the kind of knowledge spiritual science has to offer. Yet the kind of approach we must have to spiritual science is fundamentally opposite to the approach we must have to natural science. Emphasis is often laid on the fact that everyone feels that science is dry and stops us having a warm contact with life and its happenings; that dry science has something cold and unfeeling about it and robs things of their dewy freshness. Yet one could say that to a certain extent this has to be so with ordinary science. For there is an enormous difference between the impression made on us by a wonderful cloud formation in the evening or morning sky and the bare reports an astronomer or a meteorologist gives us. There is such abundant richness in the natural world around us that its effect on us is to warm us through and through whereas, in comparison, science, with its concepts and ideas, appears dull and dry, cold, lifeless and loveless. Yet there is every justification to feel this way as far as external, natural-scientific knowledge is concerned.

There are good reasons why external, natural-scientific knowledge has to be like this, but spiritual science is not this kind of knowledge. On the contrary it ought to bring us nearer and nearer to the living abundance and warmth of the outside world and of the world altogether. But this means learning to bring certain impulses to life in us that a person of today hardly possesses at all. A present-day person expects it to be in the nature of what he calls science that it has a cold and sobering effect on him, like the character of Wagner in Goethe's Faust. He expects that if he assimilates science the riddles of nature will be solved, and then he will know how everything is constituted and be perfectly satisfied with what he knows.

Science even makes some people shudder nowadays, for a quite specific reason. They maintain that what made life so rich and fresh in the past, was the fact that man had not solved every riddle and could still wonder about the unsolved ones. And then science comes along, they say, and solves the riddles of nature one after the other. And they imagine how boring life will be in the future when science will have solved all the mysteries and there will be no further possibility of wondering about anything, or having any feelings of an unscientific kind. What terrible desolation would befall mankind; we have every reason to be horrified at the prospect.

But spiritual science can kindle different feelings than these, and although those feelings would be less in keeping with modern times than the solving of riddles, they show how awakening and life-giving spiritual science can be. If we absorb anthroposophy in the right way—not just take notes of what is being said, so that we can make use of them like they do in ordinary science, and perhaps even do a neat diagram, so that we can take it all in at a glance like physics—if we do not do it so much that way, but let what anthroposophy has to say reach our hearts and we unite with it, we shall notice that it comes to life in us and grows, it awakens our independence and initiative and becomes like a new living being within us, that is forever showing new aspects. To approach external nature with our souls thus filled with anthroposophy, is to find more riddles in nature and not less. Everything grows even more puzzling, which broadens instead of impoverishing our life of feeling; you could say that spiritual science makes the world more mysterious.

Of course the world becomes a desolate place when the physicist says to you ‘You see the sunrise . . . .’ and then, showing us a diagram, he tells us which particular refractions are taking place in the rays of light so that the glow of dawn appears. This is certainly horrible, not from the point of view of human reason, but for the human heart and an understanding connected with the heart.

It is quite different when spiritual science tells us, for example, When you see the sunrise or hear one or another piece of music, it must feel to you as though the Elohim were sending their punishing wrath into the world. Then we become aware of the mysterious living weaving of the Elohim behind the glow of dawn. To know the name of the Elohim and to be able to give them a place in the ninefold diagram we have drawn in our notebook, is not knowing anything about the Elohim. But out of the living feeling we can have in looking at the sunrise will come a perception of movement and life in rich abundance, just as we know that when we look at a human being, any amount of conceptual knowledge about him will not tell us the whole of his nature, nor fathom the universal life within him. Likewise, we shall become aware that the dawn is revealing something to us of the unfathomable life of the cosmos.

Spiritual-scientific knowledge makes life more enigmatic and mysterious in a way that kindles richer feelings within us. And it is a fundamental feeling of this kind our souls can acquire, when we bring spiritual science to life within us and when we try to make ourselves at home in the kind of ideas I have just indicated. Then we shall never be tempted to complain that spiritual science only appeals to our heads and does not take hold of our whole being. We just need to be patient until the message of spiritual science becomes a living being within us and forms itself anew, filling us not only with its light but also with its warmth. Then it will take hold of our hearts and our whole being and we shall feel the richer for it, whereas, if we take up spiritual science in the same way as ordinary science, we are bound to feel the poorer.

Yet, on the other hand, it is quite natural that, to begin with, anthroposophy seems to many people to lead to an impoverishment, because they have not yet been able to find the inner life of the message of anthroposophy that can reach their heart, and because anthroposophy does not yet have the same effect on them as, for instance, the warm words of a fellow human being speaking to us. But we have to learn that anthroposophy can become alive that it can give us as much support and encouragement as we can otherwise only receive from another human being.

Our hearts find this so difficult at the present time because we have lost the habit of uniting ourselves with the life of things. It is difficult enough if one tries in small doses to re-introduce this living with things. This was attempted in our four Mystery Plays. You have only to think of the scene in spirit land, in the fifth act of The Soul's Awakening, where Felix Balde is sitting on the left side of the stage—seen from the audience—after he has ascended to Devachan, and a spiritual being on the other side of the stage speaks to him of his experience of weight. Here one should feel the weight that is descending in the distance. When people see something descending, they are accustomed nowadays only to be aware of the descending and only to see the thing higher up to start with, and then coming lower and lower down. They are quite unaccustomed to creeping into things and feeling the experience of weight, feeling the thing pressing down all the time. With an expression like that I am hoping to lift people out of their egoistic bodies right in the middle of the play, and to plunge them into the life of things outside themselves.

If this cannot happen, then real artistic feeling will not be able to arise again. In order that, for instance, a true feeling for architecture can come again, the concepts we receive from spiritual science must come alive. To begin with it makes very little difference which particular anthroposophical concepts we carry round with us. But if we really do something like this we shall see how much richer our soul life becomes. We shall gain a lot if, for instance, as well as just seeing this diagram we try and submerge ourselves in it and try to feel what is going on: weight pressing down here, and weight being supported there.

We want to go even further and not just look at it, but feel that the beam needs to have a certain strength, otherwise the load will crush it, and the supporting pillars must also have a certain strength, otherwise they too will be crushed. We must feel the way the sphere on top is pressing down, the pillars supporting and the beam keeping the balance. Not until we creep into the elements of weight, support and balance, between the pressing down and the supporting, shall we feel our way into the element of architecture.

But if we follow a structure of this kind not only with our eye but, as it were, crawl into it and experience the weighing down, the supporting and the balance, then we shall feel that our whole organism is becoming involved, and as if we have to call on an invisible brain belonging to our whole being and not just our head. Then we can awaken to the consciousness, ‘Ah! now we are beginning to feel!’ To take our simple example, we shall feel a supporting element, an upward striving, supporting luciferic element; a weighing and pressing down ahrimanic element, and a balance between the luciferic and ahrimanic which is a divine quality. Thus, even lifeless nature becomes filled with Lucifer and Ahriman and their superior ruler, who eternally brings about the balance between them.

If we thus learn to experience the luciferic, ahrimanic and divine elements in architecture, so that architecture affects us inwardly, we shall become conscious of a richer feeling of the world which leads or, one could almost say, pulls the soul into the things of the world; for our soul is now not only within our body's skin but belongs to the cosmos. This is a way of becoming conscious of this. We shall become aware, too, that whereas outside, the architectural element is supporting, weighing down and creating a balance, we ourselves in this encounter with the architectural element, develop a musical mood. Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.

This is where, from our epoch onwards, living progress in the arts will lie, through learning to experience the reconciliation of the arts. This was dimly felt by Wagner, but it can only really come about when the world comes alive with spiritual science.

Reconciling the arts: that is what we attempted to do—for the first time, and in a small, elementary way—in our Goetheanum building. We did not want only to talk in a cold, abstract way about it, but show in the architecture of the building itself an impression, a copy of this reconciling of a musical mood with architectural form. If you study what is presented in our series of pillars and everything connected with them, you will discover that we were making the attempt to bring the elements of support, weighing down and the balance into living movement. Our pillars are not merely supports, and our capitals no longer mere supporting devices, and the architraves that extend above the pillars do not just have the character of rest, serving only to round the pillars off at the top, but they have a character of living growth and movement.

We attempted to bring architectural forms into musical flux, and the feeling one can have from seeing the interplay between the pillars and all that is connected with them, can of itself arouse a musical mood in the soul. It will be possible to feel invisible music as the soul of the columns and the architectural and sculptural forms that belong to them. It is as though a soul element were in them. And the interpenetration of the fine arts and their forms by musical moods has fundamentally to be the ideal of the art of the future. Music of the future will be more sculptural than music of the past. Architecture and sculpture of the future will be more musical than they were in the past. That will be the essential thing. Yet this will not stop music from being an independent art; on the contrary, it will become richer and richer through penetrating the secrets of the tones, as we said yesterday, creating musical forms from out of the spiritual foundations of the cosmos.

However, as everything that is inside must also be outside, in art—all that lives in it must be embodied in a kind of organism—the world of soul within the series of pillars and everything belonging to them must also become embodied. This happens, or at least is about to happen in the painting of the domes. Just as the pillars and everything belonging to them are, as it were, the body of our building, so is all that is going to appear in the domes—when you are inside the building—its soul; and just as the world appears to be filled with spirit, when our organs are directed outwards, our windows executed in the new art of glass shading shall represent the spirit. Body, soul and spirit shall be expressed in our building. Body in the column structure, soul in everything to do with the domes, and spirit in what is in the windows.

Where these things are concerned karma has brought various things about for which we can be grateful, for just in the case of the Goetheanum building, karma has indeed helped us in several matters. The soul of a human being is so constituted that from outside we perceive it in his physiognomy, but we have to have resources like love and friendship to penetrate into a person's soul, if we want to get to know it from inside, as it were.

When I was travelling from Christiania to Bergen on my last lecture tour in Norway, I happened to see a slate quarry which gave me the idea of trying to get slate from there. We were successful, and it really was what one might call a karmic happening, for when we look at the roof of the domes that are now tiled with this slate with its quite unique qualities, we are sure to say that it has something of the quality of the life of the soul, that at one and the same time both discloses and conceals what is within. Now if we really want to feel the domes as soul life we shall have to develop a love for spiritual science. For what is going to be painted inside the domes should really appear to us as a kind of reflected image in colour and form, of what spiritual science can mean to us. To see this we have to go inside. But when the building is really finished, no one will be able to understand what he sees when he goes inside if he has not developed a love for spiritual science; otherwise what he sees there will probably remain something that can cause a bit of a sensation, but will not be anything that particularly appeals to his heart. What he gets from it will easily tempt him to deny that the architecture has anything to offer the feelings.

Just as we have seen in this instance that what comes to life out of anthroposophy can be rediscovered in the world, life can also be fructified through anthroposophy, in realms in which we can more readily see that our heart's understanding needs to be warmed and fructified. For it is not only artistic and scientific areas that are to be fructified by spiritual science, but the whole of life has to be.

Let me take as an example a realm in which we can see particularly well how anthroposophical concepts can come alive in outer life. I will choose the realm of education, any kind of art of education. Let us begin from the fact that children are educated by grown-ups. What does the materialistic age envisage when it speaks of a child being educated by a grown-up? Fundamentally speaking, the materialistic age sees in both of them, both the grown-up and the child, only what you get from a materialistic outlook, namely, a grown-up teaching a child. But it is not like that. Externally the grown-up is only maya, and seen from outside the child is only maya too. There is something in the grown-up not directly contained in maya, namely the invisible man, who passes from one incarnation to another, and there is also an invisible part in the child that goes from incarnation to incarnation.

We shall speak about these things again. But I would like to tell you a few things today from which you will see in the course of time—if you meditate on them—what else there is in spiritual science. I will start with the fact that a person, as he appears in the external world, cannot teach at all, nor can the person who stands before us, externally, as a child, be educated. In reality something invisible in the teacher educates something invisible in the pupil. We shall only understand this properly if we focus our attention on what is gradually unfolding in the growing child, as the outcome of previous incarnations. And when everything coming from previous incarnations has made its appearance, the child withdraws, especially in present times. What we are actually educating is the invisible result of previous incarnations. We cannot educate or have any effect on the visible child. That is how the matter stands with regard to the child.

Now we will look at the teacher. During the first seven years of the child's life he can only educate by means of what the child can imitate; in the second seven years it will be through the influence he has as an authority; and finally in the following seven years it will be through the educational effect of independent judgment. Everything that is active in the teacher all this time is not in his external physical part at all. The part of us which do the educating will not take on physical form until our next incarnation. For all the qualities in us which can be imitated, or the qualities upon which our authority is based, are germinal qualities and will form our next incarnation. When we are teachers our own next incarnation converses with the previous incarnation of the pupil. It is an illusion to think that as present people we speak to the child of the present. We only have the right feeling for this if we say to ourselves, ‘The very best in you which your spirit can think and your soul can feel, and which is preparing itself to make something of you in the next incarnation, can work on the part of the child that is sculpturing its form out of times long past.’ The musical element in us is what enables us to educate. What we should educate in the child is the element of sculpture.

Take as a whole all that I have said in these lectures about the musical element and of how, in its most exalted form, it corresponds to what man meets with in initiation. Music is related to everything that is in a process of development and lies in the future, and the realm of sculpture and architecture is related to what lies in the past. A child is the most wonderful example of sculpture we can see. What we need as teachers is a musical mood, which we can have in the form of a mood pervaded by the future. If you can have this feeling when you are involved in teaching it will add a very special tone to the relationship of the teacher to the child. For it will make the teacher set himself the highest aims, whilst having the greatest measure of understanding for the children's naughtiness. There really is an educational force in this mood.

Once the world comes to see that the right atmosphere for teaching arises when a musical mood in the teacher is combined with seeing the sculptural activity in the pupil; once it is established that this is what is required for a love of teaching, then education will be filled with the right impetus. For then the teacher will speak, think and feel in such a way that in the course of his lessons, what comes from the past will learn to love what reaches out to the future. The result will be a wonderful karmic adjustment between the teacher and his pupils. A wonderful karmic balancing.

If the teacher is egoistic and only tries to make the child an imitation of himself, then the teaching is purely luciferic. Education becomes luciferic when we try as far as possible to turn the pupil into a copy of our own opinions and feelings, and are only happy if we tell the pupil something today and he repeats it word for word tomorrow. That is a purely luciferic education. On the other hand an ahrimanic education comes about if the pupil is as naughty as possible in our lessons and learns from us as little as he possibly can. However, there is a state of balance between these two extremes, just as there is between weighing down and supporting. This is arrived at through the interplay of the musical-sculptural elements I have just been speaking about. We must learn to distinguish between the teacher's intentions and what the child turns out to be. If we have the right mood, then even though we have been trying to teach our pupil something quite specific, we shall be overjoyed to realise that he has not turned out as we intended, but that the child has developed into something quite different from what we intended him to be. This is the remarkable thing, that the teacher can only rid himself of his egoism in teaching, if he overcomes the desire to turn the child into a copy of his own views on what is good and right, and especially of his own favourite thoughts. The best thing we can achieve, as teachers, is to be able to face perfectly calmly the thought of the child becoming as different from us as possible.

But you cannot come along and say, ‘Please give me a recipe for it, write a few rules down for me on how to teach like that.’ That is the remarkable thing about the spiritual world outlook, that you cannot work according to rules, but you really have to absorb spiritual science, so that you are filled with it and your impulses of feeling and will are increased. Then the right thing will happen, whatever particular task you face in life. The essential thing is to tackle it in a living way.

Now you could ask, ‘Which is the right teaching method from the point of view of spiritual science?’ And the correct answer would be, ‘The best spiritual-scientific method of teaching is for as many teachers as possible to engross themselves in spiritual science in a living way, and to acquire the feelings that come from spiritual science’. This is less convenient, of course, than reading a textbook on the art of spiritual-scientific education. Yet spiritual science is forever being asked, ‘What is the spiritual-scientific point of view on this or that?’ Now spiritual science does not have a point of view, or, if you like, it has as many points of view as life itself. But spiritual science itself must become life. Spiritual science must be absorbed and brought to life within us, then it will be able to bear fruit in the various realms of life. People will then get beyond whatever it is that makes life so dry and dead: we could call it the request for uniformity. External science requires uniformity, but spiritual science gives manifoldness and variety, the kind of variety that belongs to life itself. Thus, spiritual science will have to bring transformation into the furthest reaches of life.

Let us look at what some realms of life are like today. Learning takes place up to a particular age; you learn one thing up to one age and something else up to another. Then comes the time when you go out into life, as we say, and do not want to learn any more; even when you go in for a scientific career you do not like having to learn any more. The ones who do go on learning in order to keep up with their science are thought to be the odd ones. In the general run people learn until a certain age and after that they play cards or other useless things in their spare time, or they develop an attitude like this one I came across. I had been invited to give a series of lectures on the history of literature in a circle that included some ladies with a thirst for knowledge. Now it could be said that the softer, or if you prefer it, ‘retarded’ brain that ladies have has retained more the receptivity and flexibility of ancient times, when learning continued throughout life. This is more often found among women than men. But these ladies had the feeling that they ought to bring the gentlemen along too, to the lecture cycle. So the gentlemen were there, and they did not all go to sleep. Some of them really listened. Then there was conversation, tea and cakes, in other words they did what is considered to be essential in some circles, if the lectures are not to be too dry. So there was conversation too. And after I had been lecturing on Goethe's Faust, some of the men summed up their attitude by saying, ‘When you see Faust on the stage it is not really the kind of art you can enjoy, it isn't even recreation, it is science.’ This was their way of saying that when a person has been working in an office all day, or has been serving customers, or standing in a court of law interrogating witnesses and sentencing the accused, by the evening he is in no state to listen to Goethe's Faust any more and needs recreation and not science.

This is an example of a common attitude with which no doubt you are familiar. You only need to mention it, for everyone knows how widespread it is, and that a lot of people would find it strange the way we gather here in such a studious fashion and want to go on learning, despite the fact that several of us are fairly old. They think they know a much better way of spending time. Yet a complete change will have to take place in people's approach to spiritual science, in that they will not just want to let it remain a study, but will want to have a living and permanent relationship with it. This will come. You cannot learn anthroposophy the same way as you learn science, by taking it down in a notebook; anthroposophy must stay alive. It becomes dead if we only learn its content and do not remain connected with it through living activity. It becomes dead and withers away, whereas it should be kept alive. Spiritual science must work in this way to enliven us and keep our hearts receptive for all they can receive from the spiritual worlds, so that we develop further all the time.

There is no doubt that in our epoch humanity shows a quality of old age; on the whole it does not have the kind of youthfulness it had in mythical times. Spiritual science must be people's draught of youth, so that they will feel able to learn from life throughout their lives. Nowadays we can experience odd things in this connection. I know a man with an active mind, a person who has had all kinds of connections with modern intellectual culture all through his life. Now he celebrated his fiftieth birthday recently, and gave a leaflet out on this occasion containing some very peculiar notions. For instance he said—but I want to alter things a little bit, so that you will not guess who it is—he said, ‘I have been offered a post in the realm of art that I had been longing for, for many years. But now that I have reached the age of fifty, old age in fact, I do not really want it any more. For to fill a post of that kind and to inspire the people around you, you need to be young, you need to be full of fantastic illusions. And these illusions have to consist of thinking that what you are doing and the people you have to deal with are the whole world and nothing else matters. What really counts is what is right there. Fifteen years ago I was of an age when I could have done it. Now I am past it. You should not wait until people have grown old before you offer them influential positions, but let them be privy councillors, for instance, when they are between thirty and forty.’ This was the gist of what this ‘old’ man said.

This mood is absolutely in line with the whole quality of our contemporary culture. It is a mood very easily acquired by people who accept what materialistic culture has to say about the human being, for materialism has not the power to penetrate the whole being of man; the content of this materialistic knowledge is not powerful enough to have the kind of influence on his soul life that will last right into old age. Spiritual science proves that even if a person grows old externally he can stay young in soul, and if he has not done anything special by the age of fifty, although he does not need to succumb to the illusion that what he is doing is of prime importance and everything else can fall by the wayside, he can still be young enough to devote all his strength to what he has to do. He can be youthful, in fact childlike enough to concentrate the whole of his forces on what has to be done, just as a child concentrates all his forces in play. Spiritual science must become a magic draught of youth and not just a theory. That is also an impulse of transformation. Tomorrow I will talk about other impulses of transformation.

If you recall the talks we had in connection with the evolution of the Earth through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, you will know that at each of these evolutionary stages, one particular kind of being from among what we would now call the higher hierarchies, attained their human level, as it were. We know that during the ancient Saturn period the Spirits of Personality, the Primal Beginnings, the Archai reached their human level, during the Sun period the Archangels, during the Moon period the Angels and during the Earth period, mankind.

You will also have seen from our talks on evolution, that each level of beings that reaches a certain stage of development, received preparation in advance. We know that the human being was being prepared throughout the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, and that what we nowadays call man's completed physical body has been evolving since the Saturn period, the etheric body since the Sun period, the astral body since the Moon period, and that the ego was only added to these during the Earth period; that is, all the beings that are at a certain level are prepared as a whole.

Now you may be anxious to know whether, in our present period of evolution, beings are being prepared to attain their human level in the Jupiter period. Another thing you know is that during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods—you can look it up in my book Occult Science—the spirits of the higher hierarchies took part in the preparation of humanity. There is a description of how the Angels, Archangels and Archai were involved in the development of human beings, and therefore an obvious question is whether human beings, during their Earth existence, are possibly involved in preparing the beings who will reach their human level during the Jupiter period?

This question is certainly a vital one for every feeling person, if his feelings have been inspired by spiritual science, as we have been describing. For it could be the case that human behaviour in general during the course of Earth evolution could either help, or omit to help, the beings who might attain their human level on Jupiter. We might say, ‘What could be worse than behaving in such a way during Earth evolution as to make it impossible for proper Jupiter beings to arise through our deeds?’ We must of course take it for granted, if we want to talk about these things, that there is a certain goodwill, for these are truly important secrets of initiation, the kind of initiation secrets that modern science detests as a matter of course. One certainly has to prepare one's feeling to be able to look at the attitude modern science is bound to have to the real truths of life.

In the previous lectures I have already tried to say a little about the way modern science necessarily relates to life. It cannot make direct contact with the secrets of life. It cannot even want to; it must not even pretend to want to reach these secrets of life. It is surely a good thing to make hard-boiled eggs for the people who like eating eggs when they are hard-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs are useful for those who like them. But if someone wanted to go and say that he takes the eggs away from the hens to hard-boil them, and then lets them hatch them after that, he would be doing something absurd. A person does exactly the same thing as far as the cosmos is concerned, if he sets out to solve the secrets of the cosmos and wants to use modern science for it; this is the same attitude as wanting to hatch hard-boiled eggs that have nothing left in them to be hatched out.

I will show you by means of a comparison just how misleading this science is that is bound up with the whole way of modern thinking, particularly when it approaches the real riddles of life. If somebody wants to hold forth about whether science is helpful or harmful he will usually start off by asking, ‘Is science right about this or that?’ And if he can prove that it is right in one or another instance, he will swear by it as a matter of course.

But this is just what we have to get away from, this attaching so much importance to the question of whether what science says is right or not. We must reach the point of seeing that this is not the main thing when it comes to the solving of riddles of life. If someone sees a horse-drawn cart with a man in it, he will be quite right in saying that the horses are pulling this person in the cart, and drawing him along behind them. This is correct, of course. And anyone who wanted to say that the horses were not drawing the cart and the man sitting in it, would obviously be wrong. But it is also true that the man sitting in the cart, through the way he guides the horses, is controlling the direction in which they should pull him; and that is surely the more important aspect from the point of view of the destination. Modern science can be compared to the statement of the person who denies that the man in the cart is guiding the horses, and insists that the horses are drawing the man in the cart.

If you think the comparison through in detail, you will get the right idea about the relation of modern science to modern research into truth. I have to say these things over and over again, because a person who bases himself on our world outlook, must come more and more into the position where he can defend and protect our spiritual-scientific outlook against the attacks of the modern world outlook. But you will be able to do this only if you enlighten yourself as to the relation of modern external science to a genuine research into truth. You must always approach spiritual-scientific questions with a certain attitude and a certain kind of feeling, otherwise you will not make the proper connection with them.

Now our question concerning the beings who will reach the human level on Jupiter is connected in very truth with the deepest questions of man's Earth evolution. There is something in our Earth evolution that has always been a philosophical problem, namely the relation between man's moral behaviour and his natural existence. As an earthly being, man has to decide to what extent he is the kind of being who is ruled by his instincts, has to obey and satisfy them, and is at the mercy of his instincts and their satisfaction, because the laws of nature simply insist on their being satisfied. That is one side of human nature. In this respect we say, ‘We do these things because we have to. We have to eat and we have to sleep.’ But there is another realm of human conduct on this earth, a realm in which we cannot say ‘must’, for it would lose its whole significance if we were to say ‘must’ here. This is the wide realm of ‘shall’, a realm where we feel that we have to follow a purely spiritual impulse as distinct from instinct and everything arising out of ourselves on a natural level. ‘You shall’ never speaks to us from out of our instincts but directs us in a purely spiritual way. ‘You shall’ comprises the realm of our moral obligations.

There are some philosophers who cannot find any connection between what is implied by the ‘you shall’ and ‘you must’. And our present age that is almost bogged down in materialism, especially where moral life is concerned, and will get more and more bogged down, would like to turn all the ‘you shalls’ into ‘you musts’. We are heading for times where, in this respect, the turning of ‘you shall’ into ‘you must’ will be blazoned forth with a certain amount of pride, and actually called psychology. Terrible aspects present themselves if we look at what has begun to develop in the field of criminal psychology. It is already evident that the human being is being conceived of in such a way that people do not ask whether he has overstepped a ‘you shall’, but try to prove that he was driven to one or another destructive act out of the necessity of his nature. Strange experiments are on the increase to define crime merely as a particular case of illness. All these things arise out of a certain materialistic lack of clarity in our times, regarding the relation of ‘you shall’ to ‘you must’.

What does this ‘you shall’, or in other words the categorical imperative, actually signify within the whole framework of human existence? Whoever obeys the ‘you shall’ is known to carry out a moral action. Whoever does not obey the ‘you shall’ commits an immoral action. This is of course a trivial truth. But now let us attempt to look at ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’, not only with regard to the external maya of the physical plane, but with regard to the truth and what is actually behind physical maya. Here the moral element corresponding to the ‘you shall’ appears to initiation science as something that hits you in the eye, spiritually, to put it rather crudely. If you look at a person—these truths which the materialistic outlook detests have to be told sometime—if you look at someone in certain temperature and weather conditions—you see this even better in horses, but we are not speaking about horses now—you will see him breathing out, and the breath becoming visible as vapour in the air. Obviously as far as materialistic science is concerned, this breath a person exhales, disperses and dissolves and has no further significance. But it has significance for a person who follows up the phenomena of life with initiation science, for he sees in the patterns of the breath the exact traces of the moral or immoral conduct of the person. A person's moral or immoral behaviour can be seen in the steamy breath, and the breath of a person who is morally inclined is quite different from the breath of a person who is inclined to immorality. You know, with regard to various things in the human being, the more delicate qualities can only be seen in the more delicate parts of the etheric and astral aura. But man's moral and immoral nature in the ordinary sense of the word is actually visible in the etheric-astral content of the steamy breath. The physical part of it dissolves. But what is incorporated in it does not dissolve; for it contains a genie, which, in the case of steamy breath, has a physical, an etheric and an astral part, only the physical is not earthly, just watery. Something that has an extremely differentiated form can be seen in this breath.

Deeds which arise out of love show something quite different from deeds which are done out of enthusiasm, a creative urge or the urge for perfection, for instance. But in every case the form in the breath reminds one of beings that do not exist on earth at all as yet. These beings are a preparation for the ones that will reach their human stage on Jupiter. Their forms are very changeable and will pass through further changes in the future, for these beings are the first advance shadow images of the beings who will reach the human level on Jupiter.

In a certain way we also owe our existence to the exhalation of the Angeloi on the Moon, and it is one of the moving experiences of spiritual life to know that Jupiter human beings of the future will evolve out of what we breathe out in present ages. If we turn to the Bible with such knowledge in mind, and read the opening words, we can tell ourselves, ‘Now we begin to understand what is meant when it says that the Elohim formed earthly man by breathing into him.’

I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and nose, if I had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become human on Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the ‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral actions.

Thus we see that through our earthly morality we take a creative part in the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we can see that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for moral action by telling us that we are working against the creation of Jupiter human beings, if we do not act in a moral way on earth. This gives morality a very real value and makes its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is very strongly formed by what we acquire through spiritual science, especially as we become acquainted with real secrets regarding the cosmos.

I have already made references to similar things and mentioned at various times that language also symbolises man's own future creativity. I do not wish to dwell on this today though, but just wanted to show you, to begin with, what significance moral behaviour has in the whole of the cosmos.

You could now ask, ‘What about immoral behaviour?’ Immoral behaviour also comes to expression in the formation of the breath. But immoral behaviour imprints a demonic form on it. Demons are born through man's immoral conduct. Let us look at the difference between the demons that arise through immoral behaviour and the spiritual beings—spiritual in so far as they only have a watery existence on earth—the spiritual forms that are created by moral actions.

These beings that incarnate as far as a transitory watery existence and arise from moral conduct, are the kind of beings that have an astral, an etheric and finally a physical body condensed to the level of wateriness, just as, in the Moon period, we had an etheric, an astral and a physical body, and this physical body was also only condensed to a wateriness. We were more or less like that, even if not exactly the same. And this creature, with a physical body, etheric body and astral body that arises out of moral actions, is predestined to receive an ego, just as in the Moon period our physical, etheric and astral body were predestined to receive an ego. They have the basis for receiving an ego, and beings of this kind are qualified to undergo a regular progressive evolution in the cosmos. The other beings, the demons created out of immoral actions, also have an astral body, an etheric body and a physical body, at the watery stage, of course, but they do not have the basis for developing an ego. They are born without heads, as it were. Instead of taking up the basis for progressing along a regular evolutionary path to the Jupiter existence, they reject this basis. By doing so they fall victim to the fate of dropping out of evolution. But this only increases the hordes of luciferic beings, for they come under their power. As they cannot progress in a regular way they have to become parasites. This is what happens to all the beings that reject their normal path; they have to attach themselves to others in order to move on. These beings that arise through immoral actions have the particular inclination to be parasites in human evolution on earth under Lucifer's leadership, and to seize hold of the evolution of the human being before he makes his physical entry into the world. They attack man during the embryonic period and share his existence between conception and birth. Some of these beings, if they are strong enough, can continue to accompany the human being after birth, as seen in the phenomena of children who are possessed.

What is brought about by the criminal demon parasites attached to unborn children is the cause of the deterioration of the generation succession, which are not as they would be if these demons did not exist. There are various reasons for the decline of families, tribes, peoples and nations, but one of them is the existence of these criminal demon parasites during man's embryonic period.

These things play a great part in Earth evolution as a whole, and they bring us into contact with deep secrets of human existence. This is often the cause of people acquiring certain prejudices and points of view before they are born into earth existence. And people are tormented by doubts and uncertainties in life and all kinds of other things, because of these demonic parasites.

There is not much more these beings can do with the human being once his ego has entered and made itself felt, but they prey on him all the more before he is born or during his earliest years. Thus we see that evil actions have a significant effect in the cosmos, too, and work creatively, but their creativity works in the direction of the ancient Moon existence. For what man passes through in the embryonic period when these demonic beings can prey on him, is basically the heritage of the old Moon period, which makes its appearance in subconscious, instinctive behaviour. Something that even physical science preserves an instinct for is that, in older and better times, man's embryonic period was not calculated according to ordinary months but lunar months, therefore it speaks of ten lunar months, and knows certain other things, too, concerning the connection of embryonic development with the phases of the moon.

So we see that our Earth evolution contains two tendencies: good deeds that contain the impulse to work creatively on Earth in preparation for Jupiter, so that man's successor on the human level can come into being. But evil deeds have also brought into our evolution the tendency to drag the Earth back again to the ancient Moon period and make it dependent on everything to do with the subconscious. If you think about it, you will find a great number of things that are connected with these subconscious impulses; in fact, there are far more of these subconscious impulses in materialistic humanity of modern times, than there were in bygone ages when people were less materialistic.

I believe that the kind of things I have been telling you about again today will make you feel what a deep impression spiritual science can make on your outlook on life, and that it really and truly will not only give you theoretical knowledge but will be capable of giving human life a new direction. A time will come when life will become quite chaotic if people do not use the chance of giving it a new direction out of spiritual-scientific knowledge. Man must get beyond a knowledge that is restricted to the physical body. Our materialistic age does not want knowledge of any other sort than the kind that is restricted to the physical body. But man has to lift his knowledge out of the physical body. And what we know today as the first exercises in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds will gradually—though ‘gradually’ will be quite a long time—they will gradually turn into something he does naturally, something he will feel to be second nature. Particularly what we call thought concentration will come naturally to people.

People will more and more feel the need really to concentrate their thoughts, to focus their whole soul activity on sharply defined thoughts which they place in front of their consciousness. Whilst they would otherwise let their senses roam from one thing or fact to another, they will more and more often direct their thought life to certain things of their own choosing; even if only for a short time, they will concentrate on a definite thought, so as to focus their soul activity on this thought. They will then discover something that a lot of you know very well. Everyone makes a certain discovery in the course of concentrating. If we place a thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all our soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing stronger and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there comes a point where it does not get stronger any more but gets weaker and fades away. This is an experience lots of you will have had. The thought has to fade away, it has, as it were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have to begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument of the physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking we do by means of the instrument of the physical body until the moment the thought dies, then we slip out of the physical body.

We would go into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something else to maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out of our physical body. What we have to do to maintain our consciousness when we are outside, is what we call leading a calm and composed life and accepting the things of the world calmly. We can do even more than accept things calmly. We can take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the concept of karma. What do I mean?

A person is not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of karma really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts him, or anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets furious, but at any rate he has antipathy for it. We encounter what we call our destiny with sympathy or antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as it is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us, destiny is something that meets us from outside.

If we take the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our ego in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what happens to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents. When someone offends us it is certainly difficult to believe we are hidden behind the offender. For it may be necessary in physical life to punish the offence. But we must always keep a corner within us where we admit to ourselves, ‘Even when someone offends you it is you offending yourself, when someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when unpleasant blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing yourself these blows.’ We forget that we are not only within our skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are within all the so-called chance happenings of our destiny.

It is very difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own ego brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own ego we bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses for this in the life between death and a new birth according to our earlier incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves our destiny. We have to unite with our destiny and, instead of warding off hard blows of destiny with antipathy, tell ourselves more and more often, ‘Through having this blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more vigorous and robust.’ It is more difficult to form a union with your destiny in this way than to resist it, but what we lose when our thought passes away can only be regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the thought fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us out of ourselves if we have taken hold of our destiny, our karma, in the true sense. We thus awaken ourselves again. The thought dies, but we carry forth the identification we have grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it carries us about the world.

This composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere acceptance of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are outside our body. Obviously this does not need to alter our life on the physical plane. We cannot always do that. But the attitude we have to acquire in a corner of our soul must be there, for the moments when we really want to be able to live consciously outside our body.

Two maxims can be our guiding principles and can mean a very great deal to us. The first of these to impress upon our minds is:

Strive for the dying away of the thought in the universe.

For the thought becomes a living force outside, only when it dies away in the universe. Yet we cannot unite ourselves with this living force unless we work at the content of the second maxim:

Strive for the resurrection of destiny in the ‘I’.

If you achieve this, you unite what has been reborn in the thought with the resurrected ego outside you.

There is a great deal in human nature, though, which makes it difficult to progress in the spirit of these maxims. It is particularly hard to look at the relationship between inner and outer in the right way. The more ethics we can learn from spiritual science in this connection, the better. And we can learn ethics from it in so far as certain ethical concepts acquire life and blood for the first time through what spiritual science can bring to them.

For instance, there are people who are perpetually complaining about other people and the awful things they do to them. They go as far as to say that other people persecute them. Everything of this kind is always connected with the other pole of human nature, you only have to observe life in the right way, which means according to spiritual science as properly understood. Of course there is good reason to complain about unkindness, but in spite of this you will always find, if you go through life with vision that has been made somewhat clairvoyant by spiritual science, that most of these complaints come from egoists, and that the suspicion that everyone wants to be nasty to them arises most often in egoistic natures, whereas a loving disposition will not readily suspect persecution, nor that people are trying to harm them in all kinds of ways, and so on.

When it is put into words like this it is easy to agree with it in theory. I am actually convinced that most people will admit to it theoretically, if they stop to think about it. But to live accordingly is what matters.

Now you may ask, ‘How do we live accordingly?’ And again the answer must be, ‘You must actually live with the spiritual science you are striving for, live with it as much as you can.’ That is the point. That is why spiritual science is not given in compendiums or short sketches, but we are trying to make spiritual science a force of life in which we can live, and from which we can constantly draw stimulating impulses.

This was the main reason that led us to make the Goetheanum building a kind of focal point for this living anthroposophical striving, for as I mentioned yesterday, the Goetheanum building, in its form, and in the whole way it has been built, has a bodily, a soul and a spiritual nature in a spiritual-scientific sense. It is itself a token of the fact that we are striving according to impulses from the spiritual world to bring into human evolution what it so badly needs, if the immediate future is to go the way it should. The very fact that you can perceive the being of spiritual science in the forms of the Goetheanum building makes it a sort of centre, a focal point around which the kind of anthroposophical striving can crystallise, that has to become an essential part of the evolution of humanity.

We probably often say that we live in troubled times and that many things exist today which stand out in stark contrast to spiritual science. Yet our karma has allowed us to come so far as to overcome, as it were, the material basis out of which our Goetheanum is built, so that it can be a token of spiritual science even in its external form.

Each one of us can acknowledge this to himself, as I often do, especially in the difficult times we are going through in face of the strong attacks being made on anthroposophy at present. Some people can question how much personal progress we have made on our part towards what ought to be crystallising around the Goetheanum. Even if one or another individual cannot be physically present any more in the work being done on the physical plane, the fact that the building is there, and that our karma has brought it to us, is an important step forward. And if we bear in mind that people with as deep an understanding of spiritual science as Christian Morgenstern, for example, remain united, even after physical death, with what the Goetheanum is intended to be, then our building can also be a token in our time of the kind of activity within our spiritual movement that is not concerned with boundaries between what is usually called life and death.

We can really feel united with this building, and therefore it can stimulate us to think the kind of serious thoughts which it is quite natural for us to think at a time like ours, when materialism is at its peak. Even if this building finds one or another individual co-operating only as a spiritual being, the building will be important for the continuation of our movement. This, you will understand, is said only to show you that our movement has a seriousness that goes beyond life and death.

We have encountered this seriousness to a special degree this week. And if one thing happens, why should not other things be able to happen soon, too? It is extraordinarily difficult to achieve what I have spoken about and mentioned again this time. I have stressed that I give the strictest attention to choosing and finding exactly the right words for which I can be fully answerable to the spiritual worlds. So it is to be desired that these words shall be heard and received in the same spirit.

Times will certainly come when people will be able to be more light-hearted with regard to the anthroposophical movement. But now, right at the beginning, we must get used to taking things very, very seriously. A while ago I talked here about occult research, among other things, because I thought it would be of use to some of you. I was mainly describing facts. I thought these would be of help to one or another of you in understanding our present difficult times. But that which I presented with this intention has not been treated with sufficient caution—there are one or two exceptions, of course, but I am right in saying that not everyone has treated it with the necessary discretion and regard, and it has transpired that it was repeated here and there in a form that conveyed exactly the opposite of what I said here.

If I just think of what has been made out of something that cannot have been misunderstood because it is already in print, regarding the classification of the peoples of Europe according to sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul and the ego, which was truly not meant to express a superiority; if I think of the statements that have gone out into the world and the opposition and bad feeling they have aroused, it is easy to see that the principle of taking things quite exactly, even in such difficult cases, has not been given due consideration. If, for instance, I have ever said that the ego activity which is there among the European peoples ought to be effective in organising the European population, I would have been talking nonsense. Yet this is one of the things that has been made public, and it creates the most fearful misunderstandings and bad feelings.

So I am duty-bound not to say a word about these things in my lectures for the time being. I must desist from any mention of them, and whereas everybody else is free to speak about it, it has become impossible for me to do so because of the way people have misconstrued what I said.

All these things go to show that we should look at ourselves and see if we cannot take the anthroposophical movement absolutely seriously. For sometimes we completely fail to notice how much feeling of responsibility there is for each sentence of the communications of genuine spiritual research, when the matter is taken seriously. To stir up emotions is certainly not what spiritual science is for, nor to oppose or pacify them. And if anyone says these things are communicated in order to oppose somebody, he ought to ask himself whether the right or wrong use has been made of that which has been communicated with the utmost objectivity and reverent love of truth. These are things which add even more pain to my occult experiences, which are already painful enough. Even if I cannot mention certain important things, and a lot has to be omitted which I thought we could investigate soon, there are still some important and substantial matters left for us to discuss during our time together.

I should like to begin today by saying a few words about the boiler house attached to the Goetheanum and the architectural principle underlying it. If you want to study what motivated the architectural forms of this house, you must bear in mind that it is part of the whole Goetheanum building and belongs to it. This fact of it belonging to the building has to come to expression in the artistic conception of the building itself, if this conception is correct. It should not be an abstraction but has to be expressed in the artistic form.

Now let us have a look at the whole question of related artistic forms. We get closest to this if we do what human beings unfortunately do far too seldom, and think of the tremendous artistic creative activity we find exemplified if we are able to look at the spiritual aspect of nature and recognise natural creation as a product of the spirit. I would like to draw your attention to the forms of the bony system because it is easiest to see there. Man's bony system, especially, is less difficult to study than the forms of any other living organisms.

You will know that I have been trying for decades to arouse some understanding in the world for the significant discoveries Goethe made in the field of anatomy and physiology, which I should like to call his second major achievement in this realm. I will not touch on the first one today but only refer to the second. This second significant discovery owes its origin to what one might, in the external materialistic world, call the combination of chance and human genius. Goethe himself relates that one day when he was going for a walk in the Jewish cemetery in Venice he found a sheep's skull that had fallen apart at the seams. Picking it up and looking at the form of the bones the thought occurred to him, ‘When I look at these head bones, what actually are they? They are transformed dorsal vertebrae.'

You know, of course, that the spinal cord that encloses the spine marrow as a nerve cord is composed of rings which fit into one another, rings with a definite shape and processes (procesus vertebralis). And if you imagine one of these rings expanding so that the hole the marrow passes through—for the rings fit into one another—begins to get larger and the bone gets correspondingly thinner and expands like elastic, not only in a horizontal direction but also in other directions, then the form that arises out of this ring form is nothing else but the bone formation which forms our skullcap. Our skullcaps are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

On the basis of spiritual science we can develop this discovery of Goethe's even further and can say today that every bone man has is a transformation, a metamorphosis of a single form. The only reason we do not notice this is because we have very primitive views of what can arise through transformation. If you think of a bone of the upper arm—you know of course what it looks like—a tubular bone like that would not immediately strike you as being similar to a bone in our head. But that is only due to our not having developed the concept of transformation far enough.

The first idea you will have is that the tubular bone has to be puffed up until it is hollow inside, then you ought to arrive at the form of the head bone. But that is not the principle underlying the shapes of the bones. A tubular bone would first have to be turned round, and you would not see the similarity it has to the skullcap until you had turned it inside out like a glove. But when a person turns a glove inside out he expects it to look the same as it did before, doesn't he? This is because the glove is something dead. It is quite different with something living. If the glove were alive, the following would happen when it was turned inside out: changes would occur like the thumb and the little finger getting very long, the middle finger very short, and the palm contracting, and so on. The turning inside out and the varying elasticity of the material would bring all sorts of changes about, in fact, the glove would acquire a totally different form, although it would still be the glove. This is how you must imagine a tubular upper arm bone being turned inside out, and then a skullcap would emerge.

You will realise that the wise powers of the Godhead in the cosmos possessed a greater wisdom than arrogant man has today, to be able to set the forces of transformation in motion that are needed to form a skull.The inner unity in nature comes from the very fact that, fundamentally, even the most dissimilar forms are transformations of one archetypal form. There is nothing in the realm of life that could not arise as a metamorphosis of a primary form. In the course of this metamorphosis something else happens as well. Certain parts of the primary form become larger at the expense of others, and other parts become smaller; also various limbs expand, but not all to the same extent. This produces dissimilarities, although they are all transformations of the same primary form.

Now look at the primary form of our whole Goetheanum building. I can only give you a very sketchy account of what I want to tell you, and only mention one point of view. If you look at the Goetheanum you will see that it has double domes and that the domes rest on a cylindrical sub-structure. The fact that it is a building with double domes is vital, for these double domes are an expression of the living element. If there had only been one dome then in essence our building would have been dead. The living quality of our building is expressed in the fact that the consciousness of the one dome is reflected in the other, as it were, that the two domes mirror one another, just as the part of man that is in the external world is reflected in man's organs. The basic concept of the double dome must be borne in mind in relation to anything organically connected with the Goetheanum, for if it were not to contain the double dome form, however hard it was to recognise, it would not express the essential nature of the concept of the building. Therefore the annexe must also contain the concept of the double dome.

Now look at the double dome and its additional constructions. First of all we have the interpenetration of the two dome motifs, whose importance I have often referred to. They represent a kind of new innovation in architecture and, as you know, were done with the help of Herr Englert. The interpenetration of the two domes is of special importance in the main building because it expresses the inner connection of the two elements which mirror one another. I am giving you this concept of mirroring in an abstract way at the moment. A very great deal is contained in this interpenetration of the two dome motifs; an infinite amount of different aspects. The further stage of the building, the artistic stage, that expresses the image of the concept of spiritual science, can only come into being because we have succeeded in achieving this interpenetration of the double dome motifs. So we have this interpenetration in the main building. If we were to cancel the interpenetration and separate the dome motifs, we move towards the ahrimanic principle. If we bring them closer together or overlap them completely, by building one inside the other, we would approach the luciferic principle.

So the ahrimanic principle has to be taken out of the building. In the annexe the domes have to be pushed apart, for in the case of the annexe, too, the dome concept is vital. And now imagine the domes kept apart. Imagine that on one side, this side motif (south portal of the main building) has shrunk to nothing, so the dotted line has gone, and on the other side it has grown considerably larger (and become the chimney). With the main building in mind, imagine that here (south) you have the separated domes, here is a front structure, and here the whole thing has been pushed in (see a). There the whole thing has been pulled out instead of being pushed in (b) but here (a) it has shrunk to nothing instead of growing. Imagine that on the other side (the front structure of the north portal) it developed considerably, and you have the transformation motif for an annexe of our main building which has developed out of the primary forms. For if you imagine this getting smaller and smaller (the chimney), that coming out again and the whole thing pushed together, then the annexe would be transformed into the main building.

(Dr. Steiner was using a model of the boiler house as he spoke.)

The point is that this metamorphosis of our main building shall be suitable for its purpose. Just as a vertebra arises out of the same primary form as the human skull, and you can think of one changing into the other, you can also think of the main building and the annexe changing from one to the other. The concept of the form can pass from one form to the other, if it metamorphoses and becomes alive.

We really have to become apprentices of the creative hierarchies who created by means of metamorphosis, and learn to do the same thing ourselves.

Now imagine the kind of force necessary to enlarge this insignificant-looking part on this side (north portal of the main building which becomes the chimney). If you have a small rubber bag that you want to enlarge, you have to press it this way and that way from inside so that it gets bigger. A force has to be there that can enlarge things and develop them. So if one of these side wings really has to be puffed up, it would have to be done by a force working from inside, from here (see left diagram).

What kind of forces can they be, in there? You can study these forces in the forms of the architraves. If you imagine the forces in the architraves jumping into the side structure and pushing this up, you get this form (chimney and back wall). You have to try and slip inside these forms of the architraves with your formative artistic thinking and contract and expand them. Imagine, that because you have slipped inside, you enlarge what is small in there. Then this form arises (chimney and back wall). There is no other way of going about creating things that belong together, than by trying to get inside them.

This slipping into things and being inside them is another way of imitating the creative forces in nature, and unless modern industrial civilisation does this, it will not overcome its godforsakenness. It would be impossible to imagine the ordinary kind of chimney as a product of natural creation. It only exists because there is a denial of divine-spiritual forces in nature. There is hardly anything outside in nature that you could compare with an ordinary chimney except possibly the rather hideous-looking asparagus plant. But that is a kind of exception. Whatever grows with the forces of earth can never go straight upwards like a chimney. If you want to study the forces that work in an upward direction, a tree is the best example in which to find what corresponds to the hidden forces in the earth, for a tree does not only develop a trunk in the vertical, but also has to reach out with its branches. The point obviously is not to imitate this directly in the model, but to study those forces which radiate out from the earth and overcome the purely vertical direction of the tree trunk by reaching out breadthways and putting forth branches. This part here does justice to the centrifugal forces in space, in the cosmos, to what I would like to call the branchlike centrifugal forces (on the chimney).

Although I have only been able to show you the roughest principles, I could justify the principles behind this architectural form in minute detail in the case of every single plane, but it would take too long.

Now a form such as this is only complete when it is fulfilling its purpose. If you look at the form now it is not complete. It will only be complete when the heating is actually functioning inside and smoke is coming out; smoke belongs to it, it really belongs, and this has been included in the architectural form. One day when the rising of the smoke is observed clairvoyantly, and the smoke coming out of the chimney, the spiritual part of the rising smoke will also be taken into consideration—for we shall know, when we have really observed it clairvoyantly, that the physical also contains a spiritual element. For just as you have a physical, an etheric and an astral body, the smoke also has at least an etheric part. And this etheric part goes a different way from the physical: the physical part will go upwards, but the etheric part is really caught by these twigs that reach outwards. A time will come when people will see the physical part of the smoke rising while the etheric part wafts away. When this kind of thing is expressed in the form, a principle of all art is gradually being complied with, namely, the presenting of the inner essence in outer form, really making the inner essence the principle according to which the outer form is created.

As I said, I would have to do a lot of talking if I were to go into all the details on which these architectural forms are based, although these might be far more interesting than those we have already discussed. One of these interesting things is that it was possible to express everything that had to be expressed in this modern material, and build with concrete. For it will be possible to go a long way with form-making in this modern material, especially in the designing of buildings in this style that will serve modern ahrimanic civilisation. In fact it is essential to do so. There is no need for me to go into any further details, because I am more concerned with showing you the principle of this building and everything to do with it. This principle can he modified in many respects. For instance the dome can be modified so that it does not look like a dome any more, if it is looked at merely from the geometrical-mathematical point of view and not organically, and so on. But today I wanted to discuss the particular principle of inner metamorphosis and transformation, the life principle within these. I wanted to cite this to show you in what way real artistic creativity, when it has to do with our spiritual-scientific conception, has to differ from any kind of symbolic interpretation, for that is external. It is a matter of getting an inner grasp of what you are being shown here and following the process with your whole soul.

When the building is eventually finished we do not continually want to be asked, ‘What does this mean and that mean?', and have to witness people happily believing that they have discovered the meaning of some of these things. Regarding some of these interpretations, we have come into a strange position along some of the by-paths of theosophy, with respect to quite a number of poetic and literary works. For instance, people have explained plays by saying that one person means manas, another person buddhi and a third person atma, and so on. If you want to, you can of course explain everything like this. But we are not concerned with this kind of interpretation, but with entering into things and joining in the process of creativity that came from the higher hierarchies and fills and forms the whole of our world. There is no need to avoid doing this just because it is more difficult than symbolic or allegorical interpretation. For it leads into the spiritual world and is the very strongest incentive for really acquiring imagination, inspiration and intuition.

A vital part of the present-day impulses for change is that we acquire more and more understanding for the way the human soul rises into the realms that open up to imaginative, inspirational and intuitive observation. For these realms contain the elements that will make our world whole again, and which will lift us up out of mere maya and lead us to true reality.

It has to be stressed again and again that the new spiritual knowledge we are moving towards, cannot consist of repeating the results of earlier clairvoyance. There are certainly a lot of people striving to repeat earlier clairvoyance, but the time for this clairvoyance is over, and it is only atavistic echoes of ancient clairvoyance that can possibly occur in these few individuals. But the levels of human existence to which we must ascend will not open up to a repetition of ancient clairvoyance. Let us have another look at the essential basis of this new clairvoyance. We have often referred to the principle of the thing, and now we want to try and approach it from another angle.

Again we will start with something we all know, namely, that during waking day man lives with his ego and his astral body within his etheric and his physical body. But I have already emphasised during the past few days that, awake as he is between waking up and going to sleep, man is not fully awake, for something in him is still asleep. What we feel as our will is really only partly awake. Our thoughts are awake from when we wake up until we go to sleep, but willing is something we carry out completely in a dream. This is why all the pondering about freedom of will and about freedom altogether has been in vain, because people have failed to notice that what they know about the will during the daytime is actually only the dreaming of their will impulses. If you have an impulse of will and make a mental image of it you are certainly awake. But in waking life man only dreams with regard to how the will arises and goes over into action.

If you pick up a piece of chalk and make a mental image of picking it up, that is of course something you can have a mental image of. But with only your day consciousness and without clairvoyance you know no more about how the ego and astral body stream into your hand and how the will spreads out, than you know about a dream whilst you are dreaming. We can only dream about the actual will with ordinary waking consciousness, and where most things are concerned we do not even dream, we just sleep. You can clearly visualise putting a mouthful of food on your fork, and to a certain extent you can visualise chewing it, but you do not even dream about swallowing it. You are usually quite unconscious of it, as you are unconscious of your thoughts while you are asleep. So during waking life a major part of our will activity is carried out in waking day sleep.

If we did not sleep with regard to our desires and the feeling impulses bound up with them, something strange would begin to happen. We would follow the course of our actions right into our body; everything we do out of will impulse would be followed up inside us in our blood and throughout the whole circulation. That is, if you could follow the picking up of a piece of chalk from the point of view of the will impulse, you would follow what is going on in your hand right into the blood circulation; you would see the activity of the blood and the feelings that are bound up with this from inside. For instance, you would have an inner perception of the weight of the piece of chalk and become aware that you are seeing the nerve channels and the etheric fluid inside them. You would feel yourself moving through the activity of the blood and the nerves, which would amount to an inner enjoyment of your own blood and nerve activity. But we have to be free of this inner enjoyment of our own blood and nerve activity during earthly life, otherwise we would go through life wanting this inner enjoyment to accompany everything we do. Our enjoyment of self would increase enormously. But as man is now constituted he should not have this enjoyment. And the secret of why he should not have it can again be found in a passage of the Bible, for which we ought to feel greater and greater reverence.

After what had occurred in paradise and is told in the paradise myth, man was permitted to eat from the tree of knowledge but not from the tree of life. Now this inner enjoyment would be the enjoying of the tree of life, and man is not permitted to do this. I cannot develop this theme further today as it would lead too far, but through meditating on it yourselves you will be able to discover more about it. Another thing that can have special significance for us in connection with these present lectures and arises out of this, is the following: not being able to eat from the tree of life means not being able to enjoy the blood and nerve activity going on within us. Yet just because we know the outer world by means of our senses and our reason, something comes about that surely has something to do with this kind of enjoyment. Whenever we perceive anything in the outer world and whenever we think about it, we follow the course of our blood circulation in the region of the senses—eyes, ears, nose and taste nerves—and, in the case of thinking, the nerve channels. But we do not have the perception of what is going on in the blood circulation and nerve channels, for what we would have perceived in the blood is reflected and mirrored by the senses, thus causing the sense impressions to arise. And what is conducted through the nerve channels is also reflected and conducted back to the nerve ends, where it is then mirrored as thought.

Now imagine for a moment a human being who is in the following situation: he does not just follow the course of his blood as it responds to the outer world and then receive a mirror image of what his blood does, nor does he just follow the course of his nerves and receive a mirror image of what his nerves do, but he is in a position to experience within himself what is denied us with regard to our blood and our sense nerves; he experiences the blood moving towards the nerve and the eyes. If this were the case he would enjoy his own inner process, at least in the blood and the nerves in this area. This is how the inner pictures of atavistic clairvoyance arise. What we see reflected are only pictures, filtered pictures as it were of what is in the blood and the nerves. There are world secrets in the blood and nerves, but the kind of world secrets that have already given their substance to creating us. It is only ourselves we get to know when we acquire the imaginations resulting from experiencing the blood circulating to the senses, and it is only the inspirations which have the task of building up our bodily nature we get to know, when we experience ourselves in the nerves leading to our senses.

A whole inner world can arise in this manner, and this inner world can be a collection of imaginations. Yet although, when perceiving the outer physical world in a way that is proper for our earth evolution, we perceive reflections of our blood and nerve activities, we still cannot get beyond the senses when we indulge in inner enjoyment, but reach only to the point where the blood circulation flows into the senses. Then the experience of the imaginative world is comparable to swimming in blood like a fish in water. But this imaginative world is in reality not an outside world but a world living in our blood. If one lives in the nerves leading to the senses one experiences an inspirational world full of music of the spheres and inner pictures. This is cosmic again but it is nothing new. It has already fulfilled its task in that it has flowed into our nerve and blood systems.

The kind of clairvoyance arising in this way, and leading man further into himself instead of beyond himself, is self-enjoyment, veritable self-enjoyment. This is why a kind of refined voluptuousness is brought about in people who become clairvoyant in this way and experience a world which is new to them. And on the whole we must say that this kind of clairvoyance is a return to an earlier stage of evolution. For although this experiencing of a person's own sense organs and blood, as I have been describing to you, did not exist then in the form in which it does today, the nervous system was already there in a germinal state. This kind of perception was the normal one for man on ancient Moon, and what he had then in the way of the beginning of nerves served to give him an inner perception of himself. The blood had not yet taken form inside him. It was more like a warm breath coming towards him from outside, like we receive the rays of the sun. Therefore what is now, on the earth, a perception of the inner blood system was regular, normal perception of the outside world at the Moon stage.

You could say that if this is the borderline between man's inner and outer world (a diagram was drawn), then, what are now our nerves were already there, in germinal form, on the Moon. By following the course of the nerves he could perceive what was within him, as a world of inner imagination. He saw that he himself belonged in the cosmos. He also had an imaginative perception of what came to him as a breath from outside and not from inside. That has now ceased, and what was outside, on ancient Moon, has become internalised as the blood circulation in Earth evolution. So it is a regression to the old Moon evolution.

It is good to know of these things, because that kind of clairvoyance keeps on making its appearance. It does not need to be acquired along the hard path of meditation and concentration described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The kind of clairvoyance that arises as a result of learning to experience one's nerves and blood as an inner enjoyment is just a more refined development of organic life, a further development of the experience of eating and drinking. This is certainly not mankind's present task, but is a kind of hot-house plant which arises when self-enjoyment of things such as eating and drinking is developed to a fine art. Just as a wine connoisseur has an inner after-taste which is only an imagination of the taste and is not formative, some people have a subtle inner enjoyment which is their clairvoyance.

A lot of clairvoyance is nothing more than a subtle, refined, forced kind of after-taste of life. We must become aware of these things again in our time. For people have not known about these secrets nor referred to them in literature since the first half of the nineteenth century. Then the second half of the nineteenth century came, with all the discoveries that are considered so wonderful, and they certainly are wonderful from their point of view, and an understanding of these things and the finer connections of existence were lost. But what has not yet been lost—and this is said in parenthesis—is the enjoyment of the effects of the coarser things we imbibe. Mankind continues to be able to live in the after-enjoyment of eating and drinking, and, precisely in the materialistic age, has cultivated this to an extent.

But mankind lives in a rhythmic cycle where things like this are concerned. Of course, because it has eradicated the general feeling it used to have of indulging in self-enjoyment in the senses, nerves and blood circulation, which people had to a greater extent in the past, the materialistic age can devote itself even more strongly to the effects of eating and drinking. You can easily study the whole change and rapid development that has taken place in a relatively short time in this realm. You have only to compare a hotel menu of the 1870's with a present-day one (1915), and you will see the progress that has been made in the sphere of refined pleasures, in the self-enjoyment of one's own body. Yet things of this kind also move in cycles, and achievements are only carried to a certain level. Just as a pendulum can only swing to a certain point before it has to go back again, the indulgence in mere physical pleasure will also have to go in the other direction once it has reached a certain point. This will occur when the keenest epicureans, that is, people with the most longing for pleasures, will look at the choicest dainties and say, ‘Ugh! I don't feel like having that, that is just too much!' This moment will certainly come, for it is a necessary development. Everything moves in cycles.

Man experiences the other side of life during sleep. His thought life is asleep and quite different conditions prevail, of course. Now I said that it was chiefly the first half of the nineteenth century that had insight into these matters still; and the kind of clairvoyance that arises when one follows the course of one's own blood and nerve channels was still called pythian clairvoyance at that time, from certain memories the people had, and it is indeed related to the foundations of ancient pythian clairvoyance.

Other conditions prevail during sleep. Man is outside his physical and etheric body with his ego and astral body. In ordinary life thoughts are then suppressed and devitalised. But between falling asleep and waking up man lives continually with the longing for his physical body. This is precisely what sleep consists of, acquiring a longing for his physical body from the moment he falls asleep. This rises to a climax and then urges him more and more to return to his body. When he is asleep the longing to return to his own physical body becomes stronger and stronger. And because the longing pervades the ego and the astral body like a mist, the life of thought is dimmed. Just as we cannot see the trees any more when mist encloses them, we cannot experience our life of perception within us when the mist of our longing envelops us.

Now it can happen that this longing grows so strong during sleep, that man does not keep it outside his physical and etheric body, but that his greed grows to the extent that he partly takes hold of his physical and etheric body and comes into touch with the extreme ends of his blood and nerve channels; he penetrates from outside as it were through his senses into the extreme ends of his blood circulation and his nerve channels.

In ancient times, when man still had experiences like these with the help of the gods, as it were, it was a normal and healthy process. The old Hebrew prophets, who accomplished so much for their people, acquired their prophetic gifts through making use of the tremendous love they bore precisely for the blood and nerve composition of their own people, so that even during sleep they did not want to let go altogether of that which lived physically in their people. These prophets of Jewish antiquity were seized with such longing and filled with such love that even in sleep they wanted to remain bound to the blood of the people to whom they belonged. This is precisely what gave them their prophetic gifts.

This is the physiological origin of these prophetic gifts, and splendid achievements came about through this channel. This is precisely why the prophets of the various peoples had such significance for their people, because even when they were outside the body they maintained a contact with it in this way.

As I mentioned, there was still a certain awareness right up to the first half of the nineteenth century, of this connection in the life of humanity. Just as they called the other kind of clairvoyance pythian clairvoyance, this kind of clairvoyance, which came about through contact of the ego-astral nature of man with the blood and nerve channels of the physical body during sleep, was called prophetic clairvoyance.

If you look at the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century you will find descriptions of pythian and prophetic clairvoyance, even if they are not as precise as spiritual-scientific descriptions of them would be today. People do not know the difference between them any more, since they have no understanding for what they can read about them in the books of the first half of the nineteenth century. But neither of these kinds of clairvoyance can really help humanity forward today. Both of them were right for olden times. Modern clairvoyance, which has to develop further and further in the future, can come about neither through enjoying what is going on in our bodies while we are awake, nor by entering into the body from outside in a sleeplike state, urged on by love—even if it is not for ourselves, but for the part of mankind to which our body belongs. Both these levels have been superseded.

Modern clairvoyance must be a third way, neither a taking hold of the physical body from outside, in loving longing, nor an enjoying of the physical body from inside. Both these phenomena, that which lives within and floods the body with pleasure, and that which can seize hold of the body from outside, have to go out of the body, if modern clairvoyance is to occur; they may only have the sort of relationship with the body, during incarnation between birth and death, in which they neither enjoy nor love the blood and nerves, either from inside or from outside, but remain connected with the body whilst freely abstaining from such self-enjoyment or self-love. The connection with the body has to be maintained nevertheless, of course, otherwise it would mean a dying. Man must remain bound to the body that belongs to him in physical incarnation on earth, and this must be done by means of the organs which are remote, as it were, or at least relatively remote from the activity of blood and nerves. A detaching from the activity of blood and nerves must be achieved.

When a person no longer indulges in enjoyment of self along the channels leading to the senses, nor takes hold of himself, from outside, as far as the senses, but has the kind of relationship to himself, both from inside and from outside, in which he can actually take living hold of what symbolises the death of physical life, then the proper condition has been reached. For we actually die physiologically because we are able to develop the bony system. When we are capable of taking hold of the skeleton which folk wisdom recognises as the symbol of death, and which is as remote from the blood system as it is from the nervous system, then we come to what we can call spiritual-scientific clairvoyance, which is higher than either pythian or prophetic clairvoyance.

With spiritual-scientific clairvoyance we take hold of the whole and not just part of the human being, and it actually makes no difference whether we take hold of it from inside or outside, for this kind of clairvoyance can no longer be an act of enjoyment. Instead of being a subtle enjoyment it is an opening up and rising into the divine-spiritual forces of the All. It is a uniting with the world. It is no longer an experiencing of the human being and the mysteries that have been woven into him, but an experiencing of the deeds of the beings of the higher hierarchies, whereby one truly lifts oneself out of self-enjoyment and self-love. Man must become a thought as it were, an organ of the higher hierarchies, just as our thoughts are organs of our souls. To be thought of, pictured and perceived by the higher hierarchies, is the principle of spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. To be received, not to take oneself.

I would like to express the wish that what I have just been saying might become a real object for your meditation, for precisely that which I have been telling you today can bring many, many things to life in all of you and enliven the actual impulses of our spiritual-scientific movement to an ever greater extent. And how seriously we have to take the enlivening of our spiritual-scientific movement has often been spoken of during these days together. We could bring to realisation a further part—I will not say of what was intended—but of what ought to be intended within this spiritual-scientific movement, if as many people as possible would resolve to think about this threefold form of knowledge of higher worlds in a living way, so that our thoughts become clearer and clearer about what, at bottom, we all intend, and which can become so easily confused with what can be had much more comfortably.

Truly, it is not for nothing that we work from cycle to cycle to accumulate more and more concepts and ideas. It is not needless work studying these concepts and ideas, for it is precisely the way to prepare the soul impulses that will lead us to real spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. By snatching up one or two ideas given by anthroposophy you can sometimes make a chink in one or another part of the human organisation, causing fragments of pythian and prophetic clairvoyance to arise, enough to make people proud of themselves. If this is the case, we often hear statements like this, ‘I don't need to study everything in detail, and I don't need what the cycles say. I know all that, I knew it already.’ And so on. Many people are still satisfied with the principle of living in a few imaginations which we could call blood and nerve imaginations. A lot of people fancy they have something really special if they have a few blood and nerve imaginations. But this is not what can lead us to selfless co-operation in mankind's development. Indulging in blood and nerve imaginations actually leads to a heightening of self-enjoyment, to a more subtle form of egoism. Then, of course, the cultivation of spiritual science can be the very thing that breeds an even more subtle kind of egoism than you ever find in the outside world.

It is taken for granted that one is never referring to the present company nor to the Anthroposophical Society, which is, of course, here. But it should be permissible to mention that there are societies in which some people manage to turn the principles in their favour, and without really giving their unselfish support, make use of one or another thing, preferably those things which stimulate blood or nerve imaginations, and then imagine they can spare themselves the rest. As a result they acquire an atavistic clairvoyance, or perhaps not even that, but only the feelings that accompany that kind of imaginative clairvoyance. These feelings are not an overcoming of egoism, just a heightened form of it. You find in societies like this—the Anthroposophical Society excepted for politeness’ sake—that although it would be people's duty to develop love and harmony out of the depths of their hearts from one member to another, you find disharmony, quarrelsomeness, people telling tales about one another, and so on. I can say things like this, for as I said, I always make an exception of the members of the Anthroposophical Society.

This shows us that dark shadows are thrown just where a strong light is about to appear. I am not finding such faults because I imagine these things can be exterminated overnight. That cannot happen, because they come from nature. But at least each person can work on himself; and it is not a good thing if you are not made aware of these things.

It is thoroughly understandable that just because a particular movement has to be founded, the shadow sides also make themselves felt in these societies, and that what is rampant in outside life is far more rampant within them. Yet it always gives one a bitter feeling if this happens in societies which, by their very nature—otherwise there would be no point in having a society—should develop a certain brotherliness, a certain loyalty, but just because they come closer together, certain faults that are short-lived in the outside world develop all the more fiercely. As the present company, the Anthroposophical Society, is excepted, it will give us all the more opportunity to think and reflect about these things quite objectively and impartially, so that we really know what they are about. Then if we come across them somewhere, we shall know them for what they are, and not imagine that if someone thinks he has a particularly deep grasp of anthroposophy, that we cannot understand that faults which occur in the outside world appear much more strongly in him. We shall understand it, but we shall also know that we have to combat them. Sometimes we cannot combat them until we have really understood them.

This is another example showing how closely connected life is with the spiritual-scientific outlook; that this spiritual- scientific outlook cannot, in fact, achieve its aim unless it becomes an attitude to life, an art of life, and is brought into the whole of life. How wonderful it would be if in—let us now say the Anthroposophical Society—all the various human relationships proved to be as harmonious as we have tried to make the forms of our Goetheanum building, where they change from one to the other and each is in harmony with the other. If it could be the same in life as it is in the Goetheanum, and the whole life of our Society could be like the wonderful co-operation among the people engaged in building the Goetheanum, so that even this very building activity is a harmonious and noble image of what comes to expression in the building itself.

Thus, the inner significance of the life principle of our Goetheanum building and the inner significance of the co-operation among the souls—no, I would rather not say that—the inner significance of the harmony of the forms of our building, should find their way into all the various human relationships in our society, and their inner formative force should stand before us as a kind of ideal. I should just like to assure you that the wrong words did not slip out just now, when I stopped in mid-sentence. I stopped quite deliberately, and sometimes the thing is said without actually saying it.

To summarise the theme I have given in many variations over these days; what I want to recommend to you most warmly is not only to look at the thoughts and ideas of spiritual science, the results of spiritual research, with your intellect and reason, but to take what lives in spiritual science into your hearts. For the salvation of mankind's future progress really depends on this. This can be said without presumption, for anyone can see it if they try at all to study the impulses of our evolution and the signs of our times. With these thoughts I will close the series of lectures I ventured to give you at the turn of the year.

The following lecture is included in Bn/GA 275. It is lecture 8 of 8 in the series entitled, Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom. It is also known as, Working with Sculptural Architecture—2.

To the impulses necessary for the transformation of the present age belongs an ever wider and more comprehensive understanding of the processes of the human soul in those regions which open to Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive observation. For what first makes our world into a whole, raising us above Maya and leading us into true reality, lies within those spheres which open to this observation. It must be emphasized again and again that what we are striving towards as a new spiritual knowledge cannot consist in any warming-up of the results of an earlier clairvoyance. It is true that many people aspire to such a warming-up of an earlier clairvoyance, but the time for this clairvoyance is past, and only atavistic echoes of it can appear in certain individuals. However, the stages of human existence that we must surmount do not disclose themselves through a revival of old clairvoyance, and thus we will endeavor to consider once again that which must lie at the basis of the new clairvoyance. We have often spoken of the principle of this, and today we shall try to do this again, but from another side.

Let us start once more from something we all know, from the fact that, during daytime waking consciousness, man lives with his ego and astral body in his physical and etheric body. During the last few days I have emphasized that this waking state of man, from waking until falling asleep, is not a fully-awake condition, because there is still something asleep in man. What we experience as our will is really only partially awake. Our thoughts are awake from waking until falling asleep, but the will is something which we exercise quite dreamily. On this account much of the pondering on the freedom of the will, and on freedom in general, is in vain, because people have not noticed that what they know of the will in waking daily life is really only a dream or a tale of will impulses. When they will, and represent something to themselves concerning it, they are of course awake. But how the will arises and passes over into action, of this man can only dream in daily waking life.

If you lift a piece of chalk and then think about this action, then you have of course an idea of it in your mind. But without clairvoyance, how the ego and astral body flow into the hand—how the will spreads out there—you can know nothing more of this in ordinary day consciousness than you know of a dream while you are dreaming. Man only dreams of real willing during ordinary waking life, and in most things we do not even dream, we sleep. You can clearly conceive of how you put a morsel of food on a fork; you can also conceive to a certain extent of how you bite this morsel; but how you swallow the morsel, this you do not even dream. For the most part you are quite unconscious of it, just as you are unconscious of your thoughts when you are asleep. A great part of the activity of will while man is awake is similarly performed in a half-sleeping condition.

For instance, if we were not asleep as regards our powers of desire and the feeling impulses connected with them, we would develop an extraordinary activity. We would follow the actions we perform right into the body; everything we fulfilled as will impulse we would follow inwardly—into our blood, and into all the blood vessels. This means that if you could follow the lifting of a piece of chalk with reference to the will impulse, you would be able to follow what takes place in your hand, right into all the blood vessels. You would see from within the activity of the blood and the feelings attached to it, for example, the gravity of the particles of chalk, and things of that nature, and would thereby become aware that you were following your nerve-paths and the etheric fluidity found therein. You would inwardly experience yourself, along with the activity of blood and nerves. This would be an inner enjoyment of your own blood and nerve activity. But during our life on earth this inner enjoyment of our own blood and nerve activity must be withheld from us, otherwise we would go through life in such a way that in everything we did we would experience this inner self enjoyment. But man, as he has become, may not have this enjoyment, and the secret of why he may not we again find expressed in a part of the Bible towards which we should always feel the greatest reverence.

After those things had taken place which are expressed in the Paradise-Myth, man was permitted to eat of the Tree of Knowledge but not of the Tree of Life. Eating of the Tree of Life would mean this inner gratification, and this must not happen to man. I cannot develop this motif further here today because it would us lead too far, but through your own meditation on the motif here touched upon you will be able to make further discoveries for yourselves. However, starting from this point, there is something else you can keep in mind which can be of essential importance for you: we are unable to eat of the Tree of Life, i.e., enjoy within our inner being our own blood and nerve activity—we cannot do this—yet something happens, especially when observing the world through our senses and our intellect, which is closely connected with such an inner enjoyment. In the perception of any object in the outer world, and in pondering over any object in the outer world, we follow the senses, that is, when we follow the eyes, nose, ears and taste nerves, we follow the path of the blood vessels. And when we think, we follow the path of the nerves. But we cannot perceive what else might have been perceived along the path of the blood and the nerves. What we might have perceived in the blood is reflected through the senses; it is as it were thrown back, and from this, sense impressions arise. And that which is conducted along the path of the nerves is also reflected and brought to where the nerve paths reach their end, and is then reflected as our thoughts.

Just suppose for once that a man appeared who was in a position not merely to follow along the path of his blood under the influence of the outer world, and then to receive reflection of what his blood does; not merely to follow his nerves, and receive reflected back what his nerves do, but to experience inwardly what is denied us in regard to the blood and sense nerves, to experience inwardly what leads to the eye, to experience inwardly the blood as it tends towards the nerves and the eyes. This he would enjoy inwardly, at least in regard to those parts of the blood and nerves. It was in this way that those forms arose that belong to the old clairvoyance. For what is reflected back for us are but images, finely filtrated images, as it were, of what is contained in the blood and nerves. Cosmic mysteries are contained in our blood and nerves, but such cosmic mysteries as are already exhausted, because we have developed beyond them. We only learn to know ourselves when we learn to know the Imaginations which are revealed to us when we experience ourselves within the blood extending to the senses; and we only learn to know those Inspirations destined to up-build us when we live within the nerves extending to our senses.

A whole inner world is thus built up. This inner world can consist of a sum of Imaginations, whereas in perceiving the outer physical world in a way fitted to our earth evolution we perceive reflections and reflected images of what takes place in blood and nerves. We are unable, when deeply sunk in the inner enjoyment of ourselves, to get beyond the senses, but only reach the point where the blood streams enter the senses. Man then experiences the Imaginative world so that he seems as it were to swim in the blood as a fish in water. But this Imaginative world is in truth no outer world, but a world which lives in our blood. When a man lives in the nerves which extend to the senses, he experiences an Inspired world, a world of sphere-tones, and a world of inward pictures. This is also cosmic, but it is nothing new, it is merely something which has completed its task in that it has streamed into our nerve and blood system.

The clairvoyance which thus arises, and which does not lead man beyond himself, but leads him rather deeper into himself, is a self-enjoyment, truly a real self-enjoyment. This is why in a certain sense it produces a higher bliss in people when they become clairvoyant in this way, that is, when they experience a new world. This way of becoming clairvoyant is on the whole a falling back to an earlier stage of evolution. For what I have just described, the life within ones own sense organs and blood, did not exist at that time in the form it does now, although the nervous system was already foreshadowed.

This kind of perception was the normal kind of perception on the Old Moon, and in what existed at that time in the tendencies toward the formation of nerves, a man was inwardly aware of himself. Blood was not yet developed within him, it was more something which came to him from outside like a warm breath, as the sun's rays come to us. Therefore what now on earth is a conscious perception of the inner blood system was on the Moon the normal perception of the outer world.

If therefore the nerve is here the boundary between the human inner and outer world, then what is now nerve was already foreshadowed on the Moon. While following the nerves a man was able to perceive what revealed itself to him as an inner, Imaginative world, which was a part of himself. He perceived how he himself is included in the cosmos. He also was aware Imaginatively of what came to him as a breath from outside… not from within. This perception has now fallen from him, what was outside him on the old Moon has become inward, as the circulation of the blood in earthly evolution. The old perception is therefore a going-back to the Old Moon evolution.

It is well to know of such things, because again and again things arise that are of this kind of clairvoyance. What appears clairvoyantly in this way has no need of being developed by those difficult paths of meditation and concentration described in How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. This clairvoyance, which arises through learning to live inwardly in ones nerves and blood—to feel satisfaction in oneself—is in general but a finer development of the organic life, a refinement of what a man experiences when he eats and drinks. When all is said such clairvoyance is not the task set before man today, but is rather something that arises as a hothouse plant through our bringing to a more refined existence that self-enjoyment afforded us by eating, drinking and similar things. Just as an inner after-effect arises in an epicure when he has drunk Rhinewine or Mosel, which of course rises only to an Imagination of taste but does not work formatively, so in many people a refined inner enjoyment arises, and this is their clairvoyance.

A great deal of clairvoyance is nothing else but a refined, rarified, hothouse-like after-enjoyment of life. Attention must frequently be drawn to these things in our day. For I may tell you that the last time the secrets concerning these things were still known, when people still spoke of them in literature, was really the first half of the 19th century. Then came the second half of the 19th century, with its so highly-rated discoveries—highly-rated from their point of view—when all understanding for these things and for the finer connections of existence was lost. It may be added parenthetically that people have not yet lost the enjoyment experienced under the influence of the coarser, let us say more selfish enjoyment; they can still live with the after-pleasure of eating and drinking, in fact these have even been developed to a certain high degree in this materialistic age.

But in such things, man lives in a cyclic, rhythmic movement. And the materialistic age, because it has extinguished what was formerly a general feeling—the passing of self-enjoyment into the senses, nerves, and blood-circulation—can therefore give itself up ever more thoroughly to the impressions of eating and drinking. We can easily observe the complete “volt face” and transformation which has taken place in this connection within a relatively short time. We have but to look at a hotel menu card from the 70's, and compare it with one of today, and we see what strides life has made in refined enjoyment, in the self-gratification of our own bodies. But such things also progress in cycles, for everything can only be reached to a certain degree, and just as a pendulum can only rise to a certain point and must then return, so mere physical enjoyment must recede when it has reached a certain point. It will then come to pass that when the keenest epicures, those who have the greatest longing for enjoyment, stand before the most daintily prepared repast, they will not yearn for it, but will say: “Ah! I cannot. All that is finished for me.” This also will come in time, for it is a necessity of evolution. Everything passes in cycles.

The other side of life is that which man experiences during sleep. His life of thought is asleep, and naturally, entirely different connections make their appearance. I have already said that in the first half of the 19th century people still had insight into these things. The clairvoyance which arises through following ones own blood and nerve paths was still called, in accord with certain memories, the Pythic clairvoyance, because it was in fact related to what lay at the root of the pythic clairvoyance of antiquity.

Other connections are present during the life of sleep. Man with his ego and astral body is then outside the physical and etheric body. Ideas from ordinary life are then suppressed and weakened, but man lives continually from falling asleep till waking in a state of longing for his physical body. Sleeping consists essentially in this, that man, from the moment he begins to sleep, develops longings for his physical body. These longings increase until a climax is reached when he is forced back more and more towards his physical body. The longing for ones physical body becomes ever greater and greater in the state of sleep. And because longing fills the ego and astral body like a cloud, the life of thought is dimmed. Perceptions become dim because desire for the physical body pervades the ego and astral body like a cloud. Just as we cannot see the trees in a wood if mist spreads over everything, neither can we ask variance of our inward life of perception if the mist of our desire spreads over it.

But it may happen that this life of desire becomes so strong during sleep that man not merely develops this desire when outside his physical and etheric body, but he becomes greedy to such an extent that he partially seizes on this inner part of his physical and etheric body so that he reaches with his desire to the furthest limits of his blood and nerve paths, he sinks through as it were from outside into the extremities of the senses of circulation, and into the ultimate ends of the nerve paths.

In ancient times, when the Gods still helped man with such experiences, they were entirely regular and good. The ancient Hebrew Prophets, for example, who did such great things for their people, performed what they did and received their prophetic gifts because they applied such infinite love to the blood and nerve structure of their people, and even in the sleeping state they did not entirely absent themselves from what lived physically in this people. These ancient Hebrew prophets were seized by such longing, filled with such love, that they remained united even in sleep with the blood of the people to whom they belonged. It was because of this that they received their prophetic gifts.

This is the physiological origin of these gifts, and most beautiful and splendid results came from what has just been told you. The prophets of different peoples were of such significance to these peoples just because, while outside the physical body, they still lived with this physical body in the way described.

As explained, a certain consciousness of this still existed up to the first half of the 19th century in the life of mankind. As the first clairvoyance described here was called Pythic clairvoyance, so the clairvoyance of which I have just spoken, in which a man dives down into the blood and nerve paths of the physical body with what otherwise lives outside the physical and etheric body during sleep, was called Prophetic clairvoyance.

If you pursue the literature of the first half of the 19th Century—even if it cannot be described with the exactitude and precision of modern spiritual science—you still find descriptions of pythic and prophetic clairvoyance. The distinction between them is not recognized today, because people can no longer understand what they read of pythic and prophetic clairvoyance.

Neither kind of clairvoyance is that which is really capable of advancing mankind at the present time. These are the kinds of clairvoyance that were valid for ancient times. The modern clairvoyance, which must develop more and more towards the future, can come neither by enjoying what penetrates our body from within during waking conditions, nor by diving down into this body from outside in a state of sleep, but from love—not for ourselves, but for that portion of mankind to which our body belongs. The earlier forms are stages of development which have been outgrown.

Modern clairvoyance must develop as a third kind of clairvoyance that does not involve desire for laying hold of the physical body from without, nor as enjoyment of the physical body from within.

That which lives within and is capable of penetrating our body, enjoying it inwardly, and that which can seize the body from without, must be detached from the body if modern clairvoyance is to arise. Neither must enter into any further connection with the body other than in the [normal] incarnation between birth and death, so that blood and nerves can be enjoyed neither from within nor from without; but each must remain connected with the body in pure renunciation of such self-enjoyment and such self-love. A connection with the body must nevertheless remain, for otherwise, death would take place. Man must remain united with the body which belongs to him during his physical incarnation on earth, remain united with it through those members which in a sense stand far, or at least relatively far, from the activity of blood and nerve. A release from blood and nerve activity must be attained.

When man no longer finds inward enjoyment along the paths which lead to his senses, or penetrates his own being from outside as far as to the senses, but when he can enter into such union with himself both from within and from without so as to really lay hold in a living way of that which in physical existence is the symbol of death, and can unite himself with that which gives the expectancy of physical death, the condition we are considering is then reached. For considered physiologically, we really die because we are capable of developing a bony system—a skeleton. When we are capable of comprehending our bones, which through a wonderful intuition people recognize as the symbol of death—the bony skeleton—and which is so far removed from the blood and nervous systems, we then attain to something which is higher than pythic and prophetic clairvoyance, we come to what we can call the Clairvoyance of Spiritual Science.

In this spiritual scientific clairvoyance, we no longer grasp only a part of human nature, we grasp the whole man. And fundamentally, it is all one whether we grasp it from within or from without, because this kind of clairvoyance can no longer be an “enjoyment,” it is no longer a refined pleasure, but a going forth into the divinely spiritual forces of the All. It is a becoming-one with the cosmos, an experience no longer of man and of what is secreted in man, but an experience that is a living within the deeds of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, a real raising of oneself above self-enjoyment and self-love. Just as our thoughts are members of our souls, so man must become, as it were, a thought, a member of the higher Hierarchies. To allow oneself to be thought, pictured, perceived by the higher hierarchies, this is the principle of the clairvoyance of spiritual science. It is being taken up, not taking up.

I hope that what I am now saying may very definitely become the subject of your further meditations, for precisely those things that I have explained today are capable of stimulating very much in all of you, and this can serve toward an ever deeper and more comprehensive penetration to the real impulses of our spiritual scientific stream. How much earnestness is necessary for this penetration into our spiritual scientific stream has been spoken of often in these past days. Something might be realized of what is—I do not say willed, but what must be willed—within this spiritual stream, if as many as possible would resolve to ponder in a living way this threefold form of knowledge of higher worlds, so that clearer and ever clearer ideas might arise concerning what we all desire at bottom, and which is so easily confused with what is far easier and more comfortable to acquire.

We have in fact worked from cycle to cycle of lectures for no other purpose than to bring together, ever more and more, ideas and concepts. It is necessary to study these ideas and concepts, and in this way we prepare in ourselves those impulses of soul which lead to real spiritual scientific clairvoyance. Often because one has sipped a little here or there of what is imparted within our spiritual scientific stream, and thereby given some part of our human nature to pythic or prophetic clairvoyance—because of this one may perhaps become proud and haughty. When this is the case opinions arise as are often heard when one or another says: I need not study every detail, I do not require what is said in this cycle. What I hear I already know, and so on. The principle of living in a few Imaginations which might be called blood and nerve Imaginations, still exists in many. Many think they possess something quite special if they have a few blood and nerve Imaginations. But this is not what leads us to selfless labor for human evolution; such a tarrying in blood and nerve imaginations leads only to a heightening of self-enjoyment, to a refined egoism. In this event, it may be that a more refined egoism is cultivated through the pursuit of spiritual science than exists even in the outside world.

Naturally, in referring to such things, one never speaks of these matters to those who are present, and never of the members of the anthroposophical society who are present. Yet it may be mentioned that societies exist in which people are to be found who, according to the principles of these societies, bring themselves to co-operate, not with true selflessness, but to undertake preferably that which kindles the blood or nerve Imaginations. They then think they can be excused from anything else. They attain to such an atavistic clairvoyance—or perhaps they do not attain to it, but merely to the feelings which are held to be an accompaniment of the phenomenon of such Imaginative clairvoyance. These feelings are not a conquest of egoism, but only a higher blossoming of it. One finds within such societies—the anthroposophical society being excepted from politeness—that although their duty is to develop love and esteem, harmony and compassion, at the profoundest depths of their souls one finds disharmony, quarrelsomeness, mutual calumniation, etc, growing more and more from member to member. I venture to express myself thus, because, as I have said, I always exclude the members of the anthroposophical. society.

We then see how, that where an especially strong light should arise, deep shadows are also cast. It is not so much as if I wished to place blame on such things, or believed they could be rooted out at once, between today and tomorrow. That is impossible because they arise naturally. However, each one can at least work on himself. And it is not good if the consciousness is not at least directed to such matters.

One can thoroughly understand that just because a certain stress must be worked out within such societies, the shadow-sides also make themselves felt, and that what flourishes outside in life often flourishes all the more vigorously within such societies. Nevertheless a certain bitter feeling is evoked when this appears in societies that should naturally (otherwise the society would have no meaning) develop a certain brotherliness and unity, and when, with this closer contact, certain qualities that exist but fleetingly outside are developed with all the greater intensity. Since the Anthroposophical Society—being present—is excepted, it is all the more possible for us to think over these things objectively, as non-participators, so that we can learn to know them more intimately. And if we find such things anywhere in the world, we do not regard them as anything other than what they are. We believe—if anyone thinks he understands anthroposophy with especial depth, yet reveals certain qualities which not only show themselves in him as they do in the world, but more intensely—that these things are not incomprehensible, but realize that they are comprehensible, yet as matters we must fight. We can frequently only fight them when we have really understood them.

This is also something which shows us how life is connected with the spiritual scientific view, and can only reach its goal when it is understood as acceptance of life, as an art of life; when it is carried into all life. How beautiful it would be if each single relationship of life, let us now say of the Anthroposophical Society, showed itself to be in such mutual harmony as is attempted in the forms of our building, where the separate forms pass over into each other, and all are in harmony one with another; if it could be in life as it is in the building, if the whole life of our society could be as we would have it through the beautiful co-operation of those who are active on the building; so that this labor which is already something harmonious and noble, might be a copy of that which finds expression in the building itself.

Thus the inner meaning of the life-principle of our building, and the inner meaning of the co-operation of the souls should ... no, would rather not say that. Thus the inner meaning of the co-operation in the forms of our building should find a path outwards into each separate relationship of the life of our Society—should in its inward construction stand before us as an ideal. I should like to assure you that I did not make a slip when I omitted a sentence just now. I left it out with full intention, and many a time that also is said which one did not say.

Summing up, what I have put before you during the last few days is a theme varying in the most diverse manner, and what I would fain lay on your hearts especially is this: that you not only place the thoughts and ideas of spiritual science, the results of spiritual investigation, before your intellect, before your reason, but that you receive that which lives in spiritual science into your hearts. For the salvation of the future progress of mankind really depends upon this. I say this without presumption, and anyone who attempts to study but a little the impulses of our evolution and the signs of our time can recognize this for himself.

With this the series of lectures, what I have permitted myself to give you at this turning point of the year is concluded.

[Before the lecture Steiner spoke a few words regarding his trip to Norway. See GA 259]

Today I propose to carry further certain points made in recent lectures concerning the evolution of humanity since the time of Christ.

Looking back, in survey, over the evolution of mankind, we see that the epochs described in anthroposophical spiritual science take their shape from the particular soul constitution of the human beings alive at any given time. This differs greatly from epoch to epoch. Today, however, there is little inclination to look beyond man's present day makeup. Although civilization has developed in a way describable in outer documents, in general mankind is regarded as having always had the same soul nature. This is not true. It has changed; and we know the dates at which it underwent transformations externally plain and distinguishable.

The last of these turning points has often been designated as the fifteenth century after Christ; the one preceding it occurred during the eighth pre-Christian century; and we might in this way go still further back. I have often emphasized how correct the art historian Herman Grimm is when he points out that the full historical comprehension of the people of the present age reaches back no further than the Romans, at which time the ideas now prevalent settled into men's souls. Or approximately the same ideas. They still operate, though at times in a detrimental way—for example, concepts of Roman law no longer in harmony with our society. The very manner in which contemporary man takes part in social life shows a comprehension for something reaching back to the Roman period.

If, on the other hand, we describe the external historical events of ancient Greece like modern events, we do not penetrate into the real soul-nature of the Greeks. Herman Grimm is right in saying that, as usually described, they are mere shadows. Precisely because ordinary consciousness can no longer see what lived in those souls, it is unable to understand the Greeks' social structure.

Still more removed from our soul life is that of the human beings of the Egyptian-Chaldean period prior to the eighth century before Christ; more different still that in ancient Persia, and completely different that of the ancient Indian epoch following the great Atlantean catastrophe.

When with the help of spiritual science we mark the stages in the changing constitution of the human being, it becomes clear that our way of feeling about the human being, our way of speaking of body, soul and spirit, of the ego in man, our sense of an inner connection between the human being and the earth planet, arose in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Gradually, in the course of time, life has become so earth-bound that human beings feel estranged from the cosmos, and see the stars and their movements, even the clouds, as lying outside our earthly dwelling place; therefore of little significance.

Prior to the Graeco-Latin period, people's feelings and indeed their will-impulses were, if I may use the expression, elementary-cosmic. Man did not need a philosophy in order to feel himself a member of the whole universe, especially the visible universe. It was natural for him to feel himself not only a citizen of the earth but also a member of the cosmos, especially during the first epoch, that of ancient India. If we go back to the seventh or eighth millennium of the pre-Christian era, we find that the human being—I cannot say spoke but felt—that the human being felt quite differently than we do today about the ego, the self. To be sure, the human beings of that ancient time did not express themselves as we do, because human speech did not have the same scope as today. But we must express things in our own language, and I shall put it thus: In ancient India man did not speak of the ego in our modern way; it was not, for him, a point comprising all his soul experiences. On the contrary, when he spoke of the ego it was to him self-evident that it had little to do with earth and earth events. In experiencing himself as an ego, man did not feel that he belonged to the earth; but, rather, that he was connected with the heaven of the fixed stars. This was what gave him the sense and security of his deepest self. For it was not felt as a human ego. Man was a human being only through the fact that here on earth he was clothed by a physical body. Through this sheath-for-the-ego he became a citizen of earth. But the ego was regarded as something foreign to the earthly sphere. And if today we were to coin a name for the way the ego was experienced, we would have to say: man felt not a human but a divine ego.

He might have looked outward to the mountains, to the rocks; he might have looked at everything else on earth and said of it all: This is, this exists. Yet at the same time he would have felt the following: If there were no other existence than that of earth's plants, rivers, mountains and rocks, no human being would have an ego. For what guarantees existence to earthly things and beings could never guarantee it to the ego. They are in different categories.

To repeat: Within himself man felt not a human but divine ego: a drop from the ocean of divinity. And when he wanted to speak about his ego (I say this with the previously-made reservations) he felt it as a creation of the fixed stars; the heaven of the fixed stars was the one sphere sharing its reality. Only because the ego has a similar existence is it able to say, “I am.” If it were able to say “I am” merely according to the level of existence of stone or plant or mountain, the ego would have no right to speak so. Only its starlike nature makes it possible for the ego to say, “I am.”

Again, the human beings of this primeval epoch saw how the rivers flowed and the trees were driven by the wind. But if we regarded the human ego which dwells in the physical body and has an impulse to move about on the earth hither and thither—if we regarded this ego as the active force in movement, as wind is the active force in moving trees, or as anything else of earth is an active force, we would be wrong. The ego is not this kind of outer cause of motion.

In ancient times the teacher in the Mysteries spoke to his pupils somewhat like this: You see how the trees sway, how the river water flows, how the ocean churns. But from neither the moving trees, the flowing rivers, nor the heaving ocean could the ego learn to develop those impulses of motion which human beings display when they carry their bodies over the earth. This the ego can never learn from any moving earthly thing. This the ego can learn only because it is related to the planets, to starry motion. Only from Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so forth, can the ego learn motion. When the ego of its own volition moves upon the earth, it achieves something made possible by its relation to the wheeling world of the stars.

Further, it would have seemed incomprehensible to a man of this ancient epoch if somebody had said: Look how thoughts arise out of your brain! Let us travel backward in time and imagine ourselves with the soul constitution we once had (for we have all passed through lives in ancient India); then confronted by the present-day soul condition, the one which makes people assume that thoughts arise out of the brain. All that modern man believes would appear as complete nonsense. For the ancient human being knew well that thoughts can never spring from brain substance; that it is the sun which calls forth thoughts, and the moon which stills them. It was to the reciprocal action of sun and moon that he ascribed his life of thoughts.

Thus in the first post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Indian time, the divine ego was seen as belonging to the heaven of the fixed stars, to the planetary movements, to the reciprocal action of sun and moon; and what came to it from the earth as transient, the essence of the ego being cosmic-divine.

In Occult Science, an Outline I call the second epoch Ancient Persian. By then the perception of the cosmic ego had grown less vivid; it was subdued. But the people of that age had an intensive experience of the recurrent seasons. (I have recently and repeatedly lectured on the year's course.) Pictorially speaking, the modern human being has become a kind of earthworm, just living from day to day. Indeed he is not even that, for an earthworm comes out of his hole when it rains, while the human being—just lives along. He experiences nothing special; at best some abstract differences: in rain he is uncomfortable without an umbrella, he adjusts himself to snow in winter and sunshine in summer, he goes to the country, and so forth. But he does not live with the course of the year; he lives in a dreadfully superficial way; no longer puts his whole humanness into living.

In the ancient Persian epoch it was different. Man experienced the year's course with his whole being. When the winter solstice arrived he felt: Now the earth soul has united with the earth. The snow which for present-day man is nothing but frozen water was at that time experienced as the garment the earth dons in order to shut itself off from the cosmos and develop an individually-independent life within that cosmos. The human being felt: Now, indeed, the earth soul has so intimately united with the earth, man must turn his soul-nature to what lives in the earth. In other words, the snow cover became transparent for man's soul. Below it he felt the elementary beings which carry the force of plant-seeds through winter into spring.

When spring arrived in ancient Persia, man experienced how the earth breathed out its soul, how it strove to open its soul to the cosmos; and with his feelings and sensations he followed this event. The attachment to the earth developed during the winter he now began to replace with a devotion to the cosmos.

To be sure, man was no longer able to look up to the cosmos as he did during the immediately preceding epoch; no longer able to see in the cosmos all that gave existence, movement and thought to his ego. He said: What in winter unites me with the earth summons me in spring to raise myself into the cosmos. But though he no longer had so intensive a knowledge of his connection with the cosmos as formerly, he felt it as by divination. Just as the ego in the ancient Indian time experienced itself as a cosmic being, so in the ancient Persian time the astral element experienced itself as connected with the course of the year.

Thus man lived with the changing seasons. When in winter his soul perceived the snow blanket below, his mood turned serious; he withdrew into himself; searched (as we express it today) his conscience. When spring returned, he again opened himself to the cosmos with a certain gaiety. At midsummer, the time we now associate with St. John's Day, he surrendered with rapture to the cosmos, not in the clear way of the ancient Indian time, but with the joy of having escaped from the body.

Just as in winter he felt connected with the clever spirits of the earth, so in midsummer he felt connected with the gay spirits dancing and jubilating in the cosmos, and flitting around the earth. I am simply describing what was felt.

Later, during August, and more especially September, the human soul felt it must now return to earth with the forces garnered from the cosmos during its summer withdrawal. With their help it could live more humanly during the winter season.

I repeat: It is a fact that during those ancient times man experienced the year's course with his whole being; considered its spiritual side as his own human concern.

He also felt the importance of training himself, at certain points of the year, in this intensive experience of the seasons; and such training bred impulses for the seasonal festivals. Later on, man would experience them only traditionally, only outwardly. But certain aspects would linger on. For example, the festivals of the summer and winter solstices would keep traces, but merely traces, of ancient, mighty and powerful experiences.

All this is connected with a revolution in the innermost consciousness of man. For ancient India it was quite impossible to speak of a “people,” a “folk.” Today this seems paradoxical; we find it hard to imagine that the feeling for such a thing arose only gradually. To be sure, the conditions of the earth made it necessary, even in the ancient Indian epoch, for inhabitants of the same territory to have closer ties than those living apart. But the concept of a people, the feeling of belonging to a folk, did not exist during the ancient Indian epoch.

Something different prevailed. People had a very vivid feeling for the succession of generations. A boy felt himself the son of his father, the grandson of his grandfather, the great-grandson of his great-grandfather. Of course, things were not dealt with the way we have to describe them with current concepts; but the latter are still appropriate. If we look into the mode of thought of that ancient time, we discover that within a family circle great emphasis was laid on an ability to enumerate one's forebears, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, right down the line to very remote ancestors. A man felt himself as standing within this succession of generations.

As a consequence, the sense of living in the present was little developed. To human beings of the ancient Indian time, an intimate connection with past generations (retained as a caricature in aristocracy's present-day stress on ancestry) seemed self-evident; they needed no family records. Indeed human consciousness itself, instinctively clairvoyant, made connections with a man's ancestry by remembering not merely his own personal experiences, but—almost as vividly—the experiences of his father and grandfather. Gradually these memories grew dim. But human consciousness would continue to experience them through the blood ties.

Thus in ancient times the capacity for feeling oneself within the generations played a significant role. Parallel to it there arose—though slowly—the folk concept, the sense of being part of a people. In ancient Persia it was not yet very pronounced. When a living consciousness of life within the generations, of blood relationship coursing through the centuries, had gradually faded, consciousness focused, instead, on the contemporary folk relationship.

The folk concept rose to its full significance in the third post-Atlantean or Egypto-Chaldean period. Though, during that epoch, awareness of the year's course was already somewhat deadened, there lived, right into the last millennium of the pre-Christian age, a vivid consciousness of the fact that thoughts permeate and govern the world.

In another connection I have already indicated the following: For a human being of the Egyptian period the idea that thoughts arise in us and then extend over things outside would have seemed comparable to the fancy of a man who, after drinking a glass of water, says his tongue produced the water. He is at liberty to imagine that his tongue produced the water, but in truth he draws the water from the entire water mass of the earth, which is a unity. It is only that an especially foolish person, unaware of the connection between the glassful of water and the earth's water mass, overestimates the abilities of his tongue. The people of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch made no similar mistake. They knew that thoughts do not arise in the head; that thoughts live everywhere; that what the human being draws into the vessel of his head as thought comes from the thought ocean of the world.

In that time, though man no longer experienced the visible cosmos in his divine ego, nor the course of the year in his astral nature, he did experience cosmic thoughts, the Logos, in his etheric body. If a member of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch had spoken our language, he would not, like us, have referred to man's physical body as of prime importance. To him it was the result of what lives as thought in the etheric body; was merely an image of human thought.

During that period the folk concept became more and more definite; the human being more and more an earth citizen. The connection between the starry world and his ego had, in his consciousness during this third post-Atlantean cultural period, dwindled greatly. Though astrology still calculated the connection, it was no longer seen in elemental consciousness. The course of the year, so important for the astral body, was no longer sensed in its immediacy. Yet man was still aware of a cosmic thought element.

He had arrived at the point where he sensed his relation to earthly gravity. Not exhaustively so, for he still had a vivid experience of thinking, but perceptibly.

During the Graeco-Latin period this experience of gravity developed more and more. Now the physical body became paramount. Everything has its deep significance at its proper time, and in all the manifestations of Greek culture we see this full, fresh penetration into the physical body. Especially in Greek art. For the early Greeks their bodies were something to rejoice over; the Greeks were like children with new clothes. They lived in their bodies with youthful exuberance.

In the course of the Graeco-Latin period, and particularly during Roman civilization, this fresh experience of the physical body gave way to something like that of a person in a robe of state who knows that wearing it gives him prestige. (Of course, the feeling was not expressed in words.) A Roman individual felt his physical body as a ceremonial robe bestowed by the world order.

The Greek felt tremendous joy that he had been allotted such a body and, after birth, could put it on; and it is this feeling that gives to Greek art, to Greek tragedy, to the epics of Homer, in their human element, insofar as they are connected with the outer physical appearance of man, their particular poetic fire. We have to look for the inner reasons for all psychological facts. Try to live into the joy that gushes forth from Homer's description of Hector or of Achilles. Feel what immense importance he attached to outer appearance.

With the Romans this joy subsided. Everything became settled; men began to grasp things with ordinary consciousness. It was during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch that man first became an earth citizen. The conception of ego, astral body and ether body of earlier times withdrew into indefiniteness. The Greeks still had a clear sense for the truth that thought lives in things. (I have discussed this in Rätsel der Philosophie.) But the perception was gradually superseded by a belief that thought originates in man. In this fashion he grew more and more into his physical body.

Today we do not yet see that this situation began to change in the fifteenth century, at the start of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch; that, since then, we have been gradually growing away from our bodies. We fancy that we feel as the Greeks felt about the human shape, but actually our feeling for it is dull. We have no more than a shadowlike sensation of the “quickfooted Achilles,” and little understanding of how this expression roused Greeks to a direct and striking perception of the hero; so striking that he stood before them in his essential nature. Indeed in all art we have gradually lost the experience of the permeation of the physical body by the soul; whereas in the last pre-Christian centuries the Greek felt how cosmic thought was disappearing and how thought could be taken hold of only by reflecting upon the human being. Presentday man is completely uncertain in regard to the nature of thought; he wavers.

A Greek of the sixth pre-Christian century would have considered it comical if somebody had asked him to solve the scientific problem of the connection of thought with the brain. He would not have seen it as a problem at all. He would have felt as we would feel if, when we picked up a watch, somebody demanded that we speculate philosophically about the connection between watch and hand. Say I investigate the flesh of my hand, then the glass and metal in my watch; then the relation between the flesh of my hand and the glass and metal in my watch; all in order to obtain philosophical insight into the reason why my hand has picked up and holds the watch. Well, if I were to proceed thus, modern consciousness would consider my gropings insane.

Just so it would have appeared insane to Greek consciousness if anyone had attempted, by reference to the nature of thought and the cerebellum, to explain the self-evident fact that man's being uses his brain to lay hold of thoughts. For the Greek this was a direct perception just as, for us, it is a direct perception that the hand takes hold of the watch; we do not consider it necessary to establish a scientific relation between watch and muscle. In the course of time problems arise according to the way things are perceived. For the Greek what we call the connection between thinking and organism was as self-evident as the connection between a watch and the hand that seizes it. He did not speculate about what was obvious. He knew instinctively how to relate his thoughts to himself.

If someone said: Well, there is only a hand; the watch ought to fall down, what really holds it? For the Greek this would have been as absurd as the question: What is it that develops thoughts in the brain? For us the latter has become a problem because we do not know that already we have liberated our thoughts, and are on our way to freeing them from ourselves. Also we do not know how to deal properly with thoughts because, being in the process of growing away from it, we no longer have a firm hold on our physical body.

I should like to use another comparison. We have not only clothes but pockets into which we can put things. This was the situation with the Greeks: their human bodies were something into which they could put thoughts, feelings, will impulses. Today we are uncertain what to do with thoughts, feelings and will impulses. It is as though, in spite of pockets, all our things fell to the ground; or as though, worried about what to do with then, we lugged them about in our hands. In other words, we are ignorant of the nature of our own organism, do not know what to do with our soul life in regard to it, contrive queer ideas with respect to psycho-parallelism, and so forth. I am saying all this to show how we have gradually become estranged from our physical bodies.

This fact is illustrated by the whole course of humanity's evolution. If we again turn our gaze to the ancient Indian time when the human being looked back through the succession of generations to a distant ancestor, we see that he felt no need to search for the gods anywhere but within the generations. Since, for the Hindu, man himself was divine, he remained within human evolution while looking for the divine in his forebears. Indeed the field of his search was precisely mankind's evolution.

There followed the time which culminated in the Egypto-Chaldean culture, when the folk concept rose to prominence and man beheld the divine in the various folk gods, in that which lived in blood relationships, not successively as before, but spatially side by side.

Then came the Greek period when man no longer felt god-imbued, when he became an earth citizen. Now for the first time there arose the necessity to seek the gods above the earth, to look up to the gods. By gazing at the stars, ancient man knew of the gods. But the Greek needed, in addition to the stars, the involvement of his personality in order to behold those gods; and this need kept increasing within mankind.

Today man must more and more develop the faculty of disregarding the physical, disregarding the physical starry sky, disregarding the physical course of the year, disregarding his sensations when confronting objects. For he can no longer behold his thoughts in matter. He must acquire the possibility of discovering the divine-spiritual as something special above and beyond the physical sense world before he can find it again within the sense world.

To emphasize this truth energetically is the task of anthroposophical spiritual science. Thus anthroposophical spiritual science grows out of the entire earthly evolution of mankind. We must always remember that Anthroposophy is not something arbitrarily created and placed as a program into mankind's evolution but, rather, something suited to our epoch, something resulting from the inner necessities of mankind's long history.

The fact that materialism holds sway over our age is, really, only a lagging behind. Man not only became an earth citizen in the Greek sense; today he is already so estranged from his earth citizenship he no longer understands how to handle his soul-spirit being in relation to his body—it is one of the needs of the age for the human being to behold spirit and soul in himself without the physical. Side by side with this deep soul-need, there exists materialism as an Ahrimanic stopping short at something natural in the age of the Greeks and Romans when one could still behold the spiritual in the physical, but not natural today.

Having remained stationary, we can no longer see the spiritual in the physical; we consider only the physical as such. This is materialism. It means that a current hostile to development has entered evolution. Mankind shuns the coining of new concepts; it prefers to continue on with the old. We must overcome this hostility toward development; must open ourselves to it. Then we shall acquire a quite natural relationship to anthroposophical growth of spirit, and pass over from antiquated needs to the truly modern need of mankind: namely, to raise ourselves to the spiritual.

In today's lecture I have tried to gain a viewpoint from which you can see how, for the present age, in the evolution of mankind, Anthroposophy constitutes a real necessity.

One result of anthroposophical spiritual science—once it has been absorbed into civilization—will be a fructification of the arts. Precisely in our time the human inclination toward the artistic has diminished to a marked degree. Even in anthroposophical circles not everyone thoroughly comprehends the fact that Anthroposophy strives to foster, in every possible way, the artistic element.

This is of course connected with modern man's aforementioned aversion to the artistic. Today the positive way in which Goethe and many of his contemporaries sensed the unity of spiritual life and art is no longer experienced. Gradually the conception has arisen that art is something which does not necessarily belong to life, but is added to it as a kind of luxury. With such assumptions prevailing, the upshot is not to be wondered at.

In times when an ancient clairvoyance made for a living connection with the spiritual world, the artistic was considered absolutely vital to civilization. We may feel antipathy for the frequently pompous, stiff character of Oriental and African art forms; but that is not the point at issue. In this and further lectures we shall be concerned, not with our reaction to any particular art form, but rather with the way in which man's attitude places all the arts within the framework of civilization. The necessity is to see a certain connection between today's spiritual life and the attitude toward art previously alluded to.

If today, as is customary, one sees man as the highest product of nature, as a being brought forth at a certain point in earthly evolution (part of an evolutionary series fashioning a variety of beings), one falsifies the position of man in respect to the world; falsifies it because man has, in truth, no right to the self-satisfaction which would enter his soul, inevitably, as an elemental impulse of soul, if he were indeed only the terminal point of natural creation. If the animals had developed in the way currently assumed by natural science, then man, as the highest product of nature, would have to content himself with this status in the cosmos; he would have no call whatsoever to create something transcending nature.

For instance, if in art one wishes to create, as the Greeks did, an idealized human being, one has to be dissatisfied with what nature offers. For, if satisfied, one could never inject into nature something which surpasses her. Similarly, if satisfied with the nightingale's and lark's song, one could never compose sonatas and symphonies; such a combination of sounds would seem untrue; the true, the natural, being exhaustively expressed by the birds.

The naturalistic world-conception demands that those who wish to create something content themselves with imitations of the natural. For it is only when we envisage a world other than the natural one that we can see a transcending of nature as anything but dishonesty and sham.

We must grasp this fact. But present-day human beings do not draw the logical conclusion from naturalism as it affects the arts. What would happen if they did? They would have to demand that people imitate nature; nothing else. Well, but if a Greek prior to Aeschylus had been shown a mere imitation of nature, he would have said something like this: “Why all that? Why let actors speak as people do in everyday life? If you wish to hear such things, go into the street. Why present them on the stage? It is quite unnecessary. The street is a far better place to find out what people say to one another in ordinary life.” In other words, only a person who participates in spiritual life has an impulse for a creative activity transcending the merely natural. Otherwise, where would the impulse come from? In all ages the human souls in which the artistic element flourished have had a definite relation to the spiritual world. It was out of a spirit-attuned state that the artistic urge proceeded. And this relation to the spiritual world will be, forever, the prerequisite for genuine creativity. Any age strictly naturalistic must, to be true to itself, become inartistic, philistine. Unfortunately our own age has an immense talent for philistinism.

Take the individual arts. Pure naturalism can never create an artistic architecture, a high art of building. Today the “art” of building leads away from art. For if people do not have a longing to assemble in places where the spiritual is fostered, they will not construct houses suitable for spiritual impulses, but merely utilitarian buildings. And what would they say of the latter? “Well,” they would say, “we build in order to shelter our bodies, to protect the family; otherwise we would have to camp out in the open”—the idea of utility being primary. Though such an attitude is not, perhaps, because of embarrassment, generally admitted, it is admitted in particular cases. Today many people are offended if the architect of a residence sacrifices anything of expediency to the principle of the beautiful, the aesthetic; and one often hears the statement: “To build artistically is too expensive.” People did not always think like that; certainly not in those ages when human souls experienced a kinship with the spiritual world. Then the feeling about man and his relation to the universe found expression in words somewhat like these: “Here I stand in the world, but as I stand here with a human form in which dwell soul and spirit, I carry within me something which has no existence in purely natural surroundings. When soul and spirit leave this body, then the relation between it and my physical environment will become manifest; this environment will consume my corporeal part. Only on a corpse do the laws of nature take effect.” Which is to say that as long as the human being is not a corpse, as long as he lives here on earth, he can, through his spiritual heritage, through soul and spirit, preserve from the action of physicality the substances and forces which the corpse will eventually claim.

I have often remarked that eating is not the simple process ordinarily imagined. We eat, and the foods entering our organism are products of nature, natural substances and forces. Because they are foreign to us, our organism would not tolerate them if we could not transform them into something totally different. The energies and laws by means of which food is changed do not belong to the physical earthly environment. We bring them with us from another world. These facts and much else were recognized, understood, when people had a relationship with the spiritual world. Today, however, human beings think it is the laws of nature that are active in the roast beef when it rests on the plate, when it touches the tongue, when it has reached the stomach, intestines, blood; they see the laws of nature active everywhere. The fact that roast beef encounters spirit-soul laws which man himself has brought from another world into this one, and which transform it into something completely different—this fact has no place in the consciousness of a merely naturalistic civilization. Paradoxical as it may sound, materialists feel embarrassed to state bluntly the above. Yet they live with this attitude of mind.

It affects our whole artistic attitude. For, in the final analysis, why do we build houses for ourselves today? To be protected while eating roast beef! Well, this is only one detail. But all contemporary thinking tends in that direction.

By contrast, human beings of the past who had a living consciousness of their relationship to the spiritual universe erected their most valuable buildings to protect the human soul against inroads from their physical environment. Of course, when I use modern words in this connection they sound paradoxical. In ancient times people did not express themselves so abstractly. Things were felt, they were sensed subconsciously. But people's feelings, their unconscious sensations, were spiritual. Today we clothe these feelings in well-defined words which convey, not inadequately, what souls experienced in more ancient times. They were aware that, when a man has passed through an earth life, he lays aside his physical body; whereupon soul and spirit must find their way back into the spiritual universe. Consequently, these people were concerned as to how a soul fares after death: how it can find its way back into spiritual worlds.

Today people do not worry about such things, but there were times when this problem of means was a fundamental concern; when (for this is pertinent) people said to themselves: Outside, there are stones; outside, there are plants; outside, animals. When absorbed by man, substances derived from stones, plants, animals, are worked over by the physical body. Its spiritual forces can overcome some minerals—for example, salt. Similarly, it possesses the spirit-soul forces necessary for the overcoming of purely plant constituents, and can transform the animal element into the human element. All of which points up the fact that the physical body is a mediator between the human being who comes down from spiritual worlds and this so alien earth. Thanks to the physical body we can stand upon this earth; can exist among minerals, plants and animals.

But when the physical body has been laid aside, then the naked soul enters a state fitted only for the spiritual world; and having laid aside its body must ask: How can I pass through the impurity of the animals in order to escape from earthly regions? How pass through the plant element which absorbs, attracts and condenses light? How—accustomed to living amid earthly plant-condensed light—pass out into far reaches of quite another condition of light? How, when I can no longer dissolve them through body-juices, pass beyond the soul-impeding minerals massed on every side?

In ancient times, during mankind's evolution, these were religious-cultural anxieties. People pondered on what they had to do for souls, especially dear ones, to help them find the lines, planes, forms, by means of which they could reach the spiritual world. Thus was developed the art of erecting burial vaults, monuments, mausoleums, which embodied in their forms, their lines and planes, that which the discarnate soul requires if it is to be unimpeded by animals, plants and minerals when ready to find its way back to the spiritual world.

These edifices took their characteristic forms directly from the cult of the dead; and if we wish to comprehend how they arose, we must try to understand how the soul, deprived of its body, finds its way back to the spiritual world of its origin. The belief prevailed that, because the soul has a certain relation to the discarded body, it can find the path out into the world of spirit through the architectural forms vaulting above it.

This conviction was one of the fundamental impulses behind the development of ancient architectural forms. Insofar as these forms were artistic and not merely utilitarian, they took their rise from edifices for the dead. In other words, artistic construction was intimately connected with the cult of the dead; or, as in the case of Greece, with the fact that each temple was built for Athena, Apollo or some other god. For just as the human soul was thought to be incapable of unfolding amid minerals, plants and animals, so the divine-spiritual natures of Apollo, of Zeus, of Athena, were thought to be incapable of unfolding amid external nature unless the spirit of man created for them certain congenial forms. Only if we study the way the soul is related to the cosmos can we understand measurements and proportions in the complicated architectural forms of the ancient Orient; forms which are living proof of the fact that the human beings from whose imaginations they sprang said to themselves: “Man in his inner being does not belong to the earth; he is of another world, therefore needs forms which belong to him in his character as a native of that other world.”

No true historical art form can be understood from merely naturalistic principles. To understand we must ask: What lies behind and is inherent in it? For example, here is the human body, the indwelling human soul. The soul, through its inherent nature, desires to unfold in all directions; and the way it would unfold, disregarding the body, the way it desires to carry its being out into the cosmos, becomes an architectural form.

O soul, if you wish to leave the physical body in order to regain a relationship with the cosmos, what aspect will you take on?—this was the question. The forms of architecture were, so to speak, answers.

Within the evolution of mankind this impulse toward outer expression of inner needs continued to work for a long time. But of course today, during the age of abstractions, everything takes on a different appearance. Which does not mean that we should wish to retrieve the past; only to understand it.

Another custom of the past, though not a very ancient past, asking to be understood: churches surrounded by graves. Not every person could have an individual tomb; the church was the common mausoleum. Therefore it was the church which had to answer, through its form, the ancient question of the soul: How [to] unfold, how [to] escape in the right way, from the body connecting me with the physical world? Ecclesiastical architecture bodies forth, as it were, the desire of the soul for its right after-death form.

To repeat: past cultural elements can be understood only in connection with the feelings and intuitions which people had out of the spiritual world. To understand a cemetery-surrounded church we must develop a sense for the feelings which lived in the original builders when they asked: Dear souls leaving us in death, what forms do you wish us to erect so that, while still hovering near your body, you can take them on and be helped? The answer was ecclesiastical architecture, the artistic element in which was directed toward the end of earth life. Certainly, all this undergoes a metamorphosis. What proceeds from the cult of the dead can become the highest expression of life (as in what we attempted for the Goetheanum). But one must understand things; must understand that architecture unfolds out of the principle of the soul's escape from the body, out of the principle of the soul's growing beyond the body, after passing through the portal of death.

And if we look in the opposite direction, toward birth, toward man's passage from the spiritual into the physical world, then I must tell you something which may make you smile, a little, inwardly; or, perhaps, you won't smile; in which case I would say, Thank goodness! For what I am going to say is true. You see, when the soul arrives on earth in order to enter its body, it has come down from spirit-soul worlds in which there are no spatial forms. Thus the soul knows spatial forms only after its bodily experience, only while the after-effects of space still linger on.

But though the world from which the soul descends has no spatial forms or lines, it does have color intensities, color qualities. Which is to say that the world man inhabits between death and a new birth (and which I have frequently and recently described) is a soul-permeated, spirit-permeated world of light, of color, of tone; a world of qualities, not quantities; a world of intensities rather than extensions. Thus in certain primitive, almost-forgotten civilizations, they who descended and dipped into a physical body had the sensation that through it he entered into relation with a physical environment, grew into space. To him the physical body was completely attuned to space, and he said to himself: “This is foreign to me, it was not so in the spirit-soul world. Here I am under the joke of three dimensions [While the book says joke, a better translation of ‘hineingespannt’ might be yoke! – e.Ed.]—dimensions which had no meaning before my descent into the physical world. But color, tone harmonies, tone melodies, have very much meaning in the spiritual world.”

In those ancient epochs when such realities were sensed, man had a strong desire not to take into his being what was essentially foreign to him. At his most perceptive, he sensed that his head had been given him by the spiritual world. For, as I have often remarked, our trunk and limbs in one life become our head in the next; and so on, from life to life. Ancient man felt the adjustment of his lower body to gravity, to the forces circling the earth; felt its imprisonment in space; and felt that what entered his physical body from his environment did not befit him as a human being bearing, within, an impulse from spiritual worlds. He must do something to bring about a harmonization with his new home.

That was why he carried down from spiritual worlds the colors of his garments. Just as, in ancient times, architecture pointed to the end of earth life, to the death-pole, so in times when man had a sense for the artistic meaning of the colors and styles of dress, the art of costuming pointed to the beginning of human life, to the birth-pole.

Thus (I repeat) ancient garments reflected something brought down from pre-earthly existence, reflected a predilection for the colorful, for harmony; and we need not be astonished that at a time when insight into the pre-earthly has withered, the art of costuming has shriveled into dilettantism. For modern clothing hardly conveys the feeling that man wants to wear it because of the way he lived in pre-earthly existence. But if you study the characteristically vivid garments of flourishing primitive cultures you will see that clothing is or can be a fully justified and great art through which man carries something of his pre-earthly life into earth life; just as, through architecture, he would receive impressions relevant to space-free, post-earthly conditions.

Peoples who still wear national costumes express, through them, the pre-earthly relationships which led them into a certain folk community. Their garments remember, as it were, their appearance in heaven.

Often, to find meaningful costumes, you must go back to more ancient times. And you will see not only that there flourished, then, painters, sculptors, and so forth, but that people of other occupations, during the whole period, were highly artistic.

If you look at Raphael's paintings, you will see that Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary are clothed quite differently; also that in all his works Raphael gives Mary Magdalene—essentially—her characteristic garment, and the Virgin Mary hers. He did this because he still experienced in living tradition the fact that a soul-spirit being, brought down from heaven, expresses himself through his garments.

Here lies the meaning of costuming. Modern man may say that clothes derive significance through the fact that they provide warmth. Well, certainly, that is one of their materialistic meanings. But it creates no aesthetic forms. Artistry arises always and only through a relation to the spiritual.

This mode in which things stand to the spiritual must be found again if we would penetrate to the truly artistic. And since Anthroposophy takes hold of the spiritual in its immediacy, it can have a fructifying influence upon art. The great secrets of the world and of life which must be revealed out of anthroposophical research will prove to be artistic; will culminate in art.

In this connection we must perceive something anatomical, already referred to. That part of the human organism which was not head during one earth-life transforms itself, dynamically, into head in the subsequent life. Then (this is self-evident) it is filled out with earth-substance. I have often explained that we must not make the silly objection: The physical body having perished, how can a head arise from it? The other objections brought against Anthroposophy are not, as a rule, much more clever; and this one is really cheap. But we are not concerned, here, with the physical filling out; only with a force relationship which can pass through the spiritual world. The relationship of forces which today inheres in all parts of our physical organism below the head (whether those forces move vertically or horizontally, whether they are held together or expand) has a spherical tendency, becoming thereby the force relationship of our head in our next earth life. When the metamorphosis of legs, feet and so forth into head takes place, the higher hierarchies cooperate. For all heavenly spirits work together. Small wonder, then, that the top of the head appears as an image of the vast space arching spherically above us. And that the adjacent area is an image of the atmosphere circling round the earth; of atmospheric forces. One might say: In the upper part of the head we have a faithful image of the heavens; in the middle, an adaptation of the head to forces which triumph in the chest, to all that encircles the earth. For in our chest we need the earth-encircling air, need the light weaving round the earth, and so forth. The whole organism below the head has no form relationship to the head's spherical form—it has a relationship of substance, not of form; but our chest has a definite relationship to our nose, indeed to everything pertaining to the middle part of the head. And if we descend to the mouth, we find that it is related to the third member of the human threefoldness, namely, to the organism devoted to digestion, nutrition, and motion.

We see how what has passed through the heavens to become head on earth (out of the previous headless body-formation) is in its majestic spherical form adapted to the heavens; whereas the middle part comes from what man is through earth-encircling orbits; and the mouth's formation from what earthly man is through earthly substance and the power of gravity.

Thus, in terms of European mythology, the head of the human being contains, above, as it were, Asgard, the castle of the gods; in its middle part, Midgard, man's earthly home; and, below, what also belongs to the earth, Jotunheim, home of the giants.

These interrelationships do not become clear through abstract concepts; they become clear only if we perceive the human head artistically, in relation to its spiritual origin; only when we see in it heaven, earth and hell. Not hell as the abode of the devil; hell as the home of the giants, Jotunheim. There lives in the head the entire human being: a whole.

We look at a person in the right way if we see in the spherical form of the upper part of the head the purest memory of his previous incarnation; if we see in the middle part, in the lower portion of the eyes and in nose and ears, a memory dulled by the atmosphere of earth; and in the formation of the mouth, that part of his previous human formation conquered by earth, banished to earth. In the configuration of his forehead the human being brings with him, in a certain sense, what has been passed on to him karmically from his previous earth-life. In the formation of his chin he is conquered by the earthly life of the present age; he expresses gentleness or obstinacy in his chin formation. If his previous organization, minus head, had not transformed itself into his present head, he would not have a chin at all. But in the formation of mouth and chin all current earth impulses are so strong that they press and constrain the past into the present.

Therefore no artistic person will say: That human being is striking because of his prominent forehead. Rather, he will pay special attention to its spherical shape, to the formation of its planes. Its protrusion or recession is less important than its spherical shape.

In regard to the chin he will say: It is advancing, obstinate and pointed; or: It gently recedes. Here we begin to understand the form of man out of the whole universe; not merely out of the present universe—there we find little—but out of the temporal universe, then the extra-temporal.

Thus through anthroposophical considerations we are driven toward the artistic element, and see that philistinism is in no way compatible with a true and living apprehension of Anthroposophy. That is why inartistic people find it so difficult to come into harmony with the whole of this teaching. Though, abstractly, they might with pleasure recognize their present life as the fulfillment of previous earth lives, they are unable to enter intimately into the forms which reveal themselves in direct artistic fashion to spiritual perception, creating and transforming: a necessary activity for anyone desiring to unite with the essential living anthroposophical element.

This is the foundation I wished to lay down in order to show how the unspiritual character of our time manifests in the most varied spheres; among others, in a widespread unspiritual attitude toward art. If mankind desires to save itself from the unspiritual, one factor in its rescue will be a reversal of this position.

A true life in the artistic: to this desirable end Anthroposophy can show the way.

Yesterday I tried to show how the anthroposophical world-conception stresses, more intensively than is possible under the influence of materialism, the artistic element; and how Anthroposophy feels about architecture, about the art of costuming (though this may call forth smiles), and about sculpture as dealing artistically with the form of man himself, whose head, in a certain sense, points to the whole human being.

Let us review the most important aspects of this threefold artistic perception of the world. In architectural forms we see what the human soul expects when it leaves the physical body at death or otherwise. During earth life the soul is (so I said) accustomed to enter into spatial relations with its environment through the physical body, and to experience spatial forms. But these are only outer forms. When at death the human soul leaves the physical world, it tries, as it were, to impress its own form on space; looks for the lines, planes and forms which can enable it to grow out of space and into the spiritual world. These are the forms of architecture insofar as they are artistic. Thus, if we would understand architecture's artistic element we must consider the soul's space-needs after it has left the three-dimensional body and three-dimensional world.

The artistic element in costuming represents something else; and I have described the joy of primitive people in their garments, and their sense—on dipping down into the physical body—of finding in it a sheath which did not harmonize with what they had experienced during their sojourn in the spiritual world; and how out of this deprivation there arose an instinctive longing to create clothes which in color and pattern corresponded to their memory of pre-earthly existence. The costumes of primitive peoples represent what might be called an unskillful copying of the astral nature of man as it existed before he entered earthly life.

Thus a contrast. Whereas architecture shows the human soul's striving on its departure from the body, the art of costuming shows the human soul's striving after descent into the physical world.

Which brings us to a consideration of sculpture.

If we feel, intimately, the significance of the formation of man's head (my last point yesterday) as a metamorphosis of his entire body formation minus head, during his previous incarnation; if we see it as the work of the higher hierarchies on the force relationship of a previous life, then we understand the head, especially its upper part. If, on the other hand, we see correctly the middle of man's head, his nose and lower eyes, then we understand how this part is adapted to his chest formation, for the nose is connected with the chest's breathing. And if we see correctly the lower head, mouth and chin, then we understand that, even in the head, there is a part adapted to the purely earthly. In this way we can understand the whole human form. Furthermore, the super-sensible human being manifests himself directly in the arching of the upper skull, and the protrusion or recession of the lower skull, the facial parts. For an intimate connection exists between the vaulting of the head and the heavens; also an inner connection between the middle of the face and everything circling the earth as air and ether; also between mouth and chin and man's limb and metabolic system, the last an indication of how man is fettered to earth. In this way we can understand the whole human form as an imprint of the spiritual on the immediate present; which means seeing man artistically.

To sum up: in sculpture we behold, spiritually, the human being as he is placed into the present; in architecture we behold something connected with his departure from the body; and in the art of costuming something connected with his entrance into that body. Which means a sharp contrast: whereas architecture begins with the erection of tombs, sculpture shows how man, through his earthly form's direct participation in the spiritual, constantly overcomes the earthly-naturalistic element, how, in every detail of his form and in its entirety, he is an expression of the spiritual.

Thus we have considered those arts which are concerned with spatial forms and which illustrate the different ways in which the human soul is related to the world through the physical body.

If we approach a step nearer the spaceless, we pass from sculpture to painting, an art experienced in the right way only if we take into full account its special medium.

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantean age, painting has assumed a character leading to naturalism. Its prime manifestation is the loss of a deeper understanding for color. The intelligence employed in contemporary painting is a falsified sculptural one. Painters see even human beings this way. The cause is space-perspective, an aspect of painting developed only after the fifth post-Atlantean period. Painters express through lines the fact that something lies in the background, something in the foreground; their purpose being to conjure up on canvas an impression of spatially formed objects. But in doing so they deny the first and foremost attribute of their special medium. A true painter does not create in space, but on the plane, in color, and it is nonsense for him to strive for the spatial.

Please, do not believe me so fantastic as to object to a feeling for space; in the evolution of mankind the development of spatial perspective on the plane was a necessity; that fact is self-evident. But it must now be overcome. This does not mean that in the future painters should be blind to spatial perspective, only that, while understanding it, they should return to color-perspective, employ color-perspective.

To accomplish this we must go beyond theoretic comprehension; the artistic impulse does not spring from theory; it requires something more forceful, something elemental. Fortunately it can be provided. For that purpose I suggest that you look again at some words of mine about the world of color as reported excellently by Albert Steffen in the weekly Das Goetheanum.¹ (The report reads better than the original lectures.) This is the first aspect.

I shall now deal with the second problem.

In nature we see objects which can be counted, weighed and measured; in short, objects dealt with in physics. They appear in various colors. Color, however—this should have become perfectly clear to anthroposophists—color is something spiritual. Now we do see colors in certain natural entities which are not spiritual; that is, in minerals. Recent physicists have made matters easier for themselves by saying that colors cannot inhere in dead substances because colors are mental; they exist within the mind only; outside, material atoms vibrating in dead matter affect eye, nerve, and something else undetermined; as a result of which colors arise in the soul.

This explanation shows physicists at a loss in regard to the problem of color. To throw light on it, let us consider from a certain aspect the colorful dead mineral world.

As pointed out, we do see colors in purely physical things which can be counted, measured, weighed on scales. But what is perceived in physics does not give us colors. We may employ number, measure and weight to our heart's content: we will not arrive at color. That is why physicists say that colors exist only in the mind.

I would like to explain by way of an image. Picture to yourselves that I hold in my left hand a red sheet, in my right a green one, and that with these colored sheets I carry out certain movements. First I cover the red with the green, then the green with the red, making these motions alternately; and in order to give them more character do something additional: move the green upward, the red downard. Say I have today carried out this maneuvre. Now let three weeks pass, at which time I bring before you not a green and red sheet, but two white sheets, and repeat the movements. You immediately remember that, contrary to my present use of white sheets, three weeks ago I produced certain visual impressions with a red and a green sheet. For politeness' sake let us assume that all of you have such a vivid imagination that, in spite of my moving white sheets, you see before you, through recollecting phantasy, the colored phenomenon of three weeks ago, forget all about the white sheets and, because I carry out the same motions, see the same color harmonies called forth, three weeks ago, with the red and green. Because I carry out the same gestures, by association you see what you saw three weeks ago.

The case is similar when we see in nature, for instance, a green precious stone. Only, the jewel is not dependent on this moment's soul-phantasy; it appeals to a phantasy concentrated in our eye, for this human eye with its blood and nerve fibers is in truth constructed by phantasy; it is the result of an effective imagination. And inasmuch as our eye is an organ imbued with phantasy, we cannot perceive a green gem in any other way than that in which, in the immeasurably distant past, it was spiritually constructed out of the green color of the spiritual world. The moment we confront a green precious stone, we transport our eye back into ages long past, and green appears because at that time divine-spiritual beings created this substance through a purely spiritual green. The moment we see green, red, blue, yellow, or any other color in a precious stone, we look back into an infinitely distant past. For (to repeat for emphasis) in beholding colors, we do not merely perceive what is contemporary, we look back into distant time-perspectives. Thus it is quite impossible to see a colored jewel merely in the present, just as it is impossible, while standing at the foot of a mountain, to see in close proximity the ruin at its top; being removed from it, we have to see it in perspective.

In confronting a topaz, say, we look back into time-perspective; look back upon the primal foundation of earthly creation, before the Lemurian epoch of evolution, and see this precious stone created out of the spiritual; that is why it appears yellow. Physics (I have characterized a recent stand) does something absurd. It places behind the world swirling atoms which are supposed to produce colors within us, when all the time it is divine-spiritual beings, creative in the infinitely distant past, who call forth, through colored minerals, a living memory of primeval acts of creativity.

And we can press on to the plant world.

Every spring, when a green carpet of plants is spread over the earth, whoever is able to understand this emergence of greenness sees not merely the present, but also the ancient Sun existence when the plant world was created out of the spiritual, in greenness. We see both mineral and plant colors in the right way when they stimulate us to see in nature the gods' primeval creative activity.

This requires an artistic living with color, which involves experiencing the plane as such. If someone covers the plane with blue, we should sense a retreat, a drawing back; if with red or yellow, we should feel an approach, a pressing forward. In other words, we acquire color-perspective instead of linear perspective: a sense for the plane, for the withdrawal and surging forward of color. In painting, the linear perspective which tries to create an impression of something essentially sculptural upon the plane falsifies; what must be acquired is a sense for the movement of color: intensive rather than extensive. Thus, if a true painter wishes to depict something aggressive, something eager to jump forward, he uses yellow-red; if something quiet, something retreating into the distance, blue-violet. Intensive color-perspective! A study of the old masters reveals that some early Renaissance painters still had what belonged to all pre-Renaissance painters: a feeling for color-perspective. Only with the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean period did linear perspective displace color-perspective.

It is through color-perspective that painting gains a relationship to the spiritual. Strange that today painters chiefly ask themselves: Can we by rendering space more spatial transcend space? Then they try to depict, in a materialistic manner, a fourth dimension. But the fourth dimension can exist only through annihilation of the third, somewhat as debts annihilate wealth. For we do not, on leaving three-dimensional space, enter a four-dimensional space; or, better said, we enter a four-dimensional space which is two-dimensional, because the fourth dimension annihilates the third; only two remain as reality. If we rise from matter's three dimensions to the etheric element, we find everything oriented two-dimensionally, and can understand the etheric only if we conceive of it so. Now you may demur: Yes, but in the etheric I move from here to there, which is to say three-dimensionally. Very well, but the third dimension has no significance for the etheric, only the other two dimensions. The third dimension expresses itself through red, yellow, blue, violet, in the way explained; for in the etheric it is not the third dimension which changes, but color. Regardless of where the plane is placed, the colors change accordingly. Only then can we live with and in color; live two-dimensionally; rise from the spatial arts to those which, like painting, are two-dimensional. We overcome the merely spatial. Our feelings have no relation to the three space-dimensions; only our will. By their very nature, feelings are bound within two dimensions. That is why they are best represented by two-dimensional painting.

You see, we have to struggle free from three-dimensional matter if we would advance from architecture, costuming as an art, and sculpture. Painting is an art which man can experience inwardly. Whether he creates as a painter or just lives in and enjoys a painting, it is a soul event. He experiences inner by outer; experiences color-perspective. We cannot say, as in the case of architecture, that the soul is striving to create the forms it needs when it gazes back into the body; nor, as in the case of sculpture, that the soul is trying to depict man's shape in such a way that it is placed into space full of present meaning. None of this concerns painting. It makes no sense in painting to speak of anything as inside or outside; of the soul as inside or outside. In experiencing color the soul is within the spiritual. Really, what is experienced in painting—despite the imperfections of pigments—is the soul's free moving about in the cosmos.

With music it is different. Now we do not merge inner with outer, but enter directly into that which the soul experiences as the spiritual or psycho-spiritual; leave space entirely. Music is line-like, one-dimensional; is experienced one-dimensionally in the line of time. In music man experiences the world as his own. Now the soul does not assert something it needs upon descending into or leaving the physical; rather it experiences something which lives and vibrates here and now, on earth, in its own soul-spirit nature. Studying the secrets of music, we can discover what the Greeks, who knew a great deal about these matters, meant by the lyre of Apollo. What is experienced musically is really man's hidden adaptation to the inner harmonic-melodic relationships of cosmic existence out of which he was shaped. His nerve fibers, ramifications of the spinal cord, are marvelous musical strings with a metamorphosed activity. The spinal cord culminating in the brain, and distributing its nerve fibers throughout the body, is the lyre of Apollo. Upon these nerve fibers the soul-spirit man is “played” within the earthly sphere. Thus man himself is the world's most perfect instrument; and he can experience artistically the tones of an external musical instrument to the degree that he feels this connection between the sounding of strings of a new instrument, for example, and his own coursing blood and nerve fibers. In other words, man, as nerve man, is inwardly built up of music, and feels it artistically to the degree that he feels its harmonization with the mystery of his own musical structure.

Thus, in devoting himself to the musical, man appeals to his earth-dwelling soul-spirit nature. The discovery by anthroposophical vision of the mysteries of this nature will have a fructifying effect, not just on theory, but upon actual musical creation.

In discussing the various arts I have not been theorizing. It is not theorizing when I say: In beholding the lifeless material world in color we stir cosmic memory: and through anthroposophical vision learn to understand how in precious stones, in colored objects of all kinds, we call to mind the creative acts of the primordially active gods; and feel, therefore, the enthusiasm which only an experience of the spiritual kindles. This is no theorizing; this permeates the soul with inner force. Nor does any theory of art emerge therefrom. Only artistic creation and enjoyment are stimulated. For true art is an expression of man's search for a relationship with the spiritual, whether the spiritual longed for when his soul leaves the body, or the spiritual which he desires to remember when he dips down into a body, or the spiritual to which he feels more related than to his natural surroundings, or the spiritual as manifested in colors when outside and inside lose their separateness and the soul moves through the cosmos, freely, swimming and hovering, as it were, experiencing its own cosmic life, existing everywhere; or (our last consideration) the spiritual as expressed in earth life, in the relationship between man's soul-spirit and the cosmic, in music.

Which summary brings us to the world of poetry and drama.

Often in the past I have called attention to the way poetry was felt in ancient times when man still had a living relationship to the spirit-soul world, when poetry, including poetic dramas, by reason of that fact, was artistic through and through. Yesterday I pointed out that in artistic ages it would not have been considered sensible for playwrights to copy on the stage the way Smith and Jones move in the market place of Gotham or at home, inasmuch as their movements and conversation, there, are much richer than in any stage representation; that it would have seemed absurd, for instance, to the Greeks of the classical age; they never could have understood naturalism's strange attempt to imitate nature right down to “realistic” stage sets. Just as it would not be true painting if we tried to project color into three-dimensional space instead of honoring its own dynamics, so it is not stage art if we have no artistic feeling for its own particular medium. Actually a thorough-going naturalism would preclude a stage room with three walls and an audience in front of it. There are no such rooms; in winter we would freeze to death in them. To act entirely naturalistically one would have to close the stage with a fourth wall and play behind it. But how many people would buy tickets to a play enacted on a stage closed on four sides? Though speaking in extremes, I refer to a reality.

Now I must draw your attention again to the way Homer begins his Iliad: “Sing, oh Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, Son of Peleus.” This is no mere phrase. Homer experienced in a positive way the need to raise himself up to the level of a super-earthly divine-spiritual being who would make use of his body in artistic creation. Epic poetry points to the upper gods, those considered female because they transmitted fructifying forces: the Muses. Homer had to offer himself up to these upper gods in order to bring to expression, in the events of his great poem, the thought element of the cosmos. Epic poetry always means letting the upper gods speak; means putting one's person at their disposal. Homer begins his Odyssey this way: “Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who wandered afar,” meaning Odysseus. Never would it have occurred to him to impose upon the people something which he himself had seen or thought out. Why do what everybody can do for himself? Homer put his organism at the disposal of the upper divine-spiritual beings that they might express through him how they perceived earthly human relationships. Out of such a collaboration arises epic poetry.

And the art of the drama? It originated—we need only to think of the period prior to Aeschylus—from a presentation of the god Dionysus working up out of the depths. At first it was Dionysus alone, then Dionysus and his helpers, a chorus grouped around him as a reflection of what is carried out, not by human beings, but by the subterranean gods, gods of will, making use of human beings to bring to manifestation not the human but divine will. Only gradually, in Greece, as man's connection with the spiritual fell into oblivion, did the divine action depicted on the stage turn into purely human action. The process took place between the time of Aeschylus, when divine impulses still penetrated human beings, and the time of Euripides, when men appeared on the stage as men, though still bearing super-earthly impulses. Real naturalism became possible only in modern times.

In poetry and drama man must find his way back to the spiritual.

Thus we may say in summary: Epic poetry turns to the upper gods, drama to the lower gods. True drama shows the divine world lying below the earth, the chthonic world, rising up onto the earth for the reason that man can make himself into an instrument for the action of this netherworld. In contrast, epic poetry sees the upper spiritual world sink down; the Muse descends and, making use of man through his head, proclaims man's earthly accomplishments or else those out in the universe. In drama the subterranean will of the gods rises up from the depths, making use of human bodies in order to give free reign to their wills.

One might say: Here we have the fields of earthly existence: out of the clouds descends the divine Muse of epic art; out of earthly depths there rise, like vapor and smoke, the Dionysian, chthonic divine-spiritual powers, working their way upward through men's wills. We have to penetrate earth regions to see how the dramatic element rises like a volcano, and the epic element sinks down from above, like a blessing of rain. And it is right here on this same plane with ourselves that the cosmic element is enticed and made gay, joyous, full of laughter, through nymphs and fire spirits; right here that the messengers of the upper gods cooperate with the lower: right here in the middle region that man becomes lyrical. Now man does not feel the dramatic element rising up from below, nor the epic element sinking down from above; he experiences the lyrical element living on the same plane as himself: a delicate, sensitive, spiritual element, which does not rain down upon forests nor erupt like volcanoes, splitting trees, but, rather, rustles in leaves, expresses joy through blossoms, wafts gently in wind. In whatever on our own plane lets us divine the spiritual in matter, stretching hearts, pleasantly stimulating breath, merging our souls with outer nature, as symbol of the soul-spiritual world—in all this there lives and weaves a lyrical element which looks up, with happy countenance, to the upper gods, and down, with saddened countenance, to the gods of the underworld. The lyrical can tense up into the dramatic-lyrical or quiet itself down into the epic-lyrical. For the hallmark of the lyrical, whatever its form, is this: man experiences what lives and weaves in the far reaches of the earth with his middle nature, his feeling nature.

You see, if we really enter the spirituality of world phenomena, we gradually transform dead abstract concepts into a living, colorful, form-bearing weaving and being. Because what surrounds us lives in the artistic, mere intellectual activity can, almost unnoticed, be transformed into artistic activity. That is why we constantly feel a need to enliven impertinently abstract conceptual definitions—physical body, ether body, astral body, all such concepts, these impertinently rigid, philistine and horribly scientific formulations—into artistic color and form. This is an inner, not merely outer, need of Anthroposophy.

Therefore the hope may be expressed that all mankind will extricate itself from naturalism, drowned as it is in philistinism and pedantry through everything abstract, theoretical, merely scientific, practical without being really practical. Man needs a new impetus. Without this impulse, this swing, Anthroposophy cannot thrive. In an inartistic atmosphere it goes short of breath; only in an artistic element can it breathe freely. Rightly understood, it will lead over to the genuinely artistic without losing any of its cognitional character.

• 1. Vol. II, 1922, No. 7-9: Vortraege Rudolf Steiner's ueber das Wesen der Farbe, (Rudolf Steiner's Lectures Concerning the Nature of Color.)

The last two lectures concentrated on artistic feeling and creation. I wished to call attention to the fact that anthroposophical contemplation leads to a particular manner of beholding the world, which must lead, in turn, to an inner vitalization of the arts, present and future. At the end of yesterday's lecture I stressed the fact that, by gaining a direct relation to the spiritual, a person can acquire the forces necessary for the creation, out of his innermost core, of true art. It has always been so. For true art stands beside real knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, genuine religious life. Through knowledge and religion man draws closer to the spiritual element in thought, feeling and will. Indeed, it is his inward experience of knowledge and religion, during an earth life, that brings about a sense of the validity of all that I discussed during the last two lectures. Looking at the physical surroundings akin to his physical body, he comes to realize that physicality is not the whole of his humanness. In all artistic and religious ages he has recognized this truth, saying to himself: Though I stand within earth existence, it contradicts that part of my human nature which was imaged forth from worlds quite different from the one in which I live between birth and death.

Let us consider this feeling I have just described in respect to cognition. Through thinking man strives to solve the riddles of existence. Modern man is very proud of the naturalistic knowledge which, for three or four centuries, now, while marvelous relationships in nature were traced out, has been accumulating. But, precisely in regard to these relationships, present-day natural science must say to itself on reflection, with all intensity: What can be learned through the physical senses leads to a door which locks out world mysteries and cosmic riddles. And we know from anthroposophical contemplation that, to pass this door, to enter the realms where we may perceive what lies behind the outer world, we must overcome certain inner dangers. If a human being is to tread the path leading through this door, he must first attain, in his thoughts, feelings and will, a certain inner steadiness. That is why entering this door is called passing the Guardian of the Threshold. If real knowledge of the spiritual-divine foundation of the world is to be acquired, attention must be called not only to the dangers mentioned, but also to the fact that no person penetrates this door in the state of consciousness brought about between birth and death by merely natural conditions.

Here we should consider the tremendous seriousness of cognition. Also the abyss lying between the purely naturalistic world and the world we must seek if we would enter our true home and discover what bears a relationship to our inmost being. For in the merely naturalistic world we feel ourselves strangers in regard to this inmost being. On entering physical existence at birth, inevitably we carry with us our eternal-divine being; but if its source is to be recognized, we must first become aware of the abyss lying between earth life and the regions of cognition which we must enter in order to know our own being.

An understanding of cognition highlights, on the one hand, the gravity of the search for a true relationship with the spiritual world; on the other, it helps us to recognize that, if earthly existence were immediately satisfactory, if what modern naturalism dreams to be the case were so, namely, that man is merely the highest pinnacle of natural phenomena, there would exist no religious human beings. For in such circumstances man would have to be satisfied with earthly existence.

Religion aims at something entirely different. It presents a reality which reconciles man to earthly existence, or consoles him beyond earthly existence, or perhaps awakens him to the full meaning of earthly existence by making him aware that he is more than anything which earthly existence implies.

Thus the anthroposophical world-conception is capable of giving a strong impetus to cognition as well as to religious experience. In the case of cognition it stresses the fact that one must travel a road of purification before passing the gate to the spiritual world. On the other hand, it stresses the truth that religious life leads far beyond the facts observable by a person with only ordinary earthly consciousness. For Anthroposophy recognizes that the Mystery of Golgotha, the earth-life of Christ Jesus, though placed among historical events comprehensible to the senses, can be comprehended in its fulness only supersensibly.

Fortunately the abyss on the edge of which man lives, the abyss opening out before him in religion and cognition, can be bridged. But not by contemporary religion, nor yet by a cognition, a science, derived wholly from the earth.

It is here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms, colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance. What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out, spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the physical-earthly.

This became evident at that moment of world-evolution when human beings were faced in all seriousness with the great question of art; became evident in the grand style during the time of Goethe and Schiller. A glance at their struggles will corroborate this statement. Much that is pertinent, here, has already been quoted in past years, in other connections. Today—to provide a basis for discussion—I shall cite only a few instances.

During the eighteenth century there emerged a guiding idea which Goethe and Schiller themselves accepted: namely, the differentiation between romantic and classical art. Espousing classicism, Goethe tried to become its nurturer by familiarizing himself with the secrets of great Greek art. His Italian journey was fulfilment of his longing. In Germany, that northern land, he felt no possibility of reconciling, artistically, the divine-spiritual hovering, before his soul and the physical-sensory standing before his senses. Greek art, so abundant in Italy, and now deeply perceived, taught him the harmonization he lacked when he left Weimar for Italy. The impression he makes in describing his experience is—I must coin a paradoxical expression—at once heroic and touching.

In art Goethe was a classicist in the sense (if we use words which satisfactorily express his own idea) that he directed his gaze primarily toward the external, the sensory-real. But he was too profound a spirit not to feel a discrepancy between the sensory and that which derives from other realms, home of his soul. Sense-evidence should be purified, elevated through shaping, through an appropriate treatment. Thus Goethe the artist distilled from natural forms and human actions an element which, although presented imperfectly in the sensory-physical, could be brought to clarity without infidelity to the physical. In other words, he let the divine-spiritual shine through purified sensory forms. Always it was his earnest endeavor not to take up the spiritual lightly in his writings, not to express the divine-spiritual offhandedly. For he was convinced that romanticism can make only a facile, all-too-easy introduction of the spiritual into the physical; not deal with it comprehensively and effectively.

Never was it his intention to say: The gods live; I resort to symbolism to prove my conviction that the gods live. He did not feel thus. On the contrary, he felt somewhat as follows: I see the stones, I behold the plants, I observe the animals, I perceive the actions of human beings. To me all these creations have fallen away from the divine-spiritual. Nevertheless, though their earthly forms and colors show a desertion from the divine-spiritual, I must, by my treatment, lift them to a level where they can reflect, out of their own natures, that same divine-spiritual. I need not become unfaithful to nature—this Goethe felt—just purify seceded nature by artistic fashioning; then it will express the divine-spiritual. This was Goethe's conception of classicism; of the main impulse of Greek art, of all true art.

Schiller was unable to go along with this viewpoint. Because his gaze was directed idealistically into the spiritual world, he used physical things as indicators only. Thus he was the dayspring of post-Goethean romantic poetry. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the reversal of method. For romantic poetry, as opposite pole to the classicism striven for by Goethe, despaired, as it were, of elevating the earthly-sensory to the divine; being satisfied to use it only as a more or less successful way of pointing to the divine-spiritual.

Let us look at the classicism of Goethe, composer of these beautiful lines:

Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well:
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.
(“Wer Wissenschaft and Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.”)

Goethe, permeated by a conviction that every artist harbors the religious impulse, Goethe, to whom the trivially religious was repulsive because there lived in him a deep religious impulse, took the greatest pains to purify artistically the sensory-physical-earthly form to a point where it became an image of the divine-spiritual. Let us look at his careful way of working. He took up what was robustly earthly without feeling any necessity of changing it greatly to give it artistic form.

Consider, in this respect, his Goetz von Berlichingen. He treated the biography of this man objectively and with respect while dramatizing it, as demonstrated by the title of the first version: Geschichte Gott friedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert (History of Gottfried of Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, Dramatized). In other words, by changing only slightly the purely physical, he led it over into the dramatic; wishing, as artist, to part with the earth as little as possible; presenting it as a manifestation of the spiritual-divine world order.

Take another instance. Let us see how he approached his Iphigenie, his Tasso. He conceived these dramas, shaped their subject matter, poetically. But what happened then? He did not dare to give them their final form. In the situation in which he found himself, he, Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt and studied in Leipzig and Strassburg before going to Weimar, he, the Weimar-Frankfurt Goethe, did riot dare to finish these dramas. He had to go to Italy and walk in the light of Greek art to elevate the sensory-physical-earthly to a level where it could image forth the spiritual. Imagine the battle Goethe went through in order to bridge the abyss between the sensory-physical-earthly and divine-spiritual. It was like an illness when he left Weimar under cover of night, saying nothing to anybody, to flee to an environment in which he could master and elevate and spiritualize, as never in the north, the forms he worked with. His psychology is deeply moving. As I said before, it has about it something that might be called heroic-touching.

Let us go further. It is characteristic of Goethe—the paradox may strike you as peculiar—that he never finished anything. He began Faust in one great fling, but only the philistine Eckermann could induce him, in his old age, to bring this drama to a conclusion, and then it was only just barely possible for the author. For Goethe to bring his Faust to artistic form was a tremendous struggle which required the help of somebody else. Then take Wilhelm Meister. After its inception, he did not wish to finish. It was Schiller who persuaded him to do so. And if we scrutinize the matter, we might say: if only Schiller had not done so. For what Goethe then produced was not on the same level as his first sketch which would have remained a fragment. Take the second part: episodes are assembled. The writing is not all of a piece; it is not a uniform work of art. Now observe how—as in Pandora—Goethe strove to rise to the pinnacle of artistic creation by drawing his figures from the Greek world which he loved so much. Pandora remained a fragment, he could not complete it; the project was too vast for him to round it out. The serious, difficult task of the artist weighed upon his soul, and when he tried to idealize human life, to present it in the glory of the divine-spiritual, he could complete only the first part of the trilogy, the first drama: Die Natuerliche Tochter.

Thus in every possible way Goethe shows his predilection for the classical; always endeavoring, in his works, to purify the earthly physical to the point where it could spread abroad the radiance of the divine-spiritual. He struggled and strove, but the task was such that, apprehended deeply enough, it surpassed human forces, even Goethe's. We must say, therefore, that precisely in such a personality the arts with their grave world-mission appear in their full grandeur and power. What appeared, later, in romanticism is all the more characteristic when considered in the light of Goethe.

Last Thursday was the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Tieck, who was born on May 31, 1773, and died on April 28, 1853. Tieck—unfortunately little known today—was in a certain respect a loyal pupil of Goethe. He grew out of romanticism, out of what at the University of Jena during the nineties of the eighteenth century was regarded as as the modern Goethe problem. In his youth he had experienced the publication of Werther and of the first part of Faust. At Jena, together with Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, he struggled to solve the riddles of the world. In his immediate environment Ludwig Tieck felt the breath of Goethe's striving toward the classical, and in him we can see how spiritual life was still active at the end of the eighteenth, and during the first half of the nineteenth, century. With Schlegel, Tieck introduced Shakespeare into Germany; and as a personality he illustrates how Goethe's tremendous efforts were reflected in certain of his prominent contemporaries. Tieck felt the grandeur and dignity of art as a mighty cultural ideal. He looked about; he did not gather his life experiences in a narrowly circumscribed spot. After sitting at the feet of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the University of Jena, he journeyed through Italy and France. Then, after becoming acquainted with the world and philosophy, he strove, in a true Goethean manner, artistically to bridge the abyss between earthly and heavenly existence.

Of course he could not compete with Goethe's power and impetus. But let us look at one of Tieck's works: Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald's Journeys), written in the form of Wilhelm Meister. What are these Sternbald journeys? They are journeys of the human soul into the realm of art. The question pressing heavily upon Sternbald is this: How can I raise sense-reality to the radiance of the spiritual? At the same time Tieck—whose hundred-and-fiftieth birthday we ought to be celebrating—felt the seriousness which streams down upon art from the region of cognition and that of religious life. Great is the light which falls, from there, upon Ludwig Tieck's artistic creations. A novel which he wrote comparatively early in life bears the title William Lovell; and this character is under Tieck's own impression (received while sitting at the feet of Schelling and Fichte in Jena) of the extreme seriousness of the search for knowledge. Imagine the effect of such teachings upon a spirit as receptive as Tieck's. (Differently, though not less magnificently, they influenced Novalis.) In his younger years Tieck had passed through the rationalistic “free spirit” training of Berlin's supreme philistine Nikolai. It was therefore an experience of the very greatest importance when he saw how in Fichte and Schelling the human soul relinquished, as it were, all connection with outer physical reality and, solely through its own power, endeavored to find a path through the door to the spiritual world. In William Lovell Tieck depicts a human being who, entirely out of the forces of his own soul, subjectively, seeks access to the spirit. Unable to find in the physical-sensory the divine for which Goethe constantly strove through his classical art, William Lovell seeks it nevertheless, relying entirely on his own forces, and thereby becoming confused, perplexed in regard to the world and his own personality. Thus William Lovell loses his hold on life through something sublime, that is, through the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. In a peculiar way the book points out the dangers of cognition, through which, of necessity, men must pass. Tieck shows us how the cognitionally-serious can infuse the artistically-serious.

In his later years Ludwig Tieck created the poetic work: Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen (The Uprising in the Cevennes). What is his subject matter? Demonic powers which approach man, nature spirits which lay hold of him, possess him, drive him into religious fanaticism, and cause him to lose his way through the world. Oh, this Ludwig Tieck certainly felt what it means, on the one hand, to be dependent solely upon one's own personality and, on the other, to fall prey to elementals, gods of the elements. Hence overtones of gripping power in Tieck's works; for example in his Dichterleben (Life of the Poet) in which he describes how Shakespeare, as a thoroughly poetic nature, enters the world, how the world puts obstacles in his path, and how he stumbles into pitfalls. In Dichterleben Tieck discusses a poet's birth and all that earthly life gives him on a purely naturalistic basis. In Tod des Dichters (Death of the Poet) which deals with the last days of the Portuguese poet Camoens, he describes a poet's departure from life, his path to the gate of death. It is deeply moving how Tieck describes, out of the seriousness of the Goethe age, the beginning and end of an artist's life. What was great in Tieck was not his own personality, but rather his reflection of Goethe's spirit. Most characteristic, therefore, is his treatment of those “really practical people” who want to stand solidly on the earth without spiritual impulse in artistic presentation. Oh, there exists no more striking satire on novels about knights and robber barons than Tieck's Blaubart (Bluebeard). And, again, no more striking satire on the mawkishly emotional trying to be artistic than Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots). The woeful excess of sentiment which mutters of the divine-spiritual (a sentimentality illustrated by the affected Ifliand and babbling Kotzebue) he sends packing.

Ludwig Tieck reveals how the Goetheanism of the first half of the nineteenth century was mirrored in a receptive personality; how something like a memory of the great ancient periods played into the modern age; periods in which mankind, looking up to the divine-spiritual, strove to create, in the arts, memorials of the divine-spiritual. Such a personality represents the transition from an age still spiritually vital, at least in memory, to an age blinded by a brilliant natural-scientific world-conception and less brilliant life-practice; an age which will never find the spirit without the impetus which comes from direct spiritual perception, which is to say, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, as striven for by Anthroposophy.

Look, from this point of view, at the tremendous seriousness ensouling these writers. Not only Goethe but many others despaired of finding their way into the spiritual world through contemporary cultural life. Goethe did not rest until, in Italy, he had acquired an understanding of the way the Greeks penetrated the secrets of existence through their works of art. I have often quoted Goethe's statement: “It seems to me that, in creating their works of art, the Greeks proceeded according to nature's own laws, which I am now tracing.” Clearly, he believed that in their art the Greeks received from the gods something which enabled them to create higher works of nature, images of divine-spiritual existence. The followers of Goethe, still under his direct influence, felt compelled to return to ancient times, at least to ancient Greece, to attain to the spirit.

Herman Grimm, who in many ways still felt Goethe's living breath (I mentioned this in my last article in Das Goetheanum), said repeatedly that the ancient Romans resembled modern human beings; though they wore the toga, walked like moderns; whereas the ancient Greeks all seemed to have had the blood of the gods flowing through their veins. A beautiful, artistically felt statement! Indeed, it was only after the fifteenth century (I have often mentioned this) that man entered into materialism. It was necessary. We must not berate what the modern age brought. Had things stayed as they were, man would have remained deterministically dependent upon the divine spiritual world. If he was ever to become free, his passage into a purely material civilization was an historical necessity. In the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have described modern man's attitude in this respect. But the evening glow of the ancient spiritual life was still lighting up the sky in Goethe's time, indeed, right up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore his longing for Italy, his hope of finding there, through an echo from ancient Greece, something unattainable in his own civilization: the spirit. Goethe could not live without having seen Rome and a culture which, however antiquated, still enshrined the spiritual in the sensory-physical.

He was preceded in this mood by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a kind of personification of that evening-glow of ancient spiritual life. Goethe's appreciation of Winckelmann comes out in his marvelously beautiful book on this man and his century: a glorious presentation of the strivings of a personality longing for the spirit. Through this book one senses what Goethe felt vividly: that Winckelmann went to the south, to Rome, to find in ancient spirituality the spirit he missed in the present and restore it. Winckelmann was intoxicated by his search for spirituality: Goethe could feel that. And his book is superb precisely because he was permeated with that same longing. In Rome both men sensed, at last, something of the breath of ancient spirituality. There Winckelmann traced the mysteries of art to remnants of Greek artistic impulses and absorbed them into his soul; there Goethe repeated the experience. Thus it was in Rome that Goethe rewrote Iphigenie. He had fled with his northern Iphigenie to Rome in order to rewrite it and give it the only form he could consider classical. Here he succeeded. Which cannot be said of the works written after he returned home.

In all this we see Goethe the artist's profoundly serious struggle for spirituality. Only after he had discovered in Raphael's colors and Michelangelo's forms the results of what he considered genuine artistic experience could his own search come to fruition. Thus he represents the evening glow of a spirituality lost and no longer valid for modern man.

Permit me, now, to make a personal remark. There was a certain moment when I felt deeply what Winckelmann said when he traveled south to discover the secrets of art, and how Goethe followed in his footsteps. At the same moment I could not but feel strongly that the time of our surrender to the evening glow had passed; we must now search with all our might for a new unfolding of spiritual life, must give up seeking for what is past. All this I experienced at the destiny-allotted moment when, years ago, I had to deliver some anthroposophical lectures about the evolution of world and man in the very rooms where Winckelmann lived during his Roman sojourn; the very rooms where he conceived his thoughts about Italian and Greek art, and enunciated the comprehensive ideas which filled Goethe with the enthusiasm expressed in his book on Winckelmann. Here in Winckelmann's quarters the conviction permeated me that something new must be stated on the path to spiritual life. A strange connection of destiny.

With this personal remark I conclude today's observations.

I should like to supplement last week's lectures on art. Often I had to emphasize that the spiritual evolution of mankind has proceeded from the unity of science, art and religion. In present-day spiritual life we have science, art and religion separated, yet can look back into the time when these three streams flowed from a common source. That source is seen most clearly if we go back four or five thousand years to poetry during the primeval ages; or, rather, to what would today be called poetry. To fathom the poetry of the bearers of ancient culture (it is nonsense, our looking for this culture in present-day primitive peoples) we must study the spiritual development of mankind in those ancient times through the Mysteries.

Let us examine the times when human beings did not look to the earth, but out into the cosmos to find a content for their spiritual life, or to satisfy the deepest needs of their souls. At that period those with clairvoyant faculties, seeing the fixed stars and movements of the planets, considered everything on earth a reflection of events taking place in its cosmic environment. We need only remind ourselves how the ancient Egyptians measured by the rising of Sirius the significance for their lives of the river Nile; how they considered the Nile's influence a result of what could be fathomed only by studying the relationship between stars out there in the cosmos. To the Egyptians their interplay in cosmic space was mirrored, on earth, by the activity of the Nile. This is but one example among many. For the conception held sway that occurrences in definite locations on earth imaged forth the observable mysteries of the starry heavens. We must also be clear about the fact that in ancient times human beings beheld in the heavens things quite different from those now being investigated and calculated with so-called astro-mechanics and astro-chemistry.

Today we shall direct our attention to the way people expressed themselves through poetry during the period when they received spiritual content for their souls in the manner described.

I refer to an age when all the arts, except poetry, were but little developed. The other arts existed, to be sure, but in only a rudimentary state because the human beings of that time were deeply conscious of the fact that with the word, created out of their organisms' innermost secret, they could express something super-sensible, that language was fitted to express what appears in star-constellations and star-movements; far better fitted than the art-mediums using substances taken directly from the earth. For language originates in spiritual man—this they felt—and is therefore eminently adapted to what, from cosmic reaches, manifests here on earth. Poetry, then, was not an offspring merely of phantasy but of spiritual perception; and it was by this means that man learned what he in turn poured into the other arts. Poetry, which finds expression through words, was the medium by which man entered into soul-communion with the stars, the extra-earthly.

This soul-communion constituted the poetic mood. Through it man saw how thoughts not yet separated from objects gain pictorial expression in his vault-like head, a head resembling the firmament; how thought represents a spiritual firmament, a celestial vault; how thought is inherent throughout the cosmos. Individual thoughts were expressed through the relative positions of the stars, by the way the planets moved past each other. In those ancient times man—unlike the free man of a later age—did not think merely by virtue of his own inner force. In every thought-movement he felt the after-image of some star-movement, in every thought-form the after-image of a constellation. Thus his thinking transported him into stellar space. The sunlight which illumined the day, and which would seem to be blinding out in the cosmos, was not considered the guide to wisdom, not the guiding force of thought, but, rather, sunlight as reflected by the moon. The following is ancient Mystery wisdom: During the day we see light with the physical body, at night we do more; we see it gathered up by the silver chalice of the moon. And this sunlight, collected by the moon, was regarded as the soul's Soma drink. Enspirited thereby, the soul could conceive those thoughts which were the result, the image, of the starry heavens.

Thus man as thinker felt as though the force of his thinking were located not in his earthly organism, but out where the stars were circling and forming constellations; he felt his soul poured out into the entire universe. If he had investigated combinations and separations of thoughts, he would have looked, not for laws of logic, but for the paths and constellations of the stars in the nightly firmament. The laws and images of his thinking existed in the heavens.

When he became aware of his feeling, it was not the abstract feeling of which we speak today in our abstract time, but rather the concrete feeling closely united with such inner experiences as that of breathing and blood circulation, the vital interweaving of the interior of the human body. Thus he felt himself existing not only upon the physical earth, but in planetary space. He did not say: In the human organism millions of blood corpuscles circle, but rather: Mercury and Mars are crossing Sun and Moon. To repeat: he felt his soul poured out into the universe; felt that, while with his thoughts he abode among the fixed stars and their constellations, with his feelings he lived within the sphere of the moving planets. Only with his will did he feel himself on earth. Considering the terrestrial an image of the cosmic he said to himself: When the forces of Jupiter, Moon, Venus and Sun strike the earth and penetrate its soil in the solid, liquid and aeroform elements, then from these elements will impulses penetrate into the human being, just as thought impulses penetrate into him from the fixed stars, and feeling impulses from planetary movements.

By such awareness, man could transplant himself into the time of the beginnings of primeval art. What is primeval art? It is nothing other than speech itself (a fact little understood today). For our speech is fettered to the material-earthly; it no longer manifests what it was when human beings, feeling transported into the Zodiac, incorporated into themselves from zodiacal constellations the twelve consonants, and from the movements of the planets past the fixed-star constellations, the vowels. At that time human beings did not intend to express through speech what they experienced upon earth, but rather what the soul experienced when it felt transported into the cosmos; which is why, in ancient times, speech flowered into poetry. The last remnants of such poetry are contained in the Vedas and, more abstractly, in the Edda. These are after-images of what, in greater glory, in much greater sublimity and majesty, had arisen directly out of the formation of languages during those ages when human beings could still feel their own soul life intimately united with cosmic movement and experience.

What is felt of all this in present-day poetry?

Poetry would not be poetry—and in our time much poetry is no longer poetry—if certain aspects of man's communion with the cosmos had not been kept. What remains is whatever in speech-formation passes beyond the prose meanings of words into rhythm, rhyme and imagination. For true poetry never consists of what is stated literally. Into the prose content of a poem, whether written down or, better, recited or declaimed, there must sound rhythm, beat, imagination. This points to elements not contained in prose; to a background which, in every true poetic work, cannot be understood but must be guessed at, divined. It is only the prose content which can be understood by the mind. The fact that poetry conveys something lying outside its words, for which the words are but a means, the fact that poetry's aura of mood echoes cosmic harmony, melody, imagination, this fact, even today, makes poetry poetry. We still can divine what it meant for Homer when he said: “Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” It was not the poet singing; it was the soul which has communion with cosmic movements singing through him. In the planets live the Muses. The epic Muse lives in one particular planet. It was into this planet that Homer felt transported: Sing, oh Muse, resound for me, celestial melody of the planets; relate the deeds of earthly heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Idomeneus, Menelaus; sing of how events appear, not from the limited standpoint of earth, but when the gaze is directed from stellar space. Could one ever believe that the magnificent, comprehensive images of the Iliad stemmed from a “frog-perspective”? No, they have not even air-perspective; they have star-perspective. For that reason, the Iliad story could not be told as though man had solely to do with man, for the gods influence actions; side by side with human agents, they perform their deeds. This is not frog-perspective, this is the stellar-perspective to which the soul of the poet longed to rise when he said: “Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

From all this it can be clearly seen that the earthly medium which art—in the present case, poetry—makes use of is only a means to an end. The artistic element comes from treating the medium in such a way that the spiritual background, the spiritual worlds, may be divined; word, color, tone, form, being but pathways. If we wish to reawaken in mankind the true artistic mood, we must, to a certain degree, transport ourselves back into those ancient times when the celestial, the poetic mood, lived in the human soul. Then we will receive an impression of how best to use other media to carry art to the world of the spirit; which is what must happen if art wants to be art. Today our feeling has coarsened; we no longer sense what, in the not so distant past, has made art what it is.

For example, say that we see a mother carrying a little child: an elevating sight. We are familiar with the fact that the immediate form impression received therefrom is fixed only for a moment. The very next moment the mother's head position changes, the child in the mother's arms moves. What we have before us in the physical world is never still very long. Now let us look at Raphael's Sistine Madonna: the Mother and Child. Now, an hour from now, a year from now, it remains what it was; nothing has changed, neither child nor mother move. The moment has been fixed. That which in the physical world is still only a moment is here, so to speak, paralyzed. But it only seems so. Today we no longer feel what Raphael most certainly felt, asking, Am I allowed to do that? to fix with my brush a single moment? It is not a lie to convey an impression that the mother holds her child in the same manner today as yesterday? Is it right to impose upon anybody a prolongation of one particular moment? At present such a question appears paradoxical, even nonsensical. But Raphael asked it. And what answer arose in him? This artistic obligation: You must atone in a spiritual way for your sin against reality, must lift the moment out of time and space, for within time and space it is a palpable untruth; must, through what you paint on the plane of your canvas, bestow eternity, arouse feelings which transcend the earthly plane.

This is what is called today, abstractly, Raphael's idealistic painting. His idealism is his justification for so unnaturally fixing the moment. What he invokes through the depths of his colors, through color harmony, he attains by precluding—spiritualizing—the third dimension. His use of colors elevates to the spiritual what is otherwise seen, materialistically, in the third dimension. Thus that which is not on but behind the plane through blue, not on but in front of the plane through red, that which steps out of the plane in a spiritual way (whereas the third dimension steps out of the plane only in a material way), bestows eternity on the moment. Which is precisely what must be bestowed upon the moment. Without the eternal, art is not art.

I have known people—artists, mainly—who hated Raphael. Why? Because they could not understand what is stated above; because they wanted to stop short with an imitation of what the moment presents but which, the next moment, is gone. Once I became acquainted with a Raphael hater who saw the greatest progress in his own painting in the fact that he was the first who had dared to stop sinning against nature; that is, had dared to paint all the hairy spots of the naked body really covered with hair. How inevitable that a man who considered this great progress should have become a Raphael hater. But the episode also shows how badly our time has forsaken the spirit-borne element in art, the element which knows why painting is based on the plane. Spatial perspective must be comprehended; it was necessary in our freedom-endowed fifth post-Atlantean period to learn to understand spatial perspective, that which conjures up on the plane not the pictorial, but the sculptural. The real thing, however, is color-perspective which over-comes the third dimension not by foreshortening and focusing, but by a soul-spiritual relationship between colors, say, between blue and red, or blue and yellow. Painting must acquire a color-perspective which overcomes space in a spiritual fashion. Thus can the artistic be brought back to what it was when it linked man directly to spiritual worlds.

At that time man felt the harmony between science, religion and art. This perception must again be aroused. An echo of it lived in Goethe; that was what made him so great. True, man in his freedom had to experience those three as separated: science, art, religion. But the division has made him lose the profundity of all three; above all, he has lost communion with the cosmos.

One need only exaggerate today's relation between art and science, between poetry and science. You may say I need not carry the problem to extremes to show the contemporary mis-relationship between poetry, art and science. But in a radical case the whole mis-relationship becomes clear. So I cite a radical case:

Once, in a certain city, there took place a meeting of scientists to discuss some great materialistic problems. You know the tremendous seriousness with which such meetings deal with scientific problems; a seriousness so great, no individual dares to approach it with his personality. He therefore places a lectern in front of him, lays his manuscript on it, and reads a paper; or rather, one scientist after another reads a paper. Personality is shoved aside. So strongly does this seriousness act, it is withdrawn from the individual and placed on the lectern; extremely serious! At such meetings every face looks grave. To be sure, they look like reflections of the lectern; but very serious indeed! At this particular meeting the chairman turned to a group of poets with the request that they create, out of their art, poems which could be launched, between courses, at the banquet to follow. Thus the gentlemen—perhaps there were also ladies—went from this serious meeting to a dinner party where poems were presented making fun, satirically, of the various sciences. You see the misrelation between science and art. First the scientists dealt very seriously with the position of a June bug's mandible, or the chromosomes of a June bug's sperm; then, between meat and dessert, poems were read which satirized this very research. First the gentlemen went to extremes of seriousness, then laughed. There was no inner relationship. You might criticize my citing so extreme an example of our civilization. I cite it because it is characteristic, because it shows in a radical manner the present-day relationship between cognition and art, namely, no relationship at all. The gentlemen who made poems for the banquet understood nothing of the scientific papers. It is not quite possible to state the reverse, namely, that the worthy scientists did not understand the poems, although the poets assumed this, for they considered their work profound. But there is not much to be understood in such poetry and it may, therefore, be inferred that even the illustrious gathering understood it in some degree.

It is highly important for our time to observe how a homogeneous human spiritual life has been split into three parts which have fallen away from each other. For there is now a most urgent necessity to recompose the whole. If a philosopher speculates today about unity and doubleness, monism and dualism, he does so with a neutral mind, marshaling abstract concepts in defence of the one or the other. Both viewpoints can be proved equally well. In the ages whose relationship to art has just been sketched, a discussion of unity or duality, of the one with or without the other, aroused all the forces of men's soul. Whether the world sprang from an undivided source, or whether, on the contrary, good and evil are two divided original powers, the battle between monism and dualism was in bygone ages an artistic-religious concern which aroused all the forces of the human soul, and upon which man felt that his welfare, his bliss, depended. Though in former times he considered these questions closely bound up with his salvation, today he speaks of them with indifference. If we do not acquire a breath of the artistic-religious-cognitional soul mood which once held sway, there will be no impulse toward the truly great in art.

Still another feeling lived in those ages. People spoke of the Soma drink, of sunlight poured into the silver moon-chalice, the reality with which they filled their souls in order to understand the secrets of the cosmos. Speaking of the Soma drink, they felt themselves in direct soul communion with the cosmos. Soul experiences took place simultaneously on earth and in the cosmos. People felt that the gods revealed themselves through fixed stars and orbiting planets. By forming images of themselves on earth, the fixed star constellations and planetary movements made it possible for the soul to experience a cosmic element. If it drank the Soma drink and carried out sacrifices in a ritualistic-artistic-cognitional manner, the soul gave back to the gods, in the rising smoke to which it entrusted the religious-artistic-poetic, word, what the gods needed for continued world creation. For the gods did not create man in vain; he exists on earth in order that something which can be achieved only by man may be used by the gods for further world creation. Man is on earth because the gods need him. He is on earth so that he may think, feel and will what lives in the cosmos. If he does it in the right way, the gods can take this changed thing and implant it into the configuration of the world.

Thus man—if in sacrifice and art he gives back what the gods gave him—cooperates in building the cosmos. He has a soul-connection with cosmic evolution.

If we permeate ourselves with a conception of this relationship within spiritual-physical cosmic evolution, we can apply it to the present world. There we see a cognition which wishes only to fashion matter, and which applies earthly laws and calculations even to astro-chemistry and astronomy; a cognition—the so-called scientific one—which holds good only for earth evolution. But this cognition will cease to be of significance to the degree that the earth is transformed into Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. To repeat: today “science” has only an earthly meaning; its purpose is to help human beings to become free here on earth; but the gods cannot use this science for the continued cosmic creation.

Abstract thoughts are the ultimate abstraction, the corpse of the spirit world. What is carried out scientifically has meaning only for the earth. Having acted on earth as thought, it is shattered, buried; it does not live on.

In truth, what Ursula Karin, grandmother of the poet Adalbert Stifter, told him about the sunset glow belongs more intensively to the cosmos than what is to be read today in scientific books. Take everything in those books about the way sunlight acts on clouds to produce the evening glow, collect everything described there as natural laws: it has an earthly significance only. The gods cannot gather it up from earth to use it in the cosmos. Adalbert Stifter's grandmother said to the boy: “Child, what is the evening glow? Child, when it appears, the Mother of God is hanging out her clothes; she has so many to hang out on the heavenly dome.”

This is an utterance on which the gods can draw for the further development of the world. Modern science tries to describe in precise concepts what exists now. But this will never become future; it is of the present. But Adalbert Stifter's grandmother, having preserved much of what lived in ancient souls, said something about which a modern scientist could only smile. He might consider it beautiful, but would have no inkling of the fact that her words are of greater significance for the cosmos than all his vaunted science. From whatever is useful in this sense, from whatever creates not space-and-time thoughts but eternally-active thoughts, all true art has arisen. Just as the imagination of Adalbert Stifter's grandmother, which made him a poet, is related to a dry materialistic conception, so Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which transcends the moment, which seizes the moment for the eternal, is related to any mother with her child seen here on the physical earth.

This is what I wished to add to our previous considerations, hoping to deepen them.

Today I would like to examine certain other aspects of our subject.

I have often dealt with the genius of language, and you know from my book Theosophy that we refer to real spiritual entities when we speak of spiritual beings in an anthroposophical context. Thus “genius of language” designates the spiritual entity behind any specific language, an entity with whom man can become familiar and through whom he can receive, from the spiritual world, strength to express his thoughts which, at the outset, are present in his earthly self as a dead heritage from that higher world. It is, therefore, appropriate for anthroposophical students to seek, in the formation of language, a meaning which is independent of man because rooted in the spirit.

I have already drawn attention to the peculiar way the German language designates the beautiful and its opposite. We speak of the opposite of the beautiful (das Schoene) as the ugly or hateful (das Haessliche). Were we to denote the beautiful in the same way we would call it—since the opposite of hate is love—the lovely or loving. As it is, we make a significant difference. In German the word beautiful (das Schoene) is related to shining (das Scheinende). The beautiful shines; brings its inner nature to the surface. It is the distinguishing quality of the beautiful not to hide itself, but to carry its essence into outer configuration. Thus beauty reveals inwardness through outer form; a shining radiates outward into the world. If we were to speak, in this sense, of beauty's opposite, we would call it the concealed or non-radiant, that which holds back its being, refusing to disclose it in any outer sheath. To put it another way, “the beautiful” designates something objective. If we were to treat its opposite just as objectively, we would have to speak of concealment, of something whose outer aspect belies what it really is. But here subjectivity enters, for we cannot love what conceals itself, showing a false countenance; we must hate it. In this way the ugly calls up quite a different emotional reaction than the beautiful; we do not respond to it out of the same recesses of our nature.

Thus the genius of language reveals itself. And we should ask: When in the broadest sense we strive for the beautiful in art, what is our goal? The very fact that the German word for “beautiful” proceeds outward (as its opposite suggests a remaining within our emotions, our hate) means that the beautiful bears a relation to the spiritual outside us. For what shines? What we apprehend with our senses does not need to shine for us; it exists. It is the spiritual that shines, radiating into the sensory, proclaiming its being even in the sensory. By speaking objectively of the beautiful, we take hold of it as a spiritual element which reveals itself in the world through art. The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Proceeding from this truth, let us consider one of the arts: painting. Recently we dealt with it insofar as it reveals the spiritual-essential through shining color. In ancient times man, by surrendering in the right way to the genius of language, showed his inner knowledge of color in his vocabulary. When an instinctive clairvoyance prevailed, he felt that metals revealed their inner natures in their colors, therefore gave them, not earthly names, but names connecting them with the planets. Otherwise people would have felt ashamed. For man looked upon color as a divine-spiritual element bestowed upon earthly substances only in the sense of our recent lectures. Perceiving the gold in gold's color, he saw not merely the earthly in that metal but the sun proclaiming itself from the cosmos in its gold color. Indeed, from the very start man saw something transcending the earthly in the colors of earthly objects. But it was only to living things that particular colors were ascribed, for living things approach the spirit in such a way that the spiritual shines forth. Animals were felt to have their own colors because in them the spirit-soul element manifests directly.

In ancient times, when man's artistic sense was not outward but inward, he painted not at all. To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object's surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun's colored light; catch the sun.

In the case of a person, this can be done still more spiritually. To paint a human forehead the way one believes it should look is nonsense; this is not painting. But to observe how the sun rays strike that forehead, how color shows up in the ensuing radiance, how light and darkness intermingle, to capture with one's paint brush all that interplay: this is the task of the painter. Seizing what passes in a moment, he relates it to the spiritual.

If, with a sense for painting, we look at an interior view, the matter of most importance is not the figure or figures therein. I once accompanied a friend to an exhibition where we saw a painting of a man kneeling before an altar, his back toward us. The painter had given himself the task of showing how sunlight falling through a window struck the man's back. My friend remarked that he would much rather see a front view. Well, this was only material, not artistic, interest. He wanted the painter to show the man's character, and so forth. But one is justified in doing this only if one expresses all perceptions through color. If I wish to paint a human being sick in bed with a certain disease, and study his facial color in order to apprehend how illness shines through the sensory, this may be artistic. If I want to show, in totality, the extent to which the whole cosmos manifests in the human flesh color, this may also be artistic. But if I try to imitate Mr. Lehman as he sits here before me, I will not succeed; moreover, this is not the task of art. What is artistic is how the sun illumines him, how light is deflected through his bushy eyebrows. Thus for a painter the important thing is how the whole world acts upon his subject; and his means of holding fast to a transitory moment are light and darkness, the whole spectrum.

In times not so long ago one could not imagine a presentation of Mary, the Mother of God, without a face so transfigured it had passed beyond the ordinary human state; a face overcome by light. One could not imagine her clothed otherwise than in a red garment and blue cloak, because only so is the Mother of God placed rightly into earthly life; the red garment depicting all the emotions of the earthly, the blue cloak the soul element which weaves the spiritual around her; the face permeated and transfigured by spirit, overcome by light as a revelation of the spirit. We do not, however, properly and artistically take hold of these truths if we stop with what I have just described. For I have translated the artistic into the inartistic. We feel them artistically only if we create directly out of red and blue and the light by experiencing the light, in its relationship to colors and darkness, as a world in itself. Then colors speak their own language, and the Virgin Mary is created out of them.

To achieve this one must live with color; color must become emancipated from the heavy matter opposing its innermost nature. Palette colors are alien to true painting in that, when used on a plane surface, they have a down-dragging effect. One cannot live with oil-based colors, only with fluid colors. When a painter puts fluid colors upon a plane, color—owing to the peculiar relationship between man and color—springs to life; he conceives out of color; a world arises out of it. True painting comes into being only if he captures the shining, revealing, radiating element as something living; only if he creates what is to be formed on the plane out of this element. For to understand color is to understand a component part of the world.

Kant once said: Give me matter, and out of it I shall create a world. Well, you could have given him matter endlessly without his ever being able to make a world out of it. But out of the interplaying medium of color a world of sorts can indeed be created, because every color has direct relationship with something spiritual. In the face of present-day materialism, the concept and activity of painting have—except for the beginnings made by impressionism and, still more, by expressionism—been more or less lost.

For the most part modern man does not paint, he imitates figures with a kind of drawing, then colors the surface. But colored surfaces are not painting for the reason that they are not born out of color and light and darkness.

We must not misunderstand things. If somebody goes wild and just lays on colors side by side in the belief that this is what I call “overcoming drawing,” he is mistaken. By “overcoming drawing” I do not mean to do away with drawing, but to let it rise out of the colors, be born from the colors. Colors will yield the drawing; one simply has to know how to live in colors. Living so, an artist develops an ability—while disregarding the rest of the world—to bring forth works of art out of color itself.

Look at Titian's “Ascension of Mary.” This painting stands at the boundary line of the ancient principle of art. The living experience of color one finds in Raphael and, more especially, in Leonardo da Vinci, has departed; only a certain tradition prevents the painter from totally forsaking the living-in-color.

Experience this “Ascension of Mary.” The green, the red, the blue, cry out. Now take the details, the individual colors and their harmonious interaction, and you will feel how Titian lived in the element of color and how, in this instance, he really created out of it all three worlds.

Look at the wonderful build-up of those worlds. Below, he has created out of color the Apostles experiencing the event of Mary's ascension. One sees in the colors how these men are anchored to the earth; colors which convey, not heaviness in the lower part of the painting, only a darkness which fetters the watching ones to earth. In the color-treatment of Mary one experiences the intermediate realm. A dull darkness from below connects her feet and legs with the earth; while, above her, light preponderates. This third and highest realm receives her head and radiates above it in full light, lifting it up. Thus are set forth, through inner color experience, the three stages of lower realm, middle realm, and the heights where Mary is being received by God the Father.

To understand this picture we must forget everything else and look at it solely from the standpoint of color, for here the three stages of the world are derived from color not intellectually but artistically. True painting takes hold of this world of effulgent shining, of splendid manifestation in light and darkness and color, in order to contrast what is earthly-material with the artistic. But the artistic is not permitted to reach the spiritual. Otherwise it would be not “shine” but wisdom. For wisdom is no longer artistic, wisdom leads into the formless and therefore undepictable realm of the divine.

With artistry like Titian's in “The Ascension of Mary,” we feel, on beholding the reception of Mary's head by God the Father, that now we must go no further in the treatment of light; we must halt. For we have reached the limit of the possible. To carry it further would be to fall into the intellectualistic, the inartistic. We must not make one stroke beyond what is indicated by light, rather than contour. The moment we insist on contour, we become intellectualistic, inartistic. Near the top this picture is in danger of becoming inartistic. The painters immediately after Titian fell prey to this danger. Look at the depiction of angels right up to the time of Titian. They are painted in heavenly regions. But look how carefully the painters avoided leaving the realm of color. Always you can ask yourself in regard to these angels of the pre-Titian age, and of Titian too: Couldn't they be clouds? If you cannot do that, if there is no uncertainty about existence, being, or semblance, shine, if there is an attempt fully to delineate the essence of the spiritual, artistry ceases.

In the seventeenth century it was otherwise, for materialism affects the presentation of the spiritual. Now angels began to be painted with all kinds of foreshortenings, and one can no longer ask: Couldn't that be clouds? When reason is active, artistry dies.

Again, look at the Apostles below: one has a feeling that in this “Ascension of Mary” only Mary is really artistic. Above, there is the danger of passing into the formlessness of pure wisdom. If one attains the formless one attains, in a certain sense, the zenith of the artistic. One has dared to press forward boldly to the abyss where art ceases, where the colors disappear in light, and where, if one were to proceed, one could only draw. But drawing is not painting. Thus the upper part of the picture approaches the realm of wisdom. And the more one is able to express, in the sensory world, this wisdom-filled realm, and the more the angels might be taken for billowy clouds shimmering in light, the greater the art.

Proceeding from the bottom of the picture to the really beautiful, to Mary herself rising into the realm of wisdom, we see that Titian was able to paint her beautifully because she has not yet arrived at, but only soars up toward, the realm of wisdom; and we feel that, were she to rise still higher, she must enter where art ceases. Below stand the Apostles. Here the artist has tried to express their earth-fettered character. But now a different danger threatens. Had he placed Mary further down, he could not have depicted her inward beauty. If Mary were to sit among the Apostles, she could not appear as she does as a kind of balance between heaven and earth; she would look different. She simply does not fit among the Apostles with their brownish tones. Not only are they subject to earthly gravity; something else has entered: the element of drawing takes hold. This you can see in Titian's picture. Why is it so?

Well, brown having already left the realm of color, it cannot express Mary's beauty; something not belonging entirely to the realm of the beautiful would be injected. If Mary stood or sat among the Apostles and were colored as they are, it would be a great offense. I am now speaking only of this picture and do not maintain that when standing on earth Mary must be in every instance, artistically speaking, an offense. But in this picture it would be a blow in the face if Mary stood below. Why?

Because if she stood there colored like the Apostles we would have to say that the artist presented her as virtuous. This is the way he presents the Apostles; we cannot conceive of them otherwise than looking upward in their virtue. But this for Mary would he inappropriate. With her, virtue is so self-evident that we must not express it. It would be like presenting God as virtuous. If something is self-evident, if it has become the being itself, we must not express it in mere outer semblance. Therefore Mary soars up into a region beyond all virtues, where we cannot say of her, through colors, that she is virtuous, any more than we can say of God that He is virtuous. He may, at most, be virtue itself. But this is an abstract, philosophical statement having nothing to do with art. With the Apostles, however, the artist succeeded in representing, through his color treatment, virtuous human beings. They are virtuous.

Let us look at how the genius of language reflects this truth. Tugend (virtue, in German) is related to taugen (to be fit, in German). To be fit, to be able to cope with something morally, is to be virtuous. Goethe speaks of a triad: wisdom, semblance and power. Art is the middle term: semblance, the beautiful; wisdom is formless knowledge; virtue is power to carry out worthwhile things effectively.¹

Since ancient times this triad has been revered. Once, years ago, a man said to me—and I could appreciate his point of view—that he was sick and tired of hearing people speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, for anyone in search of an idealistic expression mouthed the phrase. But in ancient times these realities were experienced not externally but with complete soul participation. Thus in the upper region of Titian's picture we see wisdom not yet transcendent, radiating artistically because of the way it is painted. In the middle, beauty; below, virtue, that which is fit. What is the inner nature of the fit? Here is manifest the genius, the profundity, of the languages active among men. If we proceeded in an exterior way we might be reminded of a certain hunchback who went to church and listened to a priest describing quite externally how everything in the world is good and beautiful and fit. Waiting at the church door, the hunchback asked the priest: You said the idea of everything is good—have I, too, a good shape? The priest replied: For a hunchback you have a very good shape.

If things are considered as externally as this, we shall never penetrate to the depths. In many fields modern observation proceeds so. Filled with external characteristics and definitions, men do not know that their ideas turn round and round in circles.

In respect to virtue it is not a question of fitness for just anything, but of fitness for something spiritual, so that a person places himself into the spiritual world as a human being. Whoever is a complete human being by reason of his bringing the spiritual not merely to manifestation but to full realization through his will is—in the true sense—virtuous. Here we enter a region which lies within the human and religious, but no longer within the artistic, sphere, and least of all within the sphere of the beautiful. Everything in the world contains a polarity. Thus we can say of Titian's picture: Above Mary he is in danger of passing beyond the beautiful, there where he reaches the abyss of wisdom. Below, he comes to the brink of the other abyss. For as soon as a painter represents the virtuous, meaning that which man realizes through his own being, out of the spiritual, he again leaves behind the beautiful, the artistic. The virtuous human being can be painted only by characterizing virtue in its outer appearance, let us say by contrasting it with vice. But an artistic presentation of virtue as such is no longer possible.

Where in our age do we not forsake the artistic? Simple life conditions are reproduced crudely, naturalistically, without any relation to the spiritual, and without this relation there is no art. Hence the striving of impressionism and expressionism to return to the spiritual. Though in many cases clumsy, tentative, exploratory, it is better than the inartistic copying of a model.

Furthermore, if one grasps the concept of the artistically-beautiful, one can deal with the tragic in its artistic manifestations. The human being who acts in accordance with his thoughts, who lives his life intellectualistically, can never become really tragic. Nor can the human being who leads an entirely virtuous life. The only tragic person is one who in some way leans toward the daimonic, that is to say, toward the spiritual, whether in a good or bad sense. Today in this age when man is in the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is man under the influence of tutelary spirits, is an anachronism. That man should outgrow the daimonic and become free is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. But as he progresses in freedom the possibility of tragedy diminishes and finally ceases. Take ancient tragic characters, even most of Shakespeare's: they have a daimonism which leads to the tragic. Wherever man had the appearance of the daimonic-spiritual, wherever the daimonic-spiritual radiated and manifested through him, wherever he became its medium, tragedy was possible. In this sense the tragic will have to taper off now; a free mankind must rid itself of tutelary spirits. This it has not yet done. On the contrary, it is more and more falling prey to such forces.

But the great task and mission of the age is to pull human beings away from the daimonic towards freedom. The irony is that the more we get rid of the inner daimons which make us tragic personalities, the less do we get rid of external ones. For the moment modern man enters into relation with the outer world, he encounters something of the nature of daimons. Our thoughts must become freer and freer. And if, as I say in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, thoughts become will impulses, then the will also becomes free. These are polaric contrasts in freedom: free thoughts, free will.

Between lies that part of human nature which is connected with karma. And just as once upon a time the daimonic led to tragedy, so now the experiencing of karma can lead to inmost tragedy. Tragedy will flourish when man experiences karma. As long as we live in our thoughts we are free. But the words with which we have clothed our thoughts, once spoken or written, no longer belong to us. What may happen to a word I have uttered! Having absorbed it, somebody else surrounds it with different emotions and sensations, and thus the word lives on. As it flies through the world it becomes a power proceeding from man himself. This is his karma. Because it connects him with the earth, it may burst in on him again. Even the word which leads its own existence because it belongs not to us but to the genius of language may create the tragic. Just in our present time we see mankind at the inception of tragic situations through an overestimation of language, of the word. Peoples wish to separate themselves according to language, and their desire provides the basis for the gigantic tragedy which during this very century will break in upon the earth. This is the tragedy of karma. If past tragedy is that of daimonology, future tragedy will be that of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if in everything artistic there is some relationship to the spiritual, you will understand that with the artistic we place ourselves, creatively or through enjoyment, in the spirit world. A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert. He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture. A person may be an artist in complete loneliness. Yet he cannot become one without bringing, by means of his creation, something spiritual into the world, so that it lives in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this basic connection, art becomes non-art.

To create artistically is possible only if the work has a relationship to the world. Those ancient artists who painted pictures on the walls of churches were conscious of this fact; they knew that their murals stood within earth life insofar as this is permeated by the spirit; that they guided believers.

One can hardly imagine anything worse than painting for exhibitions. It is horrible to walk through a picture or sculpture gallery where completely unrelated subjects appear side by side. Painting lost meaning when it passed from something for church or home to an isolated phenomenon. If we paint or view a picture in a frame, we can imagine ourselves looking out through a window. But to paint for exhibitions—this is beyond discussion. An age which sees value in exhibitions has lost its connection with art. By this can be seen how much waits to be done in culture if we would find our way back to the spiritual-artistic. Exhibitions must be overcome. Of course some individual artists detest exhibitions. But today we live in an age when the individual cannot achieve very much unless his judgment grows out of a world-conception permeating fully free human beings; just as world-conceptions permeating people in less free ages led to the rise of genuine cultures. Today we have no real culture.

Only a spiritual world-conception can build up true culture, the indubitably artistic.

• 1. The English word virtue, derived from the Latin vir, man, carries a similar connotation of power. (Translators)