The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from our own.

In these days we speak of chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen, for instance, is something that is present only under certain well-defined conditions—conditions of warmth, e.g., and other circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable person to unite a conception of reality with something that, when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to arrive at true existence.

I have marked a transition as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., because before this time man's perceptions were still altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality—purely in respect of reality—of the physical men he saw with his eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called Intelligences of the Cosmos, as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings, the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness; and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the Elements of the Cosmos, the earthy, the fluid or watery, the airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water, air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word, they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would, however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—even in a sense, the scholars of the eighteenth century—had ideas of warmth, air, water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water—these have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his pupils.

When I wrote my Outline of Occult Science I was obliged to make the account of the evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would have been able to give the account quite differently. The following might then have been found in a certain chapter, e.g., of Outline of Occult Science. An idea would have been called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things—but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say, with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the people were so filled with enthusiasm—forgive me, but it really was so—that present-day man would say they had all gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern Europe—it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns directly into light, illuminating everything—such an idea did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim. And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.

There you have one such sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of their being.

And then one would have gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel; the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space. [Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]

All the drawing I have made is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do, think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the whole—if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel warmth in varying differentiations—here greater warmth, there less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.

Such a united building-up by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there. The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.

A picture will perhaps make clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent; the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.” Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now in the time of which I speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones—and that is the Saturn existence.

The description went further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—these alone have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner. Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

What is it that is able now to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air. And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

You must clearly understand that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness, dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air. And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know: Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.

And what follows after this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the Sons of the Second Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air—not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn, the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of Light the Third Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels—add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to pass.

Let us suppose an Archai or Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light, encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness—or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness, darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light and darkness.

Here we may find a connection with something that is historical, with something that is to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony, Beings of the Third Hierarchy—this spiritual element in man's thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.

One must indeed have lost all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.

But now we must go further. We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when colour is present and works as a reality—and it can do so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element—when this is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure, counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the creation of Colour in the Cosmos.

You will say: No, that I cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in its true meaning. Red—surely you do not think that red is, in its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being? Red is something that makes an attack upon you.—I have often spoken of this.—You want to run away from red; it thrusts you back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper. Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with soul-experience, must follow with movement.

People gaze open-eyed at the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On the other side they come out again. To one who views it with imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance, in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage and bravery of heart.

Now picture to yourselves: There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and disappearing into it—here anxiety and fear, there courage ... And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.

There is no doubt about it: if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things. Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses himself, how he uses his words.

Thus we have, as a reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were—the second Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.

And now we come to the Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth, even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves use but guarded and kept—with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life. Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints and suggestions, came Life.

You will say: Then did nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving, glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness, laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life, in its iridescence streamed-through with Life—that is what appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms. Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into Earth existence.

Such things as I have been describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished—though history tells us little of them—from the ninth and tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the beginning of the nineteenth century—always however in these later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man. Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements. It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth Hierarchy, Man.—The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes.—That is all!

There you have the first Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself” of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the “thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes, they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”

Yes, my friends, that is the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract, shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms, and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of Spiritual Science must try to do.

I wanted to indicate to you today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings, although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures. That is what he gives—a fragment of embryology. According to the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort—unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's Faust.

It is time that these things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history during the last few centuries.

My dear friends! I have the following to say to you, in continuation of our conversation yesterday morning. The point is that you feel in the right way the sending out by the spiritual powers present in the spiritual world and connected with Christ's life on earth, and that you feel your own connection with these spiritual powers as your mission. And in this sense I have read to you the words from the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 9 and 10, in the way they present themselves when we try to penetrate their real meaning in our language:

After Christ brought his bodily life to an end, he is the healer of sins through all earthly times for all who are filled with him, and is referred to with the word of the spirit as the highest savior of souls according to the rite of Melchi-Sadek.

Only when you feel your own calling in the spirit of these words, with which at the beginning of the Christian era those who were to fulfill the mission of Christ to the full were sent out, will you be able to see in them a renewal of Christian work. Now, however, it is important that we are able to let this word - which is an old word, but has been renewed in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews - have the right effect on our souls. This word, which designates the actual mission of the Christian priesthood, points out to us that only those in the early days of Christian development, that is, in the first centuries of Christianity, sensed their priestly mission in the right way, who said: We do not want to understand alone, in the sense of the Levitical rite, that which we have to bring into the world as a cult, but we want to see through the look through the Levitical rite to that rite which stands nearer to the divine world order and according to which the priest-king Sadek, Adonai Melchi-Sadek, performed the sacrificial service before the priest-king of the ancient Jews, and that is a sacrificial service which Abraham, the old priest-king of the Jews, to whom the Levitical priestly service is to be traced back, also recognized as the higher one for that time. This indicates to us that the sacrificial service of the Jews, insofar as it is traced back to the sacrifice of Abraham, must be understood as a lower one in the early days of Christianity compared to that which was then accomplished in its archetypal old way by Melchi-Sadek, and which in a higher sense, closer to the spiritual world, was again accomplished, is being accomplished and is to be further accomplished by the Christ Jesus Himself. It is pointed out that what Christ's sacrifice is - which is to be renewed on the altar in the way it can happen -, is a higher act than the act that was offered in the days before Abraham - not to the God Jehovah - by Melchi-Sadek, and we must now understand what is actually in these words.

It is said that Melchi-Sadek offered his sacrifice through bread and wine, which were considered inferior to the offerings made by Abraham – the underlying concept here is quite clear. However, we must also bear in mind that the expression “bread and wine” is one that came from later, exoteric Judaism and no longer shows the original full understanding. Because this original and complete understanding was no longer present in those who had a hand in formulating the text of the Old Testament, but only in those initiates who still had an understanding of the ancient initiation in the early centuries of Christianity, it can no longer be fully determined from the text of the Old Testament what is actually meant by the sacrifice of Melchizedek. And yet, those who are sent out into the world as priests today must also have a correct understanding of these offerings of Melchi-Sadek.

If one goes back to what is really meant, in the sense of the initiatory knowledge, when it is said that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek was offered in the form of bread and wine, one comes to see that in the bread, in the right initiatory knowledge, has always been seen as a carrier of salt. The Jews actually no longer acted in the right sense and with the right understanding when they forgot the salt and even emphasized that it was necessary to use unleavened bread for the sacred sacrificial act. In the bread that was originally meant, salt was seen, just as in the wine it was not the wine as such that was seen, as it presents itself in its wine substance, but it was sought in the wine the extraordinarily volatile, fluctuating content of sulfur or phosphorus, which in the old term is one and the same. If we speak in the right sense, we must actually say that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek - that is, the sacrifice that was performed according to his rite - was offered through salt and sulfur - or through salt and phosphorus - as found in the foodstuffs bread and wine. That is the original conception, and initiation is called “initiation” because it always goes back to the original conception. In the ancient Hebrew priesthood, the real bread, which contains salt, was replaced by unleavened bread for a certain reason that was not human, because certain secrets were no longer known.

What is it, then, that is contained in salt and phosphorus when a person absorbs them through bread and wine? In salt and phosphorus, through salt, lies the connection between man and the earth. The more salt a person absorbs, the more he connects with the earth, and the more phosphorus he absorbs, the more he breaks away from it and frees himself from it. What takes place in the human body – not outside of the human body – through the combination of salt and phosphorus is a process that properly connects the person to earthly existence, because the salt connects him to the earth in the right way, while the phosphorus snatches him away from earthly existence in the right way, making him free from it again. It is so that the man who has salt and phosphorus in the right way in him stands on the earth in the right way, is properly connected to the earth, but also receives the necessary ethereal and astral lightness to be free again from the earth forces in his being. The fact that the Jews of later times laid the main emphasis on the unleavened in bread showed that they no longer wanted to be connected with the earth, but wanted to have in the bread itself that which would carry them above the earth. Thus they wanted a supermundane and not an earthly priesthood; they wanted a priesthood that would rule the earth from the outside. This was the case with Judaism in particular at the time of Christ. Because Judaism, through long periods of time, had established a priesthood in its mysteries that was not properly connected with the earth, it could not understand that the Being of whom its initiates spoke as the coming Messiah could come to perfection in an earthly body; and it never dawned on the initiated Jews either that the Christ could have walked on earth in an earthly body, in the body of Jesus. Only Paul realized this when he received the help that the Christ revealed Himself not in the earthly body but in the etheric body.

Thus are all things connected, and this you must feel, for the words from the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which were given to those who were sent out as priests in the first Christian centuries, these words can only be understood in the right way from these foundations. But what is gained by going back to the actual original form of the offering of “salt and brimstone”? We can imagine what is gained by doing so if we imagine the contrast that existed between the high priest, between Melchi-Sadek, who was also a priest-king, an Adonai, and Abraham. In the current of intellectual life in which Melchi-Sadek also stood, the idea of repeated earthly lives was alive. It lived precisely in the mystery community to which Melchi-Sadek belonged in such a way that it was kept hidden from the uninitiated as a mystery, but it was handed over to all those who had been initiated into these mysteries. The Abrahamitic Hebraism was characterized by the fact that it restricted human perception to what arises as something spiritual for man when one disregards repeated earth lives, when one does not go into them, when one still takes scantily into account the pre-earthly life that preceded one's earth life and then considers the post-earthly life.

At least that was the teaching of the Pharisees. Abraham was the forefather of Judaism, who had the mission, within the education of mankind on earth, not to allow the teaching of repeated earthly lives to be active at first, in contrast to the higher priest, whom he recognized and who applied this teaching to those who were consecrated by him when they offered a sacrifice. He was opposed to the view of Melchi-Sadek, as described in the Old Testament. We must visualize this view of Melchi-Sadek in the following way.

It was the case that those who became disciples of Melchi-Sadek, which Abraham did not fully become, came to recognize that a person who, here on earth, in addition to doing good and right, also does wrong, needs a power that passes from his present body to the body of the next earthly life. Man cannot by himself carry over into the body, that is to say into the physical and etheric organization of the next earth-life, that which he accomplishes as activity in one earth-life; he can carry it over - and that now in sense of the time of human evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, in that what is accomplished through the cult with salt and phosphorus is done for him, in the sense that Melchi-Sadek accomplished the sacrifice through bread and wine. This enabled people in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha to take with them into the bodies they took on in the next life on earth the consequences of the good and evil they had committed in the previous life on earth. In other words, it was only through this that people were able to develop karma. None of the moral actions of one earthly life would have been passed on to a future life if it had not been for this kind of passing from body to body of what must be borne, so that there is karma, the cosmic destiny of man.

And what would have happened if there had been no such sacrifices of salt and phosphorus, if there had been no priest-kings to perform these sacrifices and thus become human beings who, so to speak, carried the other bodies along with them through their own momentum and enthusiasm, thus carrying the power of karma from one earthly life to another? Then the good and evil that people have done in one earthly life would have fallen away from them in that particular earthly life and become an inheritance of that power which, in the sense of the Gospel, is referred to as the “prince of this world”, not as the prince to whom man, with his innermost being, belongs. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the constant struggle of the time was that the so-called prince of this world - a spirit that had become Luciferic-Ahrimanic, namely a spirit that had become strongly Ahrimanic - took possession of that which tends towards evil in man, so that he could use the power of this evil for himself in the cosmic order. Human beings would then have become increasingly free from this evil. They were not allowed to do so; they were not allowed to do so because otherwise a new existence of their own would have begun in each new life on earth, and they would never have been able to atone for what is called 'sin' themselves. The sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek therefore consists in the fact that the healing of sins was preserved for men by continually snatching them from the prince of this world, and thus giving men the possibility of effecting a sin-atoning through their own nature in a subsequent life on earth. The Catholic Church was careful later on not seriously to consider this secret, which it has known for many centuries, even as late as the Middle Ages, and which is still known today by individual initiates of the Catholic Church, as religious content, for the reason that it is easier to tell people that their sins are forgiven, that is, that they are wiped out of the earth, even with the help of indulgences, to blot them out, instead of telling them that one is working to ensure that they are not blotted out on earth and do not become prey to the prince of this world and thereby corrupt the world for eternity instead of telling them that the healing of sins consists precisely in the fact that man is given the opportunity to make up for sins in the following earthly life.

In the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, therefore, in the right sense for that time, the remedy for sins is given, and the healing consisted in giving men the strength to keep their sins and not to deliver them up to the prince of this world. All that lies in the meaning of these words, you, my dear friends, will find renewed and exalted in what the Christ accomplished on earth. And only this illumination, which is now being given, will lead you on the path to recognize in the right sense what the word means: Christ took upon Himself the sins of men, united with them. Christ did not come to unite human piety with Himself, but He was the One who united Himself with the sins of men in order to take upon Himself the burden of sin. And when Paul says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” he means: You humans should accept the Christ in you, and thus accept the current in you that goes into the future of the earth, which contains your stream of sins, but the stream of sins that does not lead to death, but to the atonement of sins. And as priests you will become real healers of sins, not repulsors of sins, whereby men would perish in the light of their existence on earth. Again, this mystery is not explained in the church because it does not want to say what speaks to the courage, but what speaks to the cowardice of men. And it speaks to the cowardice of men when one says: Your sins will be taken from you. But one must speak to the courage and strength of men when one tells them: Your sins will be kept from you, you can carry them into the following earthly lives and can create the compensation for them so that you do not spoil earthly development, and in this way you can carry what you have worked for into future earthly cycles. But this is what you must feel with dignity again if you want to understand your priestly office in the right way. For then you will unite in your mission the three things that the Christ wants to see united in the mission of those who follow him and acknowledge him as the true Master, who in a higher sense has renewed the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, who acknowledge him in such a way that they continue his work among men in the threefold sense:

Firstly: in the name of the Father, by feeling truly imbued with God and the spirit, by feeling themselves to be priests not merely by profession, by virtue of their office, but by feeling themselves to be priests through the spirit. Those who do not perform their priestly duties with enthusiasm but merely as a job – which is always the heritage of the prince of this world – do not perform them in the sense of Christ.

"The second is that the word of the gospel is not externalized in the sense of the prince of this world, but proclaimed in the sense of the living Christ, so that the proclamation of the gospel is based on spiritual understanding in the heart of the priest. The continuing churches have sinned very grievously against the second, that which Christ demanded of his servants; they have sinned very grievously by bringing about conditions that are still visible today in their extremes. Especially those who want to be priests or teachers of the gospel very often most often criticize when anyone wants to base the gospel on the living spirit again. And then, in a seductive way that actually contains a Luciferic impulse, it is said that the Gospel should not be interpreted in a “complicated” way – but it is not a matter of a complicated interpretation, but of an interpretation in keeping with the spirit – it should be interpreted in simple words, as they stand. But that means nothing other than that it should not be interpreted at all. Because the way it is proclaimed today is not the gospel; that is, the way it is proclaimed today is actually denied by many theologians. The second thing you should feel as priests of a renewed priesthood is that you should carry out your ministry with enthusiasm, that you have the will to fulfill Scripture in a spiritual sense.

The third thing is that you want to be and should be in the right sense soul doctors of people, soul healers, by your word actually being fulfilled by that power that is given with the commission you have received, by that power through which you, when you perform the cult in the right sense and teach from inner enthusiasm, from inner knowledge, interpreting the scriptures , then in your work you have the power to heal souls, that is, to truly continue the work that the Christ accomplished with the Mystery of Golgotha and that is indicated by the words that he who struggles for the inheritance of evil in human nature, so that this human nature may not bring sin from one from one life to another, has been bound by the Mystery of Golgotha in the earthly life for a thousand years, that is, for a period at the end of which people should have become so strong that they can no longer fall prey to him; then he will be released again, and then people will have to have greater strength to resist him.

We live in the time, my dear friends, in which, on the one hand, Christ wants to show Himself to people again to strengthen their power; in this time we must prepare ourselves for this in the appropriate way. But we also live in the time when the thousand years are fulfilled, when the adversary wants to break his fetters and will do his utmost to achieve his intentions. And that is the time when the real secret of human evolution will be revealed to people, that those who truly feel the “Christ in me” take their sins with them by having the intention not to repel sins and thereby deliver them to the adversary, but to take them within themselves and, through what happened at Golgotha, to have a healing effect on humanity.

My dear friends, I believe you expected to learn not an unctuous reworking of what has already been taught, but something that really contains the secrets of initiation; and you will see that much of what has been taught so far is the very opposite of what is real. And if you cannot feel very keenly that you have to bring something new into the world, which in many respects is the very opposite of what is not a teaching from God but a teaching from the prince of this world, then you will not be able to enter into what you want in the right way. It is therefore an important matter. And the words that I have to add, so to speak, as the “first sermon” at the first mass that has been held here, must not only be words spoken in theory, but they must contain something that can shake your souls in a certain way and bring them to a new state of mind. Because the time has come when people must again be told: Change your minds! And those who want to lead people in a new priestly sense must also speak in such a way that it is said: Change the mind by which, in misunderstanding the facts, the Christian mind has been veiled to man so far!

In this way, after the preceding ceremonies, it falls to me to address the word of sending to you, the word of sending that was spoken in the sense of the first Christian sending of those who had been called to the apostolate, this word of sending forth, which is recorded in the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, chapter 1, verse 6. And this word I have to speak to you at this moment in the manner in which we can express it in our present language:

I exhort you always to stir up the gift of the Holy Spirit that is in you, which was given to you by the touch of the power of the Spirit world.

And I have to add the word from the first epistle of Timothy, chapter 4, verse 14, which in turn is translated into the language that is expressed by our present words with liveliness, so it means:

Do not lose the excited spiritual power from the eyes of your soul, which is given to you through the spirit word that touches the power of the spiritual world and works in the future.

Those who were sent out in the first Christian centuries to become the apostles were sent out in the spirit of the words of truth contained in these letters to Timothy, and became true followers of the apostles. And if you want to carry out what you have set out to do in the right way, you must become successors of the apostles. You can only do that if you say to yourselves: The apostles will speak to us in the mind of Christ; but we must bring the right understanding to the language of the apostles! And in order for you to have the right understanding of the language of the Apostles, I followed the solemn ceremony of the ordination of the shepherds of souls by connecting, so to speak, the first sermon for the Apostle ministry, which can lead you in the right sense to an understanding of your Apostle ministry. But only if you know that it is precisely in the alchemy of salt and phosphorus – or sulphur – that is, in the bread and wine, that you renew what happened on the cross and as a result of the death on the cross, then you will know that you have to consider the third as part of your mission. The three components of your mission are as follows:

First, that you should discharge your office in the enthusiasm with which the divine spiritual world permeates us;

secondly, that you should bring strength to the communities in the living word, not in the dead word, which actually denies the real spirit and which today, out of a Luciferian inclination, is called the “simple” word; and

thirdly, that you feel like real healers, like real doctors for the sins of humanity, that is, that you can accomplish, in addition to your own state of soul, in addition to the interpretation of the word the miracle of the remission of sins, that is, the transformation of the inheritance of the prince of this world into a good that the Christ carries into the souls of men through all subsequent eras and circles of the earth for the atonement of sins. As one imbued with God, as a teacher of God and as a healer of sins – in this sense you must give to your communities and tell them what you yourselves experience in your enthusiasm, what you can learn as a teacher of God within you, and that it may become manifest to them what you have attained as the living power of the healing of sins. That is what I had to place upon your souls today.

A participant: What about the breaking off of a piece of the host? Does that have something to do with the human constitutional elements?

Rudolf Steiner: If we see in the whole host what lives as solar power in man, we first take in nine-tenths, which we initially let work through their salt content. In this way, we connect nine-tenths of what is in us with our earthly existence, in the way I have just described. The question is: what happens to the remaining tenth? We immerse it in the wine, and before it enters our organism, we mix it with the phosphorus of the wine. It is in this mixing of the phosphorus with the salt that the part of the action taken out of the human being lies. The other part of the action takes place when we allow the salt to combine with the phosphorus merely through inner alchemy. The fact that we also take a small part out of this inner alchemy and leave it to the power that lives on the altar, that is what lies in the breaking away of the tenth from the host.

If we consider the whole human being, in the sense in which I have presented it in my “Theosophy”, according to its nine parts, we find, if we go down from above: spirit man, spirit of life, spirit self, consciousness soul, mind soul, sentient soul, sentient body, etheric body, physical body. These are the nine members. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not a synthesis: this is the tenth (see the larger circle drawn around the nine smaller circles in the diagram on Plate 3). This gives us ten members, which also appear in the ten Sephirot of the pre-Christian era, albeit in the way that corresponds to that time, when full self-awareness did not yet exist. If you now think of the host in connection with the ten members of the human being, you have in it a member that is the physical body, the ninth (in the drawing, the small red circle), which is actually the tenth. This physical body is in a special position, it is in a different position from the other links in human nature. You have to bear in mind that if you look out into the vastness of space from the earth, in the parts bordering on the earth, in a very, very fine resolution, you have everything that is on the earth, except for the salt-like. The salt-like is a property of the earth itself. There was once a period in the evolution of the Earth when salt formations also occurred in the Earth's immediate surroundings, but they no longer developed into solids, remaining instead in a liquid or gaseous state. Then a time came in the evolution of the earth when salt formation only occurred on the earth itself and in its immediate vicinity, so that the ether, which permeates the earth but extends beyond it, has no part in the formation of salt. Salt is something that has only a meaning for earthly existence itself, and this is shown by the fact that for no other celestial body but the Earth has salt formation become the peculiar characteristic of planetary formation. If you take the physical body, then, simply through its organization, it has a share in salt. And at the moment when you break out of the whole human being, which the host represents, the 'physical body', you can say: I cannot have this body connected in any other way with the one in which the other parts are already inside, than by me letting what can no longer take place on earth in the right way, what only takes place in a decadent way – by forming phosphoric acid salts, , but which make up precisely the heaviest part of the human being, his bony part, which belongs solely and exclusively to earthly existence. By allowing this to combine in an extra-terrestrial way – that is, allowing the salt to combine with the phosphorus that is in the wine – I allow, through what I do in the rite, through Christ, that which would not be effected in my own body. So I must consume a part of the host in such a way that it does not work like the other part of the host; so that [by breaking off a part of the host] it should be shown that man himself is not the alchemist who effects the transmutation, but it should be shown how that which man cannot do is done by the power of Christ at the altar.

This is how the matter presents itself when we consider it in terms of the new spiritual alchemy.

A participant: What about the seven candles on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: It is good to put into words everything that is present in the cultus in a physical form, because the physical form of the cultus should speak to us. If we wanted to express in a single sentence what is contained in the seven candles, we would have to say: Just as there are seven human constitutional elements within you, a sevenfold power radiates out of the ritual for you, each part of which belongs to a part of your own being.

A participant: What can be said about the figures on the chasuble?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the processes that take place in the cosmos and which either close in on human beings, so that they participate in cosmic processes, or which are expressed in a different way so that they develop images or replicas of them, then, if we want to express this in words, we can only do so in the following way: Panel 3

We can say that ascending and descending forces are at work everywhere in the cosmos. These ascending and descending forces can best be visualized by a line like this:

We would then have the ascending forces on one side and the descending forces on the other.

On the one side we would have the ascending forces and on the other the descending forces. You can imagine it something like this: if you were to stand on one pan of a set of scales, you would be heavy, i.e. you would take part in the general ponderability of the earth, in gravity. You would join the forces that work downwards. There are, of course, other forces at work than those that we initially think of as represented by gravity. You could live in connection with everything that manifests itself as gravity, but you could never develop a soul life permeated by thoughts. For if you were only exposed to these forces of gravity, your brain would weigh 1500 grams; but a brain weighing 1500 grams would immediately crush all the fine veins beneath it. If the brain were to press down on the lower surface of the head with this weight, a person would not be able to think, and would therefore not be able to develop a soul life. How do we develop a soul life? You develop a soul life, to put it bluntly, through Archimedes' principle. Archimedes said that when he was once in the bath, he observed that he felt lighter than outside the water. And in physics we learn the law that every body, when immersed in water, loses as much weight as the weight of the amount of water displaced by it, so that when you are in the water, you lose as much weight as a human formed from water would weigh. Now our brain is floating in the brain fluid and as a result it loses so much of its weight that instead of pressing down with 1500 grams, it only weighs 20 grams. In physics, what counteracts the force of gravity in the fluid, which now works upwards and not downwards, is called buoyancy. Thus man lives with his soul not in the forces of gravity, the ponderable forces, but in those forces that draw upward; he himself is a physical cosmos, which, as regards his soul life, does not live in what is heavy in him, but in what continually strives to escape from gravity in him.

Thus we can say: We need only look at the human being very roughly in physical terms, and we cannot think materially at all. The human being has the characteristic of being heavy. But if we were to think with the material, we would have to think with the heaviness. We cannot think with heaviness, but only with uplift. It is therefore nonsense to believe that we think with heaviness. We think with that which strives upward to heaven; thus we join the forces that work upward. We human beings live in the forces that draw downward and those that work upward; our inner being is in the upward-working forces, our outer being in the downward-drawing ones. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is neutral in relation to gravity, the astral body pulls up and the I is carried up through the astral body, not down. Thus the outer man is integrated into the cosmos. But what does he do as an organism that also has an inner organic life? The following happens:

Everything that takes place in the head is a true reflection of what is happening in the metabolic-limb organization. When, for example, a person digests and his kidney and liver systems work together to regulate digestion in the right way, a process takes place in the kidney and liver systems that is also reflected in the left part of the brain. There is never just something going on below or just above, but there are always corresponding processes taking place below and above. Thus, just as the human being is outwardly embedded in the cosmos of ascending and descending forces, so too is he inwardly endowed with these forces; those forces that are in the left part of the brain act down in the liver and kidneys; those forces that are in the upper right part of the brain act down in the stomach (see diagram, plate 3).

And if we follow the effects of these forces, the ascending and descending ones, we get this second line:

Plate 3

There is a neutral point in the human being where these two forces intersect. If you show yourself as a spiritual person to the believing community, and you show yourself from the front, you show yourself in this form (see drawing). If you turn around, then that part of you which is more an image of your own inner being shows itself in the other line. With regard to the upper, dotted part, it is then a matter of taking it up through yourself, that is, letting it go within you and leaving it to the gods to properly effect the transformation of the ascending into the descending forces. So that you simply show what is right when you are vested. You pronounce the secrets of the world through the vestment.

So you can't say: why is that so? In the material world, man is simply Maya. During the sacred act, he can show himself as he is in relation to the cosmos and to himself. You make sure that the person shows himself not in an illusory form, but in his truth. The image is intended to suggest what is a reality in the human being in the spiritual sense, but what is also reproduced in the physical human being. You just need to form a picture of how the blood circulation in the human being proceeds in the left and right halves of the heart, how the blood flows from the right atrium to the right ventricle, through the lungs, back to the left atrium , from there to the left ventricle, and again supplies the upper part of the human being, this is visible in an approximate way, corresponding to earthly conditions. Only when one follows this line, the point of intersection is somewhat shifted in the physical and is more towards the bottom.

A participant: Does a donation formula have to be given for the community communion?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: the Act of Consecration of Man, the Mass, can be read and the faithful merely listen. The Communion of the faithful can also be incorporated into the Act of Consecration of Man; in that case it takes place after the Priestly Communion. And so it should actually be that all the breads are in the paten, to be used for the Communion of the faithful, and that all the wine is in the chalice, to be used for the Communion of the faithful. So the Priestly Communion is coming to an end.

May Your Body, O Christ, which I have received, and Your Blood, which gives me life, penetrate me, so that the disease of sin may be cured by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, let it be so.

Now the priests' communion is over; now the faithful's communion begins:

The body of Christ which you receive and the blood of Christ which gives you life may permeate you so that the disease of sin may be healed by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, Lord, let it be so.

The host is given, placed on the tongue. The believer is touched lightly with the fingers of the right hand on the left cheek, and it is said again:

Peace be with you.

Then the chalice is passed. The left cheek is again touched with the fingers of the right hand, and again it is said:

Peace be with you.

This is the transition from the priest's communion to the faithful's communion.

Of course, Holy Communion is not to be distributed at every Mass, but in any case it should not happen that the faithful proceed to Communion without an opening of the Mass. Now it may be that in some places the Mass cannot be read. Then it would of course still be good, even without celebrating the Mass, at least to develop the whole spirit of the Mass, so that - since the community will certainly demand the explanation of the Mass right from the start - the Communion of the faithful can at least be incorporated into the Mass action in spirit.

A participant asks whether the Communion of the faithful should also take place without the Priestly Communion.

Rudolf Steiner: The action can certainly be performed in an appropriate manner. It is not good if the communion of the faithful is brought about without the communion of the priests. The communion of the priests should come first.

A participant: What about the mixing of water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a given in actual alchemy, in that the human being - I only hinted at this yesterday by way of example - continually develops alcohol within himself as he needs it. Now, the human being is also 90% water column, the other is only incorporated in it. Therefore, in the chalice, we also have an image of the human being made of water and wine, in that you do not just take the wine, but the wine, which is a product of the human being, mix it with the water.

You can only unite with Christ by entering into the phantom of the physical human body. This is contained in the words: “entering into the physical earth”; and this is what man finds when he

physical, even when it is already corrupted in the physical, is linked precisely to Christ. Thus renewal takes place in union with Christ, which is there as a consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer asks whether words could also be given for the laying out of the robes in the sacristy.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course one could think of something like that, but I would actually like to warn against the danger of over-Catholicizing. The situation is this: if you take a missal in your hands today – the good missals include instructions for this – you will find an extraordinarily strong externalization. Every second, when the priest dresses or walks to the altar, he is doing something prescribed for him; he cannot escape the words contained in the missal. A Missa solemnis is, after all, something extraordinarily complicated, and only by first tormenting candidates for the priesthood to learn how to put together a mass, for example at Christmas, at Easter and so on, does one make it possible for the matter to proceed without difficulty. Otherwise, the composition of a mass, for example a Christmas mass, where many individual priests work together, would take an extremely long time to prepare, because everything is externalized and has to be coordinated. Now this is simply postponed to the time of the candidates, and later the priests can spare themselves the trouble, because it actually happens automatically. So it is precisely in the Catholic Church that it is the “catholic” that it has externalized everything, and one must go back to feeling one's way through the action of the Mass with such moods, as I have just indicated through the two fundamental sermons, so that one does not have to specify. And you have indeed given the priest the means to keep this alive in his mind, in the breviary, if it is used in the right way and is brought into the right connection with the preparation for and the celebration of the Mass. I would therefore like to warn against the fact that the matter is too formulaic. I must strive to bring back what is Catholic in the Ahrimanic externalized, to the original real spiritual. So I would like to warn against feeling too strong a tendency towards Catholicism. They would quickly end up on the same path that Catholicism actually took in the 5th century, but especially between the 10th and 12th centuries, where everything was really externalized. I believe that we would have to avoid that if we act correctly. So: do not go too far when formulating. Formulate what needs to be formulated, but do not go too far.

What I said yesterday and today, and what I may still have to say, offers the opportunity to experience the original spiritual dimension in a very concrete way, not just in a general, abstract way, but in a very concrete way, during the preparation, the celebration and the aftermath of the Mass. There it comes to life every day. We do not run the risk that the Roman Catholic priest does, namely – and of course one must express things as they are – when you celebrate the great lines of the rite, it is also a real process. What you perform as a rite is imprinted in the ether of the universe; and when you read the tenth mass, it is not the same as the first time. The first time you excite the vibrations in the cosmic ether, the tenth time you already place yourself in the vibrations; thus, more and more an objective arises. If you now permeate everything with formulas too strongly, you get the same result as when a Catholic priest performs the service. The actual rite breaks away from the person, but the rite that clings too strongly to the person causes a terrible hardening in the person: he repeatedly enjoys the same thing that he enjoyed the day before, he enjoys, so to speak, his own sputum over and over again. And that must be avoided. A participant: How should we understand 'to the right and left of the altar' at Mass?

[Rudolf Steiner's answer is only poorly recorded by the stenographer. See note.)

A participant asks about sobriety when celebrating the Act of Consecration of Man.

Rudolf Steiner: You can imagine how much more undisturbed the whole process of celebrating the Mass is when there is no nourishment at work within you. The Catholic Church has the idea that the consumption of the sacrament at Mass is made the first consumption of the day, with the exception of those who have dispensation because otherwise their health would be harmed. Now, the idea is that the mass is basically performed for others, so it is detached from the priest, so that the question of whether the priest should perform the mass on an empty or a full stomach is actually a personal matter for the priest. Of course, it has an effect on him, because he also has to read it for himself. Now he can arrange it in such a way as he needs for his own strengthening. He has to read the Mass every day. But if one priest says, “I feel the power of the Mass for eight days,” another says, “I feel it for a month.” This is true for the priest himself.

The act should be celebrated at sunrise, not at sunset. A mass at sunset cannot be considered a real mass for the cosmos. During the Christmas season, a mass should be read around midnight, at the transition from the descent to the ascent of the sun, between December 24th and 25th. This is how it is now; originally it was between December 22 and 23. This is now also correct in the Catholic Church. A mass is to be read at midnight between December 24 and 25, immediately where the sun begins to rise. A participant: How often should incense be burned during the ceremony?

Rudolf Steiner: Only one incense is necessary. But of course, if you want to celebrate the service solemnly, you can even do it up to three times. You don't have to limit it to a clever system. It is a process that develops. You must not ask: What difference does it make if I do it three times? - The first time invokes the process.

From the instruction hour in Berlin, December 16, 1911.

The three lights that now burn symbolize the three higher principles that shine in the darkness in our higher being. They also represent the wisdom, beauty and strength whose words (names) were pronounced when the lights were just lit on the altars of the east, south and west. We will find the light of wisdom if we always strive for truth in our thinking, if we learn to recognize that a new kind of thinking should arise in us, that world thoughts live in our thoughts. We should become aware that it “thinks in us” and that what is thought in us are revelations of spiritual entities that want to bring us wisdom. From the astral world, living, weaving, moving wisdom flows to us, and by letting wisdom permeate our thinking, we can catch the wisdom of those spiritual entities and our soul will attain wisdom.

Beauty flows into us when we acquire true piety. When our soul can open in admiration and devotion to the beauty that is around us, this beauty becomes for us the expression of spiritual beings who want to reveal their language with it and make themselves understood to us. Only heartfelt, true piety can reveal true beauty to us. For you all know that in the spiritual (astral) world, devils can show themselves in the guise of angels under the mask of beauty. But you also know that this is only possible if our soul is not permeated by that purity which is coupled with heartfelt devotion. In the lower Devachan, those beings can be found who send their beauty down to us in truly beautiful images and forms.

Strength or power flows down upon us from the higher Devachan and will strengthen our inner being if we transform our power into virtue, into active virtue. True, active virtue arises when we transform all the qualities that stand out in our lower nature through the power of our will, so that they become forces that can work as spiritual forces in the world.

From the instruction session in Berlin, December 17, 1911

We see here the flames on the altars, which represent wisdom, beauty and strength. These are very deep symbols that we can also find in the human being.

Where can we find wisdom in the human form? It cannot be found on the outside, it is hidden within the form in such a way that it is not currently adapted to the present stage of development, so that the form does not form a cohesive whole. Wisdom can be depicted as follows:

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It is different with beauty, which finds its full expression in human hands when they are raised in an outstretched position, with the head forming the center. In the hands one finds the symbol of beauty and this is represented as follows:

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The purpose of the hand is to be beautiful, not to be strong; the arm may be strong and muscular, but at the bottom it tapers into the beauty-tending form of the human hand.

Strength is found in the opposite of the hands, in the feet. No one who is an occultist will see anything beautiful in the feet, and anyone who wants to see something beautiful in them in their ordinary lives will see nothing but a caricature of beauty. The feet represent power or strength; they must be able to carry the whole body. This is represented as follows:

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Thus we find in the human form these three important symbols, which in occultism are called the “three world mothers”, which Goethe also calls so in his “Faust”.

From the instruction session in Hanover, December 31, 1911

One of the most important symbols is represented by the three flames that stand on the altars of the East, the West and the South, and to which our attention should be drawn first. In them we should see the symbols of wisdom, beauty and strength, but we should not understand them to mean worldly wisdom, worldly beauty and worldly strength.

Wisdom is not to be found in the physical plane. Anyone who is involved in the occult life should make up their mind never to pronounce the word “wisdom” and to think of it as the worldly wisdom that we encounter in the external sciences, for example, or that is generally associated with learning. A learned person is not wise; a wise person does not need to be learned, and may even be a very naive person; but a wise person is the one who keeps wisdom in his heart, who speaks and feels as it were from his heart: I see my God at work in every petal; a person who senses and perceives his God in all of creation and feels connected to creation and the divine. But it should be borne in mind that this does not mean that one should be a pantheist to do so; one must form a much more intimate mental image of such a sage, an inexpressible feeling of being sheltered in the divinity of the world, which gives him peace and bliss in his being.

We must acquire such wisdom for ourselves, it must permeate our entire being so strongly that it is no longer possible for us to think that we are not always and forever surrounded and cared for by the spirit of the world, so that inner peace and security can no longer leave us.

Such perceptions and feelings will flow into us from the astral world, which consists of living, flowing, moving wisdom, which forms the background, the source of the nature that surrounds us and permeates the entire physical world. From there we must draw the strength to become wise. It cannot be found in the physical world itself.

The beauty symbolized by the second flame also has nothing in common with the beauty in the world; it does not refer to any worldly object. To glimpse something of this beauty, we must turn our gaze to the starry night sky and immerse ourselves in it, so that we feel, as it were, that spiritual beings rule behind it. A deep, heartfelt devotion should fill us with this. Or, when we experience a sunset and feel how the radiant orb sinks slowly below the horizon in a purple glow, so that the shadows grow longer and longer and finally the whole of nature around us is shrouded in darkness, then again, a deep, heartfelt devotion should permeate our being and identify so strongly with the divine power in our soul that the inner sun will shine and shine in our soul, as the midnight sun can shine into the dark Christmas days for the student of occultism, and the spiritual beings can be seen in their sublime beauty, in all their majesty. We must think in this sense when we speak of beauty, and these thoughts should transform the concept of beauty.

Beauty can be found in the lower Devachan; from there it streams down upon us from the beings in beautiful images and forms. But on this plane one also still finds ugliness, and precisely in that which on earth is often called “beautiful”. We find every lie there as something ugly. We can even find beauty in this world, but it is only based on illusion, on delusion. We find, for example, beautiful figures and forms there, even angelic figures, which have been created by black magicians, with which they envelop themselves as with a veil to hide their own selfish goals. One can have come quite far in the esoteric life and deal with magical arts or black magic in a particular life, then such people can show themselves in the lower devachan plan in such angelic forms, wrapped in a veil of beautiful garments. So there is no absolute, true beauty in this realm, and only genuine, heartfelt devotion can reveal the true devachanic beauty to us.

The third flame symbolizes power, again not what we know as power in the physical world; but this power from the higher devachan is to flow into the physical world and unfold there in man as “active virtue”. This is the virtue that consists in continually allowing our personality to recede, that we fight our ambition, especially when it expresses itself in that we want to shine with our gifts. This virtue should make us aware that we rest in the Godhead, that we are only a small part of the true, great perfection, so that we feel how all vanity and pride are unreal, so that it would be foolishness to want to be proud of something.

Particularly at the beginning of their occult path, people often become haughty or vain and proud. For example, when they start to notice small successes in themselves, they soon feel superior to others. But that is not the way to achieve active virtue. Those who seek to share their knowledge or powers with others, to teach what they have received as higher teachings, and who then allow themselves to be venerated by those to whom they impart knowledge, will not find the way either. These vices are great obstacles which man himself places in his own way. But also those who thus offer homage place these obstacles in the way of the esotericist. By combating these vices in the physical world and constantly guarding against falling prey to them by practicing “active virtue,” the power found in the higher Devachan as a sum of high spiritual beings will flow into us as spiritual power and strengthen our inner being.

Higher Devachan Power

Lower Devachan Beauty

Astral world Wisdom

Man in truth True piety

Physical world in thought Piety

[ 1 ] This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts.’

[ 2 ] The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.

[ 3 ] When man turns his attention to the world into which he is born and out of which he dies, he is surrounded in the first place by the fullness of his sense-impressions. He forms thoughts about these sense-impressions.

[ 4] In bringing the following to his consciousness: ‘I am forming thoughts about what my senses reveal to me as the world,’ he has already come to the point where he can contemplate himself. He can say to himself: In my thoughts ‘I’ live. The world gives me the opportunity of experiencing myself in thoughts. I find myself in my thoughts when I contemplate the world.

[ 5 ] And continuing to reflect in this way, he ceases to be conscious of the world; he becomes conscious of the ‘I’. He ceases to have the world before him; he begins to experience the self.

[ 6 ] If the experience be reversed, and the attention directed to the inner life in which the world is mirrored, then those events emerge into consciousness which belong to our life's destiny, and in which our human self has flowed along from the point of time to which our memory goes back. In following up the events of his destiny, a man experiences his own existence.

[ 7 ] In bringing this to his consciousness: ‘I with my own self have experienced something that destiny brought to me,’ a man has already come to the point where he will contemplate the world. He can say to himself: I was not alone in my fate; the world played a part in my experience. I willed this or that; the world streamed into my will. I find the world in my will when I experience this will in self-contemplation.

[ 8 ] Continuing thus to enter into his own being, man ceases to be conscious of the self, he becomes conscious of the world; he ceases to experience himself, he becomes feelingly aware of the world.

[ 9 ] ‘I send my thoughts out into the World, there I find myself; I sink into myself, there I find the World.’ If a man experiences this strongly enough he is confronted with the great riddles of the World and Man.

[ 10 ] For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle.

[ 11 ] And to feel that one's own self is formed through destiny, yet to perceive in this process the onward flow of world-happenings—this presents the second riddle.

[ 12 ] In the experience of this problem of Man and the World germinates the frame of mind in which man can so confront Anthroposophy that he receives from it in his inner being an impression which rouses his attention.

[ 13 ] For Anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience which does not lose the world when thinking. One can also live in thought. Anthroposophy tells of an inward experience in which one does not lose the sense-world when thinking, but gains the Spirit-world. Instead of penetrating into the ego in which the sense-world is felt to disappear, one penetrates into the Spirit-world in which the ego feels established.

[ 14 ] Anthroposophy shows, further, that there is an experience of destiny in which one does not lose the self. In fate, too, one can still feel oneself to be active. Anthroposophy points out, in the impartial, unegoistic observation of human destiny, an experience in which one learns to love the world and not only one's own existence. Instead of staring into the world which carries the ego on the waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego which shapes its own fate voluntarily. Instead of striking against the world on which the ego is dashed to pieces, one penetrates into the self, which feels itself united with the course of events in the world.

[ 15 ] Man's destiny comes to him from the world that is revealed to him by his senses. If then he finds his own activity in the working of his destiny, his real self rises up before him not only out of his inner being but out of the sense-world too.

[ 16 ] If a person is able to feel, however faintly, how the spiritual part of the world appears in the self, and how the self proves to be working in the outer world of sense, he has already learned to understand Anthroposophy correctly.

[ 17 ] For he will then realise that in Anthroposophy it is possible to describe the Spirit-world which the self can comprehend. And this will enable him to understand that in the sense-world the self can also be found—in a different way than by diving within. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sense-world reveals to man not only sense-perceptions but also the after-effects of his life before birth and his former earthly lives.

[ 18 ] Man can now gaze on the world perceptible to his senses and say: It contains not only colour, sound, warmth; in it are active the experiences passed through by souls before their present earthly life. And he can look into himself and say: I find there not only my ego but, in addition, a spiritual world is revealed.

[ 19 ] In an understanding of this kind, a person who really feels—who is not unmoved by—the great riddles of Man and the World, can meet on a common ground with the Initiate who in accordance with his insight is obliged to speak of the outer world of the senses as manifesting not only sense-perceptions but also the impressions of what human souls have done in their life before birth and in past earthly lives, and who has to say of the world of the inner self that it reveals spiritual events which produce impressions and are as effective as the perceptions of the sense-world.

[ 20 ] The would-be active members should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the problems of Man and the Universe, and what the knowledge of the Initiates has to recount, when it draws forth a past world out of the destiny of human beings, and when by strengthening the soul it opens up the perception of a spiritual world.

[ 21 ] In this way, through the work of the would-be active members, the Anthroposophical Society may become a true preparatory school for the school of Initiates. It was the intention of the Christmas Meeting to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Meeting meant will continue to point this out until sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.

[ 22] May the Leading Thoughts to be given in this number proceed, therefore, out of this spirit.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 23 ] 62. In our sense-perceptions, the world of the senses bears on to the surface only a portion of the being that lies concealed in the depths of its waves beneath. Penetrative spiritual observation reveals within these depths the after-effects of what was done by souls of men in ages long gone by.

[ 24 ] 63. To ordinary self-observation the inner world of man reveals only a portion of that, in the midst of which it stands. Intensified experience in consciousness shows it to be contained within a living spiritual Reality.

[ 25] 64. The destiny of man reveals the workings, not only of an external world, but of the man's own Self.

[ 26 ] 65. The experiences of the human soul reveal not only a Self but a world of the Spirit, which the Self can know by deeper spiritual knowledge as a world united with its own being.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 27 ] 66. The Beings of the Third Hierarchy reveal themselves in the life which is unfolded as a spiritual background in human Thinking. In the human activity of thought this life is concealed. If it worked on in its own essence in human thought, man could not attain to Freedom. Where cosmic Thought activity ceases, human Thought-activity begins.

[ 28 ] 67. The Beings of the Second Hierarchy manifest themselves in a world-of-soul beyond humanity—a world of cosmic soul-activities, hidden from human Feeling. This cosmic world-of-soul is ever creative in the background of human Feeling. Out of the being of man it first creates the organism of Feeling; only then can it bring Feeling itself to life therein.

[ 29 ] 68. The Beings of the First Hierarchy manifest themselves in spiritual creation beyond humanity—a cosmic world of spiritual Being which indwells the human Willing. This world of cosmic Spirit experiences itself in creative action when man wills. It first creates the connection of man's being with the Universe beyond humanity; only then does man himself become, through his organism of Will, a freely willing being.

Dr. Steiner: (Speaking to Ruhtenberg who was substituting in the 5b class) How are you doing in the fifth grade?

A teacher: The children are talkative and boisterous.

Dr. Steiner: To what do you attribute their talkativeness? Their previous teacher, Miss Lang, could always work with them.

A teacher: I listened in on her class, and the children were always quiet with her.

A teacher: That class was always particularly difficult.

Dr. Steiner: This is something peculiar. Miss Lang could always keep them quiet, so there is something hidden here.

A teacher: She was very strict.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to call your attention to the fact that there is something important for us in this situation. Miss Lang was a credentialed teacher in Württemberg. When we are evaluated, they will tend to use the strict discipline taught in Württemberg. When the three wise men were in the school, one said, in reference to Mrs. K., that the discipline in her class was not as good as that in the credentialed teachers’ classes. They noticed when a properly credentialed teacher was in the class.

A teacher: I have the impression that the problem lies in not having enough time to prepare myself.

Dr. Steiner: Here we come to the intangibles. It is not only important what a teacher does, but who the teacher is, the attitude in his or her soul. That is how things are and how we must think of them. That is something particularly obvious in the college preparatory high schools, where a teacher often arrives at school with a hangover because they have spent the evening at a bar. Then, all hell breaks loose simply because the teacher has a hangover. That is one of the intangibles, perhaps the most radical case. The moment you are insufficiently prepared, the souls of the children vibrate differently. That is easily seen in the lack of discipline. The real difficulty for the teachers in the Waldorf School is to be truly prepared. With all the stressful activities, it is terribly difficult to prepare. Why are you laughing?

A teacher: Because that’s the way it is.

Dr. Steiner: Once again, we want to become aware of the kind of teachers we need. Yes, we have the sixth grade. We don’t need to divide it. There are fifty-four children, but that is still bearable. However, we must still think of the ninth grade, and in that connection, the tenth. We will need to find some division there.

The classes are reviewed—including those of the specialty teachers—and assigned.

Dr. Steiner: I would like Dr. Röschl to come here. I think she is suitable. I would very much like her to have Latin and Greek. She could begin in the fall.

Is Ruhtenberg free? Considering that I want to have Dr. Röschl, I think it would be a good idea if Mr. Ruhtenberg would permanently take over the 5b class.

Then we need to discuss only two new teachers.

Isn’t Miss Klara Michels a high school teacher? We could certainly consider her for the upper grades.

Dr. Kolisko says he can be at the school beginning in the fall.

Dr. Steiner: If Dr. Kolisko comes here, things might shift a little. It is not easy to find teachers. A large number of people have applied, but there are hardly any we can use.

A teacher: In ninth grade history, I am now at the present.

Dr. Steiner: You had thought about skipping Jean Paul. I think we must keep things we have decided upon. Are you also at the present in the eighth grade?

I would recommend that you have the eighth grade read the first chapter of Schiller’s Thirty Years War. They can learn a lot from that. It contains many things that go up to the present.

A teacher: Could we read something out of a book in the seventh grade English class?

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps you could. How much time would you have to read? How could we manage to read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol? It would be extremely instructive if the children had the book, and you called upon them individually and had them read aloud before the others, so that they learn to think and work together. In the sixth grade, poetry followed by prose. In Latin, you could have them read Ovid or Virgil, perhaps Plutarch, little stories.

A teacher says he has read Ovid.

Dr. Steiner: Stay with it until they can do a great deal.

A question is asked regarding Pliny.

Dr. Steiner: Pliny is good reading. Use Livius for the older children. There you will have to go into the more intimate things. We know very little about Livius. He is a famous writer you can conjecture about.

In Greek, I would go through such sayings (an example is given). There are a number of these two-line sayings in Greek.

A question is posed about the religion class.

A teacher: I was in the 6b class. That went quite well.

Dr. Steiner: You can help someone a great deal when you are in the class.

How is it with eurythmy? I wanted to have Mrs. Steiner hear about it.

A report is given. An extra class has been formed.

Marie Steiner: It is not a bad idea for some of the young men and women to simply look on.

Dr. Steiner: Forming an extra class broke with the principle of showing eurythmy to the school. If that principle were properly held by the school, you would not do that, you would not prepare an extra group. You remove the class from the normal process of the school instruction that way. Forming such a student aristocracy is something that disturbs the school’s pedagogy.

A teacher: We did it that way because we needed some of the children for performances.

Dr. Steiner: There must be some of the regular students you can use for that. It is not pedagogically correct to prepare a particular group in a special way.

A teacher: I spoke with Mr. N., and he thought it might be better if we had a course outside the school.

Dr. Steiner: Then we could never say that we are presenting the Waldorf School children. That is something we need to take into account for the public. We have never discussed such an extra course in one of our meetings.

A teacher: It is something that arose out of the first performance.

Dr. Steiner: We need to discuss such important things in our meetings. Otherwise, one day someone could decide to select a number of children and begin a class in chess. In principle, it’s the same thing. We cannot do this. You are creating an aristocracy. Marie Steiner: I understand that.

A teacher: I wanted to ask if we have given up the idea of a kindergarten.

Dr. Steiner: Not given up. We just need to wait until we can form it.

A teacher: We wanted to bring up the question of a vocational school.

Dr. Steiner: Are there concrete possibilities? We will need to determine the plan for the tenth grade. It should contain something practical. But a vocational school? Are there any concrete possibilities for it?

A teacher: The concern is with the children who have left, so that we could include them also. At the present, it was not possible due to space limitations and money. We should prepare it for next year.

Dr. Steiner: The preparation would actually be to see to it that the officials don’t spit in the soup.

A teacher: From the official perspective, vocational schools are acceptable, but we will need to show that the curriculum meets the standards of the others.

Dr. Steiner: Now we are to be so stupid as to stick the children into special situations. We cannot do that if we are to remain with our pedagogy. We can create only those things that will bring people forward. If we create a vocational school, we must do it in such a way that the children will have something for the continuation of their human development.

We will decide what kind of school we want to create. There was certainly no doubt that Strakosch was called to a general vocational school. It was to be a kind of practical continuation of the college preparatory high schools, a school for human development. We haven’t the slightest inclination to create anything else. It is certainly not necessary that we do what everyone else does.

A teacher: The situation is that the children who will go into a trade must attend one of the state schools.

Dr. Steiner: Those who are already attending such trade schools don’t come to us. We will have none of them in our classes. We lack the possibility of teaching children according to our plans from the age of fifteen on. That was something we said earlier. For now the question is settled. We already discussed it here and we cannot do anything more now. The most acute question is how to use the time between elementary school and college. If we had some way of getting official recognition, we would have a tremendous increase in attendance.

Is it possible that when an apprenticeship is not under consideration, someone could get such people accepted into a company?

A teacher: Those who have not learned through a certified master cannot be employed.

Dr. Steiner: We can’t do anything! Everything is so limited that all we need is a law about how to hold a fork.

We need to study the question about how we can create a vocational school so that it can be a vocational school in the sense of my essays on public education. The Waldorf School needs to see if we can force that through the official channels. We will need to create more respect for the school.

Dear friends!

In keeping with the promise we made at the Christmas Conference to provide updates on the work of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, we are sending this first newsletter to those associated with us in the field of medicine. It is inspired by the attitude that united us during the medical courses in the New Year. It would like to convey to each word something of the feelings for suffering humanity, from which not only devotion to the art of healing must arise, but also its real power.

It was in ancient times
There lived in the initiate's soul
The powerful thought that every man is sick
By nature.
And education was regarded
As the healing process,
Which, as the child matured,
At the same time brought health
For life's completed humanity.

It is good to let such powerful thoughts, gained from the contemplation of ancient instinctive wisdom, come before our soul when we want to prepare our soul in the right inner contemplation to grasp the healing effects.

Let us not forget that the healing process must be given a soul, since it must not only turn to a body but also to a soul. The more young doctors grasp such thoughts, the more that which the thoughtful doctor longs for when he perceives the limitations of the current state of his art will flow into medical life, and the patient will experience it as a blessing during the healing process.

Dear friends, you who were here in January, you accepted with open hearts what was offered to you with such good will. We will never forget how this shone in your eyes and how it was conveyed in your warm words. Our thoughts were with you, and today, for the first time, they are turning to you in response to the questions you have raised.

We are sending the following to individual addresses and ask those who receive direct mail from us to ensure that it is forwarded to the addresses we have provided.

Goetheanum, March 11, 1924.

Questions and Answers.

I. In response to a question about the difficulties that aspiring doctors today face in studying both conventional medicine and medical courses in the anthroposophical movement, we can only reply that it is precisely our intention, by communicating these circulars, to overcome these difficulties over time. The meditation referred to in the letter as supplementary is available from Dr. Ita Wegman for those who need it.

II. Regarding study at the Goetheanum.

Practical study should, of course, be provided for wherever possible, but we ask for patience in this regard. We will indicate in these newsletters the time from which registrations will be possible.

III. Regarding the request for the presentation of certain topics for co-workers in the Medical Section [of the School of Spiritual Science], we note that we would like to work in this direction. However, it will be more effective to discuss such topics in individual correspondence rather than in this newsletter. But here, too, we ask for a little patience; we will come ever closer to achieving our goals, but we can only proceed step by step.

We would also like to add that in the future, therapeutic questions that are asked for very specific cases will not be answered in the newsletter. We naturally welcome general therapeutic questions that arise in relation to the medical courses that have taken place, as well as questions that relate to physiological and anatomical problems, to the study, and to the physician's human and moral attitude.

IV. For those individuals who have asked us whether they can come here in the near future to participate in the work of the college, or who – after passing their exams, for example – have a desire to do so, we note that three to five further lectures are to be held immediately after the Easter lectures from April 19-22, in which those concerned can initially receive guidelines for their further work.

Topic: The nature of man and world orientation with regard to education and healing, as well as the particularly important human tasks in this area.

V. The establishment of home pharmacies with our remedies would of course be desirable, but cannot be implemented for the time being, as the law only allows homeopathic remedies to be dispensed by the city doctors themselves. Once we are in the same position as these homeopathic physicians (i.e. in terms of legal recognition), we will be able to do the same. For the time being, we have to be content with distributing the remedies through pharmacies.

VI. In answer to the question of whether information about the mode of action of the remedy should be given to the patient, it can be said that the effect is indeed impaired if the knowledge of it is absorbed in thought. However, the impairment is less severe if the thoughts are only intellectual, more severe if they are pictorial, and most severe if the patient is able to follow the entire course of the healing process within himself. But this should neither prevent the patient from being given any desired information about the mode of action nor prevent a knowing patient from being cured. For what is lost through knowledge can be fully regained if the patient develops reverence for the healing methods. Care must be taken to communicate this.

VII. Questions about the type of injections.

Injections should generally be made under the skin. Only if the patient does not respond to repeated attempts should intravenous injections be given, in highly potentized doses. In this case, the effect of the first injection must be awaited.

VIII. In a letter, reference is made to two lines, one running in the direction of the spine and the other running down from the head, indicating the hyoid bone, mandibular arch, thyroid cartilage, and lateral part of the ribs. And the question is what the significance of this line direction is. The latter line corresponds to what is formed out of the most solid substances in the animal through the astral body. In the human being, this line is brought in that direction by the upright posture, in which it forms an oblique angle with the vertical. This is oriented by the ego organization, in such a way that in the course of the spinal vertebrae the earthly ego appears, so to speak, hypertrophically; the forming ego, which then remains after death, hypertrophically orients the cartilaginous part of the ribs and the breastbone. Because in such spiritual beings as Lucifer the human aspect is skipped, both the dorsal column and the cartilaginous part of the ribs with the breastbone must be omitted. Therefore, the questioner has a pointed chest and lateral rib tendencies in the Lucifer sculpture.

IX. Regarding a question about the cavities of the head and their significance, we have the following to say: The physical and etheric parts of the head are arranged in such a way that in certain places the physical, in other places the etheric predominates; in these places the cavities show themselves. They are the actual thought-carriers, while the physically full places are the carriers of life in the head and the suppressors of thought life. If their activity is too strong, fainting or hallucinations and the like occur.

X. Regarding the question of medial predisposition.

A person's mediumistic disposition is based on the incomplete engagement of the astral body and the ego in the abdominal and limb tract of the etheric and physical body in a trance state. As a result, the limbs and the abdomen are connected to the etheric and astral environment in an irregular manner, so to speak, as sensory organs. This results in spiritual perceptions; however, at the same time, the moral and conventional impulses that normally act through these organs are eliminated, just as they are eliminated by the ordinary sense organs. The eye sees blue, but not slander. It is extremely difficult to physically heal mediums. It could only be brought about by highly potentized tobacco injections into the part of a sensory organ, for example, into the interior of the Eustachian tube or into the cornea of the eye, which is of course very dangerous. A psychic healing requires that the healer has a stronger will than the medium except for the trance and that he can work through wax suggestion.

XI. Regarding the question whether an abortion performed to save the mother's life encroaches upon the mother's karma and the child's karma, it must be said that although both karmas are quickly steered in a different direction, they soon return to their own course in the corresponding direction, so that from this point of view it can hardly be said that karma has been encroached upon. On the other hand, there is a strong intervention in the karma of the person taking the action. And this person must ask himself whether he consciously wants to take upon himself what brings him into karmic connections that would not have existed without the intervention.

But questions of this kind cannot be answered in general terms, but depend on the specifics of the case, just as in many cases, even in purely mental cultural life, an intervention in karma means and can lead to deep, tragic life conflicts.

XII. A question regarding cod liver oil.

Cod-liver oil can be avoided if the causes of the corresponding ailment are diagnosed and the remedies we have indicated are used:

Waldon I: vegetable protein, vegetable fat.
Waldon II: vegetable protein, vegetable fat, silicic acid iron.
Waldon III: vegetable protein, vegetable fat, silicic acid iron and Calcarea carbonica.

XII. For injuries that have come into contact with the ground, Belladonna 30D together with Hyoscyamus 15D will be of use, even if only a single injection is given.

XIV. Regarding the case of a 35-year-old diabetic. For this diabetic, the rosemary cure would undoubtedly be the best. It could be supported by adding silica in the 10th decimal.

XV. A question about the treatment of ringing in the ears. For ringing in the ears, poppy juice to 6 decimal places is generally recommended. If the personality can muster sufficient strength to convert passive surrender to the buzzing into active imagination, as if one were causing it oneself, improvement can be brought about after some time. The ringing in the ears is due to a weakening of the astral body in relation to the etheric body in the bladder area.

XVI. Case of brain fever with after-effects.

We should try to inject the 38-year-old patient, who is not responding to the remedies used, with the consequences of the flu, with Fliegenschwamm D 30 and ensure that he is in a confidently cheerful mood after the injection.

Rudolf Steiner
Dr. I. Wegman

Translated by Steiner Online Library

by Hella Wiesberger

At the re-establishment of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923/24, Rudolf Steiner spoke of his plan to establish the new esoteric school in future as a “Free University for Spiritual Science” with three classes and pointed out that such three classes had existed before, only in a slightly different form. These were the three working groups or departments of the Esoteric School, as they had existed from 1904 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. In keeping with the precept of maintaining continuity as far as possible, he had also linked these groups to what already existed at the time and which lay in the direction of his own intentions: for the first group to the Esoteric School of Theosophy of the Theosophical Society, for the second and third groups, from which the department of the cult of knowledge was formed, to a society with masonic cult forms. ¹

Structure

The Esoteric School of Theosophy – abbreviated as E.S.T. or simply called E.S. – was founded in 1888 by H.P. Blavatsky and was under her sole leadership until her death in 1891.² After that, Annie Besant and W.Q. Judge took over together, and from 1895 A. Besant alone.” The few German Theosophists who were seeking esoteric training were affiliated with this E.S. in London. It was only through Rudolf Steiner that a German Esoteric School was established together with the German Society.

The following can still be reconstructed today about the successive development of the first circle initially affiliated with the E.S.T.

On October 20, 1902, the German Section of the Theosophical Society, based in Berlin, was officially founded with Rudolf Steiner as General Secretary and Marie von Sivers as Secretary. Annie Besant, one of the most active representatives of the Theosophical Society and then head of the Esoteric School, came to Berlin and delivered the certificate of foundation. On this occasion, Rudolf Steiner asked her to admit him to the E.S.³ He reports on this in his “Life Course” (chapter 32) as follows:

"In this context, I must discuss something that the opposing side, shrouded in a fog of misunderstanding, repeatedly brings up. For personal reasons I need not talk about it at all, because it had no influence on my development or on my public work. And compared to everything I have to describe here, it remained a purely “private” matter. It is my admission to the “Esoteric School” within the Theosophical Society.

This “Esoteric School” goes back to H.P. Blavatsky. She had created a place for a small inner circle of the Society where she shared what she did not want to say in the general Society. Like other experts on the spiritual world, she did not consider it possible to communicate certain deeper teachings to the general public.

Now all this is connected with the way in which H. P. Blavatsky came by her teachings. There has always been a tradition of such teachings, going back to the old mystery schools. This tradition is cultivated in all kinds of societies, which strictly guard against the teachings of the societies from leaking out.

But from some quarter it was thought advisable to communicate such teachings to H. P. Blavatsky. She then connected what she received with revelations that arose within her. For she was a human individuality in whom the spiritual worked through a remarkable atavism, as it once worked in the leaders of the mysteries, in a state of consciousness that, compared to the modern one, was pervaded by the consciousness soul and tuned down into the dream-like. Thus, something in Blavatsky was renewed that had been at home in the mysteries of ancient times.

For the modern man there is an infallible way to decide what of the content of spiritual vision can be communicated to wider circles. This can happen with anything that the researcher can clothe in such ideas as are proper to the consciousness soul and as, by their very nature, also come into play in recognized science.

The situation is different when spiritual knowledge lives not in the consciousness soul but in more subconscious soul powers. These are not sufficiently independent of the forces at work in the physical. Therefore, for teachings that are brought from subconscious regions in this way, the communication can become dangerous. For such teachings can only be absorbed by the subconscious again. And teacher and student are moving in an area where what is beneficial and what is harmful to the human being must be treated very carefully.

All this does not apply to Anthroposophy because it draws its teachings entirely from the unconscious region.

Blavatsky's inner circle lived on in the “Esoteric School”. I had placed my anthroposophical work within the Theosophical Society. Therefore, I had to be informed about everything that was going on in it. For the sake of this information and because I myself considered a narrower circle necessary for those who had progressed in the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, I allowed myself to be accepted into the “Esoteric School”. However, my narrower circle was to have a different meaning than this school. It was to represent a higher section, a higher class for those who had absorbed enough of the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy. Now I wanted to tie in with what already existed and what had been established historically. I wanted to do this with regard to the Theosophical Society and also with regard to the Esoteric School. That is why my “inner circle” initially existed in connection with this school. But the connection was only in the institutions, not in what I communicated from the spiritual world. So in the early years, my inner circle looked like a department of Mrs. Besant's “Esoteric School”. Internally, it was not at all like that. And in 1907, when Mrs. Besant was at the Theosophical Congress in Munich, the external connection between us also ceased completely, according to an agreement between Mrs. Besant and me.

The possibility that I could have learned something special from Mrs. Besant within the “Esoteric School” was out of the question, because I did not attend events of this school from the very beginning, except for a few that were intended to provide me with information about what was going on.

At the school at that time there was no other real content than that which came from H. P. Blavatsky, and that was already printed.⁴. In addition to this printed material, Mrs. Besant gave all sorts of Indian exercises for the advancement of knowledge, which I rejected.

Thus, until 1907, my immediate circle was, in a sense, related to what Mrs. Besant cultivated as such a circle in terms of the institution. But it is completely unjustified to make out of these facts what opponents have made out of them. They went so far as to assert the absurdity that I was led to the spiritual knowledge only through the esoteric school of Mrs. Besant."

The letters summarized in the first part of this volume document that Rudolf Steiner was asked for esoteric instructions immediately after the founding of the German Section, that is, even before he was officially nominated Arch-Warden (National Leader) of the Esoteric School in 1904. The formation of a circle, which he considered necessary and which his first students hoped for, is hinted at in the letter to Marie von Sivers of April 16, 1903, which states: “Without a core of true Theosophists who, through the most diligent meditation work, improve the present karma, the Theosophical teaching would only be preached to half-deaf ears.” (GA 262), as well as by the answer to a corresponding question from Mathilde Scholl: “It would be quite nice if the newer members of the E.S. in Germany would somehow come together more closely. We need that especially in Germany. For the E.S. must become the soul of the Theosophical Society.” (Letter dated May 1, 1903, $43.

One year after this statement, in May 1904, Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers spent a week in London to discuss with Annie Besant his role in the E.S. Marie von Sivers was always present as an interpreter during his personal conversations with Annie Besant. In a circular letter dated May 10, 1904, sent to all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria, Annie Besant announced that Rudolf Steiner had been authorized to act as Arch-Warden for Germany and Austria. According to his statements, he was also responsible for German-speaking Switzerland and Hungary.⁵ Annie Besant's circular letter of May 10, 1904, read as follows (see facsimile on page 26):

To all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria.

I hereby appoint Dr. Rudolf Steiner as Arch-Warden of the E.S. in Germany and the Austrian Empire, with full authority, as my representative, to call meetings of the school, to organize groups and appoint Wardens, and to do all else necessary for the welfare of the school, remaining in direct communication with myself. Annie Besant.

(To all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria.

I hereby appoint Dr. Rudolf Steiner as Arch-Leader of the E.S. in Germany and Austria, with full authority as my representative to hold meetings of the school, organize groups and appoint leaders, and to do everything necessary for the welfare of the school in direct communication with myself. Annie Besant.

Upon his return from London to Berlin, Rudolf Steiner began to build up his Esoteric School in addition to his activities for the public dissemination of spiritual science and the development of the Society. Since he placed the main emphasis of his activity from the very beginning on public work, he began to present the Christian-Rosicrucian path of training that is necessary for the West in a series of articles in the public Theosophical journal “Lucifer-Gnosis”, which he founded and edited: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” (June 1904 to 1908, 1st edition 1909). The earliest date of an E.S. event undertaken by him in his capacity as Arch-Warden of the E.S.T. also dates from this month of June 1904. It was during the days of the Theosophical Congress in Amsterdam, which lasted from June 18 to 21, 1904, and in which, in addition to Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers, several German Theosophists also participated; among them were Mathilde Scholl from Cologne, Sophie Stinde and Pauline von Kalckreuth from Munich, Günther Wagner from Lugano and his sister Amalie Wagner from Hamburg. Mathilde Scholl reports that Amalie Wagner was to be accepted into the E.S. at the time and that Rudolf Steiner organized this acceptance in her hotel room. However, this can only have been a kind of anticipation, since the official E.S. work was only established from Berlin after the Amsterdam Congress. The first esoteric lessons took place there on July 9 and 14, 1904; at any rate, these are the two earliest known dates for esoteric lessons in Berlin, and from the available notes it can be seen that the E.S. work in Berlin began at that time. But these lessons must actually still be counted among the preliminary stages, which basically extended into the fall of 1905. For it was only when the second and third departments were established that the school was fully formed.

During the month of August vacation in 1904, Rudolf Steiner addressed personal letters to various external members, admitting them to the school or inviting them to join. Another E.S. meeting was planned for the beginning of September (according to a letter dated August 29, 1904 to Günther Wagner); however, it is not known whether it actually took place.

In the second half of September 1904, Rudolf Steiner accompanied Annie Besant on her lecture tour through several German cities and repeated the public lectures she gave in English in German. At the last stop on this trip, in Cologne, where both were staying with Mathilde Scholl, a meeting of E.S. members also took place, according to her account: “Mrs. Besant, Dr. Steiner, Fräulein von Sivers, Miss Bright, Mr. Keightley, Mathilde Scholl in Mrs. Besant's room. Before we left the room, Mrs. Besant spoke with Dr. Steiner about the study material for E.S. students. She recommended Leadbeater's “The Christian Creed.” Dr. Steiner replied politely but firmly that he could not use this book for his students.

In the period that followed, until May 1905, a few esoteric lessons took place in Berlin. But the first official orientation through the “long-prepared circular letter to the German E.S. members” with rules did not take place until the beginning of June 1905.

In October 1905, when a large number of members travelled to Berlin at the express request of Rudolf Steiner for the general assembly of the German Section and the School was expanded to include the second and third sections of the Knowledge of Religion, several E.S. lessons were also held. Steiner personally wrote down the content of the lesson of October 24, 1905 for Anna Wagner, the wife of Günther Wagner, who had been unable to attend for health reasons. ⁶ This is the only esoteric lecture recorded in his handwriting, apart from the short summary in a letter from the lecture on October 4, 1905 for Adolf Kolbe in Hamburg. All other records of such hours were made by participants afterwards from memory, since it was not allowed to take notes during the hours themselves.

From this autumn of 1905 onwards, more and more esoteric hours took place not only in Berlin, but also in other German cities and later in other countries, where Rudolf Steiner's students worked in this way. After the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, the esoteric work was discontinued because strictly closed events could be mistrusted, but also because it was not possible to work esoterically in a time so burdened by strong emotions. It was only ten years later, in connection with the re-establishment of the Anthroposophical Society, that an Esoteric School was re-established.

The rules

From the relevant documents it can be seen that during the period of the establishment of the first esoteric working group, “rules” were set up that were based on those of the E.S.T. The latter were originally very strict, but over time they were modified several times. At the time of Rudolf Steiner's affiliation, admission to the T.S. could be requested after two years of membership. The school was divided into grades, which could be worked through in four different ways or methods (disciplines): a general one, a special yoga one, a Christian-Gnostic one, and a Pythagorean one. Before one was admitted to the actual training, however, one had to belong to the probationary or hearer order (Shrävaka order in Indian) for at least one, and later two, years. Upon admission, a written “promise” had to be given to treat the received papers confidentially and to return them upon request. After the prescribed probationary period, one could be admitted to the actual first degree, provided one was willing to make the written vow to make Theosophy the all-determining factor of one's life.

Since Rudolf Steiner's first esoteric study group was outwardly affiliated with the examination order of the E.S.T., and within the general discipline therefore in the first rules issued by him the designation “Shrävaka-Orden” - was connected, his students also had to give the obligatory “promise”, as can be seen from various letters. He ran his working group completely independently of this. For example, there were no electable disciplines, even though the four disciplines are mentioned in the letters to Anna and Günther Wagner dated January 2, 1905. But at that time everything was still in the process of being formed and soon after it had obviously become a matter of course to follow Rudolf Steiner's intentions. For example, on January 23, 1905, Mathilde Scholl, who through his mediation in May 1904 had been accepted by Annie Besant into the first degree of the E.S.T. in London, but had not yet received his instructions, wrote to him: “Personally, it is now of no importance to me at all whether Mrs. Mead sends the writings or not, because everything I need you give me and is given to me, and that is so much that I can only raise my eyes with awe and wonder at all that is coming.” Similar words are spoken in a letter from Günther Wagner, who wrote to him on April 3, 1905: “Months ago I received from Mrs. Oakley an English E.S. pamphlet containing messages about the four paths that are taken in the E.S., which you also mention in your kind and loving letter to my wife. My wife and I have decided to follow the 'Christian' path and now ask whether we should also start on April 1 in Germany, as stated in the English pamphlet. Will a German instruction be issued? Probably, since you cannot give written instructions to all E.S. members living abroad. I would also like to know whether there are any other regulations for students in the first degree (according to the old regulations) than those in the English brochure, or whether everyone should follow these from now on. On January 2, you wrote to my wife, instructing her to do the exercises for four weeks from around January 6. She did that and continues to do so, but she too is asking for further instructions.” These questions were answered more and more with the first E.S. circular letter of June 5, 1905 and the further instructions given.

Thus far, the gradual development of the first circle can be reconstructed. However, the question of how the oath of the E.S.T. was handled remains open, since Rudolf Steiner's pupils did not go through the degrees of the E.S.T. and yet there are some such oaths that, as far as they are dated, date from 1906. Whether they were given at the time of admission to the first degree of the Section for the Cult of Knowledge or in some other context is not known. In any case, in the same year, 1906, Rudolf Steiner also wrote to an esoteric disciple: “Please do not regard the keeping of secrets as an obligation in principle, but as a temporary one, due to the confused present circumstances in the E.S. and T.S. ... I myself would be glad if this too need not be.” This statement is consistent with the fact that nothing of it has been handed down - although the circle of students had already grown quite large - that after the separation from E.S.T. in May 1907, Rudolf Steiner had written promises made. In fact, when the Esoteric School was re-established in 1924, the only appeal made with regard to the obligation to treat the teaching material received confidentially was to the sense of responsibility of the individual. In this sense, Marie Steiner wrote after Rudolf Steiner's death: “He did not believe that esotericism could be practised as in earlier times, in the deepest seclusion, with strictly binding vows. These were no longer compatible with the sense of freedom of the individual. The soul must come before its own higher self and recognize what it owes to this self and to the spiritual world in reverent silence.” ⁷

The teaching material

The teaching was divided into three parts, so to speak: the rules and exercises that applied equally to all students; the personal exercises; and the esoteric lessons, in which the intimacies of the training path were discussed and the consciousness was directed to the great teachers of humanity, the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings, as the actual leaders of the school. The ideal goal of the training was, through the higher consciousness developed by the exercises, to gradually find access to the Masters themselves.

The descriptions of the nature and work of the Masters, as imparted in esoteric hours, were intended to help on this path. The little that has been handed down is summarized in the section on the Masters. However, since Rudolf Steiner not only spoke about them in esoteric lessons, but also in lectures for members of the Society and even in public, a sufficient idea can be gained from the picture that he painted of the Masters. See the attempt at an overview in the appendix to the section 'From the teaching material on the Masters...'.

Knowledge about the masters has been of fundamental importance in the Theosophical Society and its Esoteric School since its inception.⁸ For Rudolf Steiner himself, the existence of the masters was a reality that he had personally experienced decades before his association with the Theosophical Society. He testified to this on several occasions.⁹ He also taught from his own experience the necessity of teaching the truths of occultism to the world, as he received them from his master. Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe», Heft 83/84, 1984. There is also personal testimony that he was convinced by his Master of the necessity of teaching the truths of occultism to the world:

”... if the Master had not been able to convince me that despite everything [the immaturity of the time for the high truths of occultism], Theosophy is necessary for our age: I would have written only philosophical books even after 1901, and, speaking literarily and philosophically.” (Letter of January 9, 1905 to Marie von Sivers, GA 262).

And he had only joined the Society after he had realized at the “endpoint of a long inner development” that “the spiritual forces I must serve are present in the T.S.” ¹⁰

However, while in the T.S. the Masters were always spoken of as the “Masters of Wisdom”, he spoke of them as the “Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings” or also the “Feelings of Humanity”, because they not only possess a high degree of wisdom, but also an “unlimited source of love for humanity” (letter of August 2, 1904, p. 62). This nuance, like everything in his work, points to the central point of his spiritual knowledge: the unique significance of the Christ principle for the development of all humanity and the Earth. For Steiner, Christ was the Master of all Masters and the “Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings” were those who “stand in direct connection with the forces of the higher hierarchies” (Düsseldorf Lecture, June 15, 1915) and who have grasped that “the progress of humanity depends on the comprehension of the great event of Golgotha” (Berlin, March 22, 1909).

The most enlightening thing about Rudolf Steiner's personal relationship with the masters is probably what he said in one of his very first public lectures in Berlin. Referring to the description of these highly developed individuals in Sinnett's “Secret Buddhism”, he tried to make it clear that, if one bears in mind that there are endless possibilities on the ladder of development — from the least developed to, for example, Goethe and beyond — the concept of the master need not be strange to European thinking. And then follow the words that are so decisive for him:

”...that the so-called masters are great inspirers for us - nothing more - great inspirers in spiritual realms. However, their development goes far beyond what is offered by popular culture. They are great inspirations for us; but they do not demand faith in any authority, not faith in any dogma. They appeal to nothing but one's own human insight and provide guidance on how to develop the powers and abilities that lie in every human soul, through certain methods, in order to ascend to the higher realms of existence.” (Berlin, October 13, 1904)

In the following lecture, he characterizes the masters in such a way that it can be understood how they, in particular, respect human freedom to the highest degree, so that no kind of dependency can arise. For example, no one can suffer harm from the rules in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in contrast to much of what is touted in such fields today. But because so much is being advertised that is not only worthless but can also be harmful, “the Masters have given permission to publish such rules.” (Berlin, December 15, 1904).

Taking the various statements about the Masters, at first glance they seem to contradict each other. In particular, what was said in the lecture of October 13, 1904 seems to contradict what is to be read in letters to esoteric disciples: “I can and may only lead so far as the exalted Master, who guides me Himself, gives me the instruction” (Letter of August 11, 1904); or when it is said that the theosophical teachings go back to the Masters:

"We say rightly that Theosophy did not come into the world through this or that book, nor through this or that sum of dogmas. Theosophy comes from those exalted individuals whom we call the Masters of wisdom and of the harmony of intuitions, because they have opened the sources of spiritual life, which can henceforth flow into human beings.

“Spiritual life ultimately goes back to those sources that we seek in those individualities whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. In them we find the impulses, if we seek them rightly, of how we are to work from epoch to epoch, from age to age.” (Berlin, December 26, 1909)

However, if we delve into these various statements, the apparent contradiction between them disappears. It becomes clear that Rudolf Steiner himself belongs to those initiates who receive the impulses of the masters with their free powers of thought and have to elaborate them for the progress of humanity. The world of the supersensible, and thus also of the masters, has its own language. It reveals itself in signs and symbols, the study and interpretation of which is only possible through special training. The way in which occult revelations are translated, interpreted and applied depends entirely on the depth of the person's ability to comprehend and on their sense of moral responsibility. Rudolf Steiner's achievement for cultural progress lies quite obviously in the fact that he was able to translate the sign language of the underlying creative-spiritual of all existence into the conceptual language of anthroposophy, which is in keeping with modern consciousness. He had to represent this personal deed in the world without having to invoke the authority of the masters. He was personally responsible for his teaching. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Steiner, especially in the years after the First World War, no longer spoke of the Masters in the intimate way of the earlier years, the stronger the scientific character of Anthroposophy was developed. ¹¹

The way of teaching in the Esoteric School

While Rudolf Steiner personally took responsibility for the way in which he publicly taught his supersensible knowledge in the sense described above, the same did not apply in the same way to the Esoteric School. He himself stated that the school was under the direct leadership of the masters and that it must therefore be a basic commitment of the school that everything that flows through it originates only from the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, while the basic obligation for the students would be to apply their entire reason to everything that was taught and to ask themselves whether it is reasonable to follow this path. (Esoteric Lesson Düsseldorf, April 19, 1909, p. 223).

Apparently not always, but in certain esoteric lessons or in certain moments of esoteric lessons, Rudolf Steiner spoke as the direct messenger of the masters. A participant in the Düsseldorf lesson of April 19, 1909 reports that this particular lesson began with the words: “My dear sisters and brothers! This esoteric lesson is one that is not subject to the responsibility of the one who speaks!” And this was said because in the following description of how Zarathustra was once initiated by the spirit of the sun, Rudolf Steiner was said to have been Zarathustra himself at that moment. It could have been perceived as a tremendous experience, how “our great teacher, who had shared with us the results of his research, now showed us himself how an ancient leader and teacher of humanity could reveal himself in an inspiring way,” how Rudolf Steiner was the first person in modern times to be trained, not as a medium, but as a fully conscious spiritual researcher, through his own strict schooling, to become a serving tool for spiritual beings."

Only a few have passed on something about this very special way in which Rudolf Steiner could be experienced as a messenger of the masters in the esoteric hours. One of them put his memory into the words:

Another reports the deep impression he received when he was able to attend an esoteric session for the first time, with the following words:

"Everyone was sitting in silence. When Rudolf Steiner entered, an unearthly light seemed to shine on his face, from the realm from which he came to us - it didn't just seem like it: it was there. He spoke as if he knew the great masters who guide our lives and aspirations from an immediate knowledge: Kuthumi, Morya, Jesus and Christian Rosenkreutz - the “Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings”.

Suffice to say that the consecration of this hour was indescribably beautiful. Here Rudolf Steiner appeared entirely as the messenger of a higher world. The impression is unforgettable.¹³

In his book of memoirs, “Transformations of Life” (Basel 1975), the well-known Russian poet Andrei Bely describes in the most detailed and linguistically subtle way how he experienced the task of training attention more for the how than the what in the “Class of Hearing”. For there was no external difference between the esoteric lectures and the other lectures, since everything had an esoteric tone, all the more delicate the more popularly Rudolf Steiner spoke. But what could have been experienced in a concentrated way in the esoteric lectures was precisely how the how became the what and radiated everything.

• 1. See “On the History and the Content of the Gnostic Section of the Esoteric School”, CW 265.
• 2. For the history of the E.S.T., see the preliminary remarks to the second part of this volume.
• 3. On October 23, 1902. Marie von Sivers had already become a member of the E.S.T.
• 4. "Esotericism” (3rd volume of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”), published as posthumous writings by Annie Besant (1897)
• 5. See “Rules”, page 144
• 6. In “From the content of the esoteric lectures”, GA 266/1.
• 7. Preface to the first edition of the lectures “The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement”, Dornach 1926, reprinted in “Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Works” No. 23 Christmas 1968.
• 8. For more on this, see the preliminary remarks to the second part.
• 9. See the Notes for Edouard Schur and letters to Marie Steiner-von Sivers, both in Briefwechsel und Dokumente... (Correspondence and Documents...), GA 262; also the autobiographical lecture Berlin, February 4, 1913 in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Heft 83/84, 1984.
• 10. In a draft of the first circular letter to the German Theosophical lodges in the summer of 1902, before the official founding of the German section. In Briefwechsel und Dokumente... (Correspondence and Documents...), GA 262, note on page 17.
• 11. Elisabeth Vreede in a lecture given in Stuttgart on July 9, 1930. See Elisabeth Vreede/Thomas Meyer: Zur Bodhisattvafrage, Basel 1989.
• 12. Jenny Schirmer-Bey in “What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society. News for its members”, 1974, No. 35 dated September 1, 1974
• 13. Ludwig Kleeberg, “Wege und Worte”, Stuttgart 1961

In the short lecture I gave this afternoon before the eurythmy performance, I pointed out how we can see from the relationship that modern humanity has to the festivals of the year how we are entering into materialism. However, one must then grasp the concept of materialism much more deeply than is usually the case. The most dangerous characteristic of the present time is not that people are infected with materialism, but the much more dangerous characteristic is the superficiality of our age.

This superficiality is not only present in relation to spiritual worldviews, but it is also present in relation to materialism itself. It is taken for granted in superficial appearances. This afternoon, for example, I pointed out how, in different times of the year, something like the moods to which people in older times still yielded also came to expression in the festive events of those older times. Various moods were incorporated into the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John's festival, the Michaelmas festival, those very specific, cult-like or at least cult-like events, which must overcome people when they consciously experience the course of the year.

In this way, the human soul received nourishment, whereas today we only nourish the body. We still take part in the course of the day. When the sun sends forth its morning gold in its own revelation as dawn, we eat our breakfast. When the sun is at its zenith, when it pours its warmth and light particularly lovingly over the human race on earth, we devote ourselves to our midday meal, and so on through five o'clock tea and supper. In these festive events of the day, we join in the course of the day with the sun, by inwardly experiencing this fiery ride of the sun around the world. We experience what the sun performs in its fiery ride around the world by completing hunger and satiation. And so the mood for the human physical organism is there in a very distinct way at certain times of the day. We could call breakfast, lunch, tea and supper the festivals of the day. The human physical organism participates in what takes place in the relationship between the earth and the cosmos.

In a similar way, in older times, when the soul life was felt more intensely from the old instinctive states of clairvoyance, the course of the year was experienced. Certain things even played into the other from one sphere. You only need to remember what remains of these things: Easter eggs, St. Martin's geese and so on. In this way the lower, bodily region plays into the soul region, which must also experience the course of the year in a soul-like way. Now, a materialistic age would still be most likely, I do not want to say for Easter eggs, but for St. Martin's geese and the like, one would also be in favor of the course of the year.

But in olden times these things were not meant with reference to the actual festive mood, but they were attuned to the hunger and satiation of the soul. The human soul needed something different at Christmas time, something different at Easter time, at Midsummer time and at Michaelmas time. And one can really compare what was in the events of the festivities with a kind of consideration for the hunger of the soul precisely in the seasons that occur and with a satiation of the soul in these seasons.

Now we can say: If we look at the course of the sun during the day, we can apply to it that which is good for our body. If we look at the course of the sun during the year, we can apply to it that which is good for our soul.

If festivals are to be revived, then this must naturally happen out of a much more conscious state: out of such an awakening of the soul as is striven for through the anthroposophical world view. We cannot merely restore the old festival seasons historically; we must find them again out of our own soul nature through the newer insights and views of the world. But we distinguish not only between body and soul in man, but also between spirit.

Now it is already difficult for modern man to surrender to certain ideas when speaking of soul. The story becomes blurred and indefinite. Not only that one has experienced how in the 19th century people began to speak of a psychology, a doctrine of the soul without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great critic of language, even said: Soul is something so indeterminate that we do not really know any soul, we only know certain thoughts, sensations, feelings that are experienced in us, but we do not know a unified soul in it. We should therefore no longer use the word “soul” at all in the future. We should speak of this indeterminate inner wiggling and no longer say soul, but “soul”. Thus Fritz Mauthner advises that a future Klopstock who writes a “Messiade” should no longer say: “Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, but rather: “Sing, unsterbliches Geseel, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, if that still makes sense at all within this Geseellehre! So in the future we would not have a psychology, but a soul science.

Now we can really say: the modern man no longer knows anything about the connection between his soul and the course of the sun throughout the year. He has become a materialist in this respect too. He adheres to the feasts of the body, which follow the course of the sun throughout the day. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional custom, but they are not felt to be alive. And we have, in addition to having a body and a soul - or, in the sense of Fritz Mauthner, a Geseel - we also have spirit.

Now, in the course of the world, there are also historical epochs. The human spirit also lives through these historical epochs, which extend beyond the course of a year and span centuries, if it feels them with feeling. In the old days, people experienced them very well. Anyone who is able to enter in the right way, borne by the spirit, in the way that people in older times thought their way into the course of time, knows, as has been said everywhere: At this or that turning point in time, some personality appeared who in turn revealed something spiritual from the heights of the world. And then this spiritual essence has become established, just as sunlight becomes established in the physical world. When such an epoch then entered its twilight, something new emerged.

These historical epochs are related to the development of the spirit of humanity just as the course of the year is related to the development of the soul. Of course, precisely when the development of the spirit must be grasped in a living way, it must be done by learning to understand how changes and metamorphoses occur in the development of humanity through conscious spiritual knowledge. Today, people would rather overlook these metamorphoses altogether. They are somehow outwardly affected by the effects, but inwardly they do not want to deal with the changes that come from the spirit and express themselves in external world events.

One should only look at how a certain way of thinking, feeling and feeling arises in our time among children and young people, which was still foreign to the earlier generation; how great changes occur, which, if one looks at the right elements, are entirely comparable to the development of the year in the development of humanity. Therefore, we should listen to what each age proclaims as its needs, and pay attention when a new age is dawning and demanding something different from people than previous ages have demanded. But for that, people today have only a limited organ.

The great interconnections of life can come to us when we approach the festive mood in the right way from our present consciousness, when, for example, we really let something like the St. John's mood into our soul, and if we try to gain from the St. John's mood that which will help our soul to develop, that which supports our engagement by the cosmos coming to our aid.

Certainly, modern humanity has become more or less indifferent to the things that are connected with the greatness of world development. Today, people no longer have a heart for the insights of the great world connections. The spirit of pettiness has made its way in, I would say the spirit of microscopy and atomization in phenomena that, when you talk about them today as I have to do here, naturally give the impression of the paradoxical.

I would like to point out a particular phenomenon in connection with the St. John's mood. The connection will be somewhat remote, but I would like to point it out. Even if one does not have a very developed sense of the course of the year, what is more natural than to have the impression from the growth of plants, from the growth of trees, that When spring comes, the green sprouts and shoots, and more and more growth, sprouting and blossoming occurs. The whole process of active growth, which gives the impression that the cosmos, with the effects of the sun, is calling upon the earth to open up to the universe, all of this then enters into the time around St. John's Day.

Then the sprouting and budding begins to recede again. We are approaching the time when the earth draws its forces of growth back into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How natural it is that from the impression one receives from the course of the year, one forms the idea that the snow cover belongs to winter, that it belongs to winter that the plants, so to speak, creep into the soil of the earth with their being, that it belongs to summer that the plants come out, grow towards the cosmos. What could be more natural than to develop the idea – even if in a deeper sense it is actually correct to have the opposite idea – that the plants are dormant in winter and awake in summer?

I do not want to speak now about this sleeping and waking in terms of right and wrong ideas. I just want to speak about the impressions that one gets, so that people have the idea that summer belongs to the development of vegetation, winter to the withdrawal and creeping away of vegetation. After all, a kind of world feeling develops for the human being. One gets into the feeling of a connection with the warming and illuminating power of the sun when one sees this warming and illuminating power of the sun again in the green and flowering plant cover of the earth, and you get into a feeling as if you were an earth hermit in winter, when the plant cover is not there and the snow coat closes the earth from the cosmos, calling for inner activity. In short, by feeling and sensing in this way, you tear yourself away from your earthly existence with your earthly consciousness, so to speak. You place yourself in the greater context of the universe.

But now comes modern research, which I am not criticizing here – what I am going to say now is not meant as a scolding, but as a praise, even in relation to research itself – now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders when it comes to the great cosmic connections. Why should one feel uplifted by the divinely illuminating, warming power of the sun when the trees bud, turn green, and the earth is covered with a blanket of plants? Why should one feel a connection with the universe through these plants growing out of the earth? It disturbs one. Cosmic feelings disturb one. It is no longer possible to reconcile having such feelings with one's materialistic consciousness. The plant is a plant, after all. It is as if the plant has a mind of its own when it blossoms only in spring and agrees to bear fruit in summer. How does that happen? You are dealing not only with a plant, but with the whole world! If you are supposed to feel, sense or recognize these things, you are dealing with the whole world, not just with the plant! It's not appropriate! You are already trying not to deal with the substances that are available in powder or crystal form, but with the atomic structures, with the atomic nucleus, with the electromagnetic atmosphere and so on! So you are trying to deal with something that is complete, not with something that points to many things. You should now admit to the plant that you need a sensation that reaches out into the cosmos! It is a terrible thing not to be able to narrow one's field of vision to the mere individual object! We are so accustomed to it: when we look through the microscope, everything around is closed off, there is only the small field of vision; everything happens in such a small, closed way. One must also be able to look at the plant by itself, not in connection with the cosmos!

And lo and behold, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, researchers achieved something extraordinary in precisely this area. It was certainly already known from individual plants in relation to hot houses, 'green houses and so on, that one can overcome the summer and winter, but on the whole, at this turn of the 19th to the 20th century, not enough had been achieved to overcome the fact that plants do need a certain winter rest. Discussions were held during this time about the situation of tropical plants. Those researchers who no longer wanted to know anything about the connection with the cosmos claimed that tropical plants grow all year round. The others, who still held on to the old conservative view, said: Yes, when you come to the lush green world of the tropics, you only think that because the plants go dormant at different times, some only for up to eight days. So you don't see it when a particular species is dormant. There were extensive discussions about the behavior of tropical plants. In short, there was a sense of tremendous unease about this connection between the plant world and the cosmos.

Now, just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the most interesting and ingenious attempts have been made in this direction, and a whole range of plants, not just annuals but also trees, which are much stronger, have actually been successfully weaned from their stubbornness, their cosmic stubbornness. We have succeeded in overcoming the dependency on cosmic conditions by creating certain conditions that make plants that were thought to be annuals become perennial. In the case of the majority of our forest trees growing in temperate climates, we have actually succeeded in creating conditions that cause trees that were thought to have to have this winter time, to lose their leaves in winter and stand there withered, to become evergreen. For that was the premise of certain materialistic explanations. In this respect, an extraordinarily ingenious achievement has been made.

It was discovered that the cosmic can be driven out of the trees if the trees are brought into closed rooms and the soil is properly nourished with nutrient salts, so that the plants, which would otherwise find nothing in the wintertime when the soil is so low in nutrient salts, now also find their nutrient salts there. If you provide sufficient moisture, enough warmth and enough light, the trees will grow.

Only one tree in Central Europe resisted this research drive at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the beech, the copper beech. It was hounded from all sides, and now it was said to be willing to be locked up in closed rooms! It was provided with the necessary nutrients, with the necessary moisture and warmth – but it remained stubborn and continued to demand its winter rest. But she was all alone.

And now, in this 20th century, in 1914, we have to note - I do not want to talk about the outcome of the world war, but about another great historical event - the great, powerful event that Klebs, a researcher who was extraordinarily favored by research in this field, succeeded in exorcising the beech's cosmic stubbornness. He simply succeeded in growing beech trees in closed rooms, providing them with the necessary conditions in closed rooms: the appropriate sunlight, which could be measured. And lo and behold, the beech did not resist; it also yielded to what the researchers wanted.

I am not referring to a phenomenon that I have reason to criticize, because who could not admire such tremendous research effort. Besides, it would of course be madness to want to refute the facts. They are there, they are like that, they are absolutely like that. So it is not a matter of agreement or refutation, but something else.

Why should it not be possible to create hair growth outside of humans and animals if the necessary conditions for hair growth could be found somewhere on neutral ground? Why not? The appropriate conditions just need to be somehow produced. I know that there are some people in our time who would prefer their hair to grow on their heads rather than be produced externally by some kind of cultivation! But we could imagine that this would also succeed. Then we would seemingly no longer need to somehow connect what happens on earth with the cosmos.

Of course, one can have all due respect for research, but one must nevertheless see deeper into these things. Apart from what I developed here some time ago about the nature of the elements, I would like to say the following today. It must be clear that, for example, the following is the case. We know that once upon a time the Earth and the Sun were one body. That was a long, long time ago, in the Saturn era, the Sun era. Then there was a brief repetition of this state during the Earth era. But something remained behind in the earth that belongs there. Today we are bringing it out again. And we are not only bringing it out of the repetition that occurred during our time on earth by heating our rooms with coal, but we are bringing it out by using electricity. For from those times when, according to the old Saturn time, in the solar time, the sun and the earth were one, the foundation was laid for us to have electricity on earth. With electricity, we have a force that has been connected to the earth since ancient times, which is solar power, solar power hidden in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn beech tree, if only we tackle it hard enough, make use of the solar energy flowing in from the cosmos, instead of using the solar luminosity obtained from the earth in the form of electricity!

But it is precisely when we consider these things that we realize how much we need a deepening of our whole knowledge. As long as people could believe that solar energy came only from the cosmos, they came from the immediate present observation of each year to an awareness of their cosmic connection in plant growth. In the present age, when materialistic considerations would sever that part of the Cosmos which can be so easily seen as a cosmic effect, we must, when we look at the apparent autonomy of the plant, have a science that remembers that the cosmic connection between earth and sun existed in older times, but in a different form. We need, precisely, on the one hand, to be restricted as if under a microscope, but on the other hand, we need an all the more intensive breadth of vision, and it is precisely in the details that it becomes clear how we need this breadth of vision.

It is not at all a matter of us on anthroposophical ground revolting in an amateurish way against the progress of research. But since the progress of research, by its very nature, must increasingly lead us to that earthworm nature of which I have often spoken here, so that we have no free view into the distance, we must gain the broader view, the great cosmic We need the counter-pole everywhere. Not antagonism towards research, but we need the spiritual, the spiritual counter-pole. That is the right point of view for us to take. And I would like to say that it is also a St. John's mood when we inscribe this in our minds, when we realize how we must now live in a world-historical St. John's mood, how we must turn our gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos. We need this. We need this especially in our spiritual knowledge. Today, mere talk of the spiritual is not enough; what is needed is a real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What is brought out of the cosmic development of the Earth, by drawing attention to the development of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, has enormous implications in terms of knowledge, including knowledge of history.

When, on the one hand, materialistic science, in such brilliant research results as those of Klebs, draws our attention to the fact that even the stubborn beech tree can be made to do without sunlight and light, as it otherwise only does under the influence of sunlight, then this leads us, if we have no spiritual knowledge, to crumbling everything in the world and narrow our field of vision. There is the beech tree in front of us, the electric light promotes its growth, but we know nothing but this, which arises in the narrowest field.

If we are endowed with spiritual insight, we say something different. Then we say to ourselves: If the beech's Klebs withdraws the present sunlight, then it must give it to it in the form of electricity, the ancient sunlight. Then our vision will not be narrowed, but on the contrary, our vision will be expanded into the vastness. Oh well, say the people who do not want to know anything more about the spiritual course of the year, one day is like the other: breakfast, lunch, tea time, supper time; it's good if there is something better at Christmas, but basically it goes on like this day after day throughout the year. We only look at the day, that is, at the outward material of the human being: Oh well, cosmic connections! Let us emancipate ourselves from such a world view! Let us realize that even the wayward beech no longer needs the cosmos. If we lock it in a closed prison, we only need to provide it with electric light of sufficient strength, and it will grow without the sun! — No, it just does not grow without the sun. We just have to know how to seek out the sun in the right way when we do something like that. But then we must also be clear about the fact that it is something different, a different relationship. When we look with a broad view, it turns out that it is something different whether we let the beech thrive in the cosmic sunlight, or whether we give it the light that has become Ahrimanic, originating from ancient times. And we recall what we have often said about the normal developmental process and the Luciferic on the one hand, and the Ahrimanic on the other.

If we have a sufficient insight into this, then we will not lick our fingers out of sheer cleverness that we have now overcome the cosmic obstinacy of the beech, but we will go much further. We will now proceed to the juices of the beech and examine the effect on the human organism, we will examine the effect on the human organism of the beech that we have left to its own devices and of the beech that we have removed its stubbornness with the electric light, and we will perhaps learn something very special about the healing properties of one beech and the other. Then we have to go into the spiritual!

But how do you deal with these things today? You have an admirable interest in research. You sit in a classroom, you are an experimental psychologist, you write down all sorts of words that have to be memorized, you test memory, you experiment on children, and you discover something tremendously interesting. Once you have awakened an interest in something, then of course all things in the world are interesting; it depends only on the subjective point of view. Why should one not be able to make it so that a stamp collection is much more interesting than a botanical collection? Since that can be the case, why should it not be possible for something like that to happen in another area? Why should one not be able to gain some interest from the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented on? But everywhere one wonders whether there are not higher obligations, whether it is at all advisable to experiment with children in this way at a certain age. The question arises as to what one is corrupting there. And the even stronger question arises as to what is spoiled in the teachers when, instead of demanding a lively, warm relationship from them, an experimental interest is demanded from the results of experimental psychology. So it really depends on whether, when one puts oneself in the right relationship to the sensory world with such research, one also puts oneself in the right relationship to the supersensible world.

Now, of course, it will be able to roar with joy to certain people who speak of the necessary objectivity of research: So he wants to claim that there are some spirits who find it immoral when the beechwood glue takes its stubbornness in this way! — That doesn't occur to me at all. It doesn't occur to me in my dreams. Everything that is done should be done, but you have to have the counterweight to it. And in an age in which we have emancipated ourselves from cosmic perception regarding the growth of beech trees, there must also be a perception on the other hand, in a civilization that absorbs such things, of how spiritual progress occurs in the evolution of humanity. In an age such as our own, a sense of the times is essential. I do not wish to restrict research, but it must be felt that something else must be set against it. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times, these and those things from the spiritual world always reveal themselves. If, on the one hand, materialism becomes overgrown and leads to strong and great results, then those who have an interest in such results should also have an interest in the research results about the spiritual world.

But this lies at the very heart of Christianity. A correct view of Christianity, after the Mystery of Golgotha and in the continuing effect of Christ's earthly existence, sees in the nature of Christ the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse. And that means that when the autumn mood sets in, when everything becomes arid and barren, when the sprouting and budding in the nature of the senses ceases, then one perceives precisely the sprouting and budding of the spirit, when one can feel the glistening and glowing of the spirits in the tree as it sheds its leaves, and these spirits now accompany man through the winter.

But in the same way, we must learn to feel how, in an age that, from a certain point of view, rightly sets about understanding the details, narrowing our view of the details, our view must also fall on the big, the comprehensive. That is the St. John's mood in relation to Christianity. We must understand intuitively that the St. John's mood is the starting point for the event that lies in the words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That means that the impression on man of all that is conquered by sense research must decrease. And precisely by penetrating more and more into the individual senses, the impression of the spiritual must become ever stronger and stronger. The sun of the spirit must shine ever more brightly into the human heart, the more the sun that works in the sense world diminishes.

We must feel the St. John's mood as the entrance into spiritual impulses and as the exit from sensual impulses. We must learn to feel the St. John's mood as something in which it weaves and blows, spiritually and demonically blows from the sensual into the spiritual, from the spiritual into the sensual. And we must learn to shape our spirit lightly through the St. John's mood, so that it does not just stick like pitch to the fixed contours of ideas, but that it finds its way into weaving, blowing, living ideas. We must be able to notice the glowing of the sensual, the dying away of the sensual, the glowing of the spiritual in the dying away of the sensual. We must feel the symbol of the illumination of the St. John's night moth as something that also has its meaning in the dimming of the lighting.

The St. John's night moth glows, the St. John's night moth dims again. But by glowing, it leaves alive in us the life and weaving of the spiritual in the twilight of the senses. And when we see the little spiritual ripples everywhere in nature, just as we see symbolically in the sensual the glowing and damping of the Johanniswürmchen, then we will, when we can do this with full, bright, clear consciousness, find the right Johannis mood for our age. And we need this right Midsummer mood, for we must go through our time in such a way that the spirit learns to become fervently alive, and that we learn to follow meaningfully the fervently alive spiritual.

St. John's mood - towards the future of humanity and the earth! No longer the old mood, which only understands the sprouting and sprouting of the external, which is glad when it can also imprison this sprouting and sprouting, can put under electric light that which otherwise thrived happily in sunlight. We must learn to recognize the flashing and blossoming of the spirit, so that electric light becomes less important to us than it is in the present; but that we may thereby sharpen our view, the Johannic view, for that ancient sunlight that appears to us when we open up the great spiritual horizon, not only the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light that appears to us on this great horizon to have the right effect on us, then all the trivialities of our age will be able to appear to us in this light, and we will move forward and upward. Otherwise, if we do not make up our minds to do so, we will move backward and downward.

Today, it is all about human freedom, about human will. Today, it is all about the independent human decision between forward or backward, between upward or downward.

During the last few days I have brought before you the four cosmic Imaginations which can be called up through an intimate human experience of the seasons of the year. If we are to arrive at an understanding of the whole place and situation of man in the world, we must seek it through the working together of the Beings who appear in conjunction with these imaginative pictures. And here I would like first to say something by way of introduction.

If we open our souls to the impressions which may come to us from the content of these pictures, then at the same time there will come to us much that has been experienced in the course of human evolution as an echo of old, instinctive clairvoyance; to-day this is sometimes treated historically, but fundamentally it is not understood. Real poets and spiritually inspired men lay hold of these often wonderful voices which sound from the traditions of the past, and make use of them just when they wish to express their highest and greatest conceptions. But even then they are very little understood. So in the first part of Faust there rings out a wonderful saying which is scarcely at all understood, though it is quoted often enough. It occurs when Faust, having opened the book of Nostradamus, comes upon the sign of the Macrocosm:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.¹

A magnificent picture—but if one knows Goethe one must say that it is real to him only through his feelings. For what Goethe has evidently drawn from his reading of old traditions and his feeling for them—all this stands in its full significance before our souls only if we have in mind the four great cosmic Imaginations, as I described them to you—the Autumn Imagination of Michael, the Christmas Imagination of Gabriel. the Easter Imagination of Raphael, and the Midsummer, St. John's Day, Imagination of Uriel. You must really picture to yourselves how from all these Beings, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Michael, forces stream out through the cosmos and as formative forces stream again into man. In order to understand this, we must see how man stands within the cosmos in—I might almost call it—a purely material way.

In this connection there is very little understanding, unfortunately, for how things really are. For example, medical textbooks always describe how man breathes in oxygen from the air and how the carbon within him takes up the oxygen; this process is then compared with external combustion, in which all sorts of external substances combine with oxygen. The whole process in the human organism, whereby oxygen is taken up by carbon, is then called combustion.

All this is said because one essential fact is not known—the fact that all external substances and processes become different directly they enter into the human organism. Anyone who speaks of this peculiar combination of oxygen with carbon in man and thinks of it as combustion is talking in just the same way as if someone said: “There is no need for a man to have two living lungs; he could equally well have a pair of stones suspended inside him.” That is more or less how these people talk in speaking of the combustion of oxygen and carbon within the human organism.

Everything that takes place externally in nature is different as soon as it enters a human being. No process within the human organism takes place in the same way as in outer nature. A flame that burns externally is dead fire; that which corresponds to it within the human being is flame living and ensouled: Just as a stove stands towards a lung, so does the external flame stand towards the living activity that goes on in the human organism when carbon unites with oxygen there—a process which, viewed externally, is indeed combustion in chemical terms. All spiritual progress at the present day depends on our being able to grasp these things in the right way. Suppose you take salt with your food, or eat some albumen or anything else, people assume that it remains just the same substance within you as it was outside. That is not true. Whatever enters the human being becomes different immediately. And the forces which make it different proceed in a quite definite way from those Beings whom I have pictured in the four Imaginations.

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Let us recall the last picture: how at St. John's tide, Uriel hovers in the heights, weaving his body out of golden light in the golden radiance of the Sun (see Plate V, red.) As I told you, we must picture him with grave, judicial eyes, for his gaze is directed down towards the crystal realm of the earth, and he sees how little are human errors compatible with the abstract but none the less shining beauty of the crystallisation process that goes on below the surface of the earth. That is the reason for his gravely judging gaze, as he looks down and compares human errors with the living activity in the crystals of the earth.

I spoke also of Uriel's gesture as a warning gesture, indicating to men what they ought to do. It calls upon them, if they understand it rightly, to transform their faults into virtues. For up above in the clouds appear the shining pictures of beauty, woven out of the Sun-gold, and they are pictures of all that by dint of virtue humanity has achieved.

Now from the Being who has to be described in this way—and can be described in no other way—there proceed forces which work directly in man, but have also a characteristic further effect. All that I am depicting goes on in high summer. The Uriel-Being, however, is not at rest, but in majestic movement. This must be so, for when it is summer with us, it is winter in the opposite hemisphere, and Uriel is there in the heights. We must picture this clearly, so that if we have the Earth here (see sketch), Uriel appears to us in summer, and then follows a course which brings him after six months to the other side. Then it is winter with us. While Uriel descends (yellow arrow) and while his forces are thus coming to us from a descending line, summer with us passes over into winter, and then Uriel is over the other hemisphere. But the Earth does not hinder his forces from coming to us; they penetrate through the forces which come to us directly from above (red arrows), seeking to permeate us with the Sun-gold of summer, penetrate right through the Earth in winter and permeate us as an ascending stream (red) from the other side.

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If we bring before our souls the midsummer working of Uriel through nature into man—for his activity works into the forces of nature—we must picture the forces of Uriel streaming out in the cosmos, raying into the clouds, the rain, the thunder and lightning, and raying also into the growth of plants. In winter, after Uriel has made his way round the Earth, his forces stream up through the Earth and come to rest in our heads. And then these forces, which at other times are outside in nature, have the effect of making us citizens of the cosmos. For they actually cause an image of the cosmos to arise in our heads, illuminating us so that we become possessors of human wisdom.

We speak rightly if we say: Uriel makes his descent as summer passes through autumn into winter. Then in winter he begins to re-ascend, and from this descending and ascending power of Uriel we get the inner forces of our heads. Thus Uriel works in nature at midsummer, and during the winter season he works in the human head, so that in this connection man is truly a microcosm over against the macrocosm.

We understand the human being only if we place him in the world not merely as a being of nature, but as a spiritual being. And just as we can follow the forces of Uriel and see how they stream into man through the course of the year, so must we do with Raphael, who pours his forces into the forces of nature in spring, as I have described. I had to show you how the Easter Imagination is completed through the teaching that Raphael, the great cosmic physician, can give to mankind. For precisely when we allow all that Raphael brings about, working in the springtime forces of nature as Uriel does in summer—when we allow all this to work on us at Easter through the spiritual hearing of Inspiration, then we have the crowning of all the truths of healing for mankind.

But the springtime activity of Raphael travels round the Earth, as Uriel does. In terms of the cosmos Uriel is the spirit of summer; he moves round the Earth and in winter creates the inner forces of the human head. Raphael is the spirit of spring, and in autumn, as he travels round the Earth, he engenders the forces of human breathing. Hence we can say: While during autumn Michael is the cosmic spirit up above, the cosmic Archangel, at Michaelmas Raphael works in human beings—Raphael who is active in the whole human breathing-system, regulating it and giving it his blessing. And we shall form a true picture of autumn only if on the one hand, up above, we have the powerful Michael-Imagination, with the sword forged from meteoric iron, the garment woven out of Sun-gold and shot through with the Earth's silver-sparkling radiance, while Raphael below is working in man, aware of every breath that is drawn, of everything that flows from the lungs into the heart and from the heart through the whole circulation of the blood. Thus man learns to recognise in himself the healing forces which play through the cosmos in the Raphael-time of spring, if in autumn, when the rays of Raphael pass through the Earth, he comes to know how Raphael is active in human breathing.

For this is a great secret: all the healing forces reside originally in the human breathing system. And anyone who understands truly the circuit of the breath, knows the healing forces from the human side. They do not reside in the other systems of the human organism; these other systems have themselves to be healed.

Look back and see what I have said about education: the breathing system comes specially into activity between the ages of seven and fourteen. There are great possibilities of illness during the first seven years of life, and again after fourteen; they are relatively least during the period when the breath pulses through the body with the help of the etheric body. A secret activity of healing resides in the breathing system, and all the secrets of healing are at the same time secrets of breathing. And this is connected with the fact that the workings of Raphael, which are cosmic in spring, permeate the whole mystery of human breathing in autumn.

We have learnt to know Gabriel as the Christmas Archangel. He is then the cosmic Spirit; we have to look up above to find him. During the summer Gabriel carries into man all that is effected by the plastic, formative forces of nourishment. At midsummer they are carried into man by the Gabriel forces, after Gabriel has descended from his cosmic activity during the winter to his human activity in summer, when his forces stream through the Earth and it is winter on the other side.

And when at last we come to Michael, we have him as the cosmic Spirit in autumn. He is then at his highest; he has reached his cosmic culmination. Then he begins his descent; in spring his forces penetrate up through the Earth and live in all that comes to expression in man as movement and the power of will, enabling him to walk and work and take hold of things.

Now bring before you the complete picture. First, the summer picture at the time of St. John: up above, the grave countenance of Uriel, with his judicial look, his warning mien and gesture—and, drawing near to men and permeating them, the mild and loving gaze of Gabriel, Gabriel with his gesture of blessing. So during summer we have the working together of Uriel in the cosmos, Gabriel on the human side.

If we pass on to autumn, we have the—I will not say commanding, but rather the guiding—look of Michael. For if we see it in the right light, Michael's gaze is like a pointing finger, as though wishing not to look into itself, but to look outwards into the world. Michael's gaze is positive, active. And his sword forged out of cosmic iron is held so that at the same time his hand points out to men their way. That is the picture up above.

Below, in autumn, is Raphael, with deeply thoughtful gaze, who brings to mankind the healing forces which he has first—one might say—kindled in the cosmos. Raphael, with deep wisdom in his gaze, leaning on the staff of Mercury, supported by the inner forces of the Earth. Thus we have the working together of Michael in the cosmos, Raphael on Earth.

Now we go on to winter. Gabriel is then the cosmic Angel; Gabriel up above, with his mild and loving look and his gesture of benediction, weaving his garment of snow in the clouds of winter. And below, Uriel, with his grave judgment and warning, at the side of men: the positions are reversed.

And as we come round again to spring, up above we find Raphael, with his deeply thoughtful gaze; with the staff of Mercury which now in the airy heights has become something like a fiery serpent, a serpent of shining fire, no longer resting on the Earth, but as though held forth, using the forces of the air, mingling and combining fire, water and earth, so as to transmute them into healing forces, working and weaving in the cosmos.

And below, quite specially visible, is Michael, coming to meet mankind, with his positive gaze; a gaze that shows the way, as it were, into the world and would gladly draw the eyes of men in the same direction, as he stands close to mankind, the complement of Raphael, in spring.

So there, you see, are the pictures:

Winter: Gabriel above, Uriel below.
Spring: Raphael above, Michael below.
Summer: Uriel above, Gabriel below, with man.
Autumn: Michael above, Raphael below, with man.

Now let us take the words which have come down through the ages like an old magical saying and were used again by Goethe:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andren wirkt und lebt!

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives

Yes, indeed, Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael and Michael work together, one working in the other, living in the other, and when man is placed in the universe as a being of spirit, soul and body, these forces work magically in him. And how far-reaching is the truth in these words, how far they go! Think what they mean:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,

—rising and descending! And then the lines that follow:

Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchlingen!

their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.

Remember how in yesterday's lecture I spoke of it all passing over from plastic form into musical sound, universally resounding harmony.

I cannot tell you what I felt when this stood before my soul and I read again these lines by Goethe: vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen! This durch—it can shake one profoundly, for that is just how it is—it is true! It is staggering to realise that these words ring through the world like a peal of bells and are regarded as poetic licence or something of the sort—or as words that anyone might write in letters or articles. It is not so. These are words which correspond to a cosmic fact. It is really shattering to read these words in the context of Goethe's Faust and to know how true they are.

Now we will go further. We have seen how the heavenly Powers with golden pinions—the Archangels—permeate the universe in harmony, working and living in one another. But that is not all.

Let us look at Gabriel, who draws nutritive forces out of the cosmos and carries them into man at midsummer. These forces are active in the human metabolic system.

Raphael rules in the breathing system. And now Gabriel and Raphael, as they ascend and descend, work together in such a way that Gabriel passes up into the breathing system those forces of his which are otherwise active in human nutrition, and there they become healing forces. Gabriel hands on the nourishment to Raphael, and it then becomes a means of healing. When that which is otherwise only a nutritive process in the human organism is interwoven with the secret of breathing, it becomes a healing force.

We must indeed observe carefully the transformation which external substances undergo in the nutritive system itself: then we come to recognise the significance of the Gabriel forces, the nutritive forces, in man. But these forces are led over into the breathing system. And in working on further there, they become not only a means of quenching hunger and thirst, and not only restorative forces: they turn into forces for the inward correction of illness. The transmuted nutritive forces become healing forces. Anyone who understands nutrition correctly, understands the first stage of healing. If he knows what salt should do in a healthy man, then, if he allows the metamorphosis from the Gabriel-way to the Raphael-way to work on him, he will know how salt can act as a means of healing, in this or that case. The healing forces within us are metamorphoses of the nutritive forces. Raphael receives the golden vessel of nutrition from Gabriel; it is passed on to him.

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And now we come to a secret, familiar in early times but entirely lost to-day. Anyone who can read Hippocrates, or, if he cannot read Galen, can still gather something from him, will notice that, in Hippocrates, and even in Galen, those old physicians, there survived something of what is really a great human secret. The forces that prevail in our breathing system are healing forces; they are healing us continually. But when these breathing forces rise into the head, the healing forces become spiritual forces, active in sense-perception and in thinking. Here is the secret that was known at one time; the secret that is almost explicit in Hippocrates and can at least be drawn out of Galen. Thought, perception, the inner spiritual life of man, are a higher metamorphosis of therapy, the healing process; and when the healing element in the breathing system, which lies between the head and the digestive system, is driven further up, as it were, it becomes the material foundation for the spiritual life of man.

So we can say: The thought which flashes through the human head is really a transmutation of the healing impulses that reside in the various substances. Hence if a man sees truly into the heart of this, and has some healing salt-substance, let us say, in his hand, or some remedial plant-substance, he can look at it and say: Here is a beneficent healing force which I can give to man in accordance with his need. But if this substance penetrates into the man and passes beyond the realm of breathing, so that it works in his head, it becomes the material bearer of the power of thought: Raphael then hands on his vessel to Uriel.

Why does a remedy heal? Because it is on the way to the spirit. And if one knows how far on the way to the spirit a remedy is, one knows its healing power. The spirit cannot of itself lay hold directly on the earthly in man; but the lower stage of the spirit is a therapeutic force.

And just as Gabriel passes on to Raphael the nutritive forces, to be transmuted into forces of healing—in other words, he passes on his golden vessel—and just as Raphael passes on his golden vessel to Uriel, whereby the healing forces are made into the forces of thought, so it is Michael who receives from Uriel the thought-forces, and through the power of cosmic iron, out of which his sword is forged, transforms these thought-forces into forces of will, so that in man they become the forces of movement.

Hence we have this second picture: Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, ascending and descending; Uriel and Gabriel, let us say, working in one another, but also working with one another, one giving his possession to the other, so that it can work on further in him. We see how the heavenly Powers rise and descend, passing to one another golden vessels—the golden vessels of nourishment, of healing, of the forces of thought and of movement. So these golden vessels move on from one Archangel to another, while at the same time each Archangel works with the other in cosmic harmony.

And again in Faust we find:

Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!

See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:

True indeed, down to the very word “golden,” for these things are woven out of the Sun-gold radiating from Uriel, as I described yesterday.

Goethe had of course read the old saying to which he then gave poetic expression, and it made a tremendous impression on him. But the meaning I have been able to picture for you here—that he did not know. It is just this which staggers one—to find that when out of a certain poetic feeling a spirit such as Goethe's takes hold of something handed down from old traditions, it so incredibly reflects the truth! This is the splendid thing that unites us, if we are cultivating Spiritual Science to-day and these things are revealed to us: when we truly see how Uriel and Raphael and Michael and Gabriel are working together, and how they really do pass on to one another their own particular forces. If we first see this for ourselves and then, having perhaps come across indirectly an ancient saying, through Goethe in this case, we let it work upon us, we see how an old instinctive truth—no matter whether mythical or legendary—was at one time widely current in the world. And then times change, and in our own time we see how the ancient truth has to be raised to a higher level.

O Hippocrates—it is all the same whether we now give the name of Raphael, or Mercury, or Hermes to the one who stood at his side—this Hippocrates lived at a time when twilight was falling over the knowledge of this working together of Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, and of how the healing forces in the human organism lie between the thoughts and the nutritive forces. This was the source from which an ancient instinctive wisdom drew those wonderful old remedies which in fact are always being renewed. Today they are found among so-called primitive folk, and people cannot imagine how they have been come by. All this is connected with the fact that a primeval wisdom was once possessed by mankind.

But now there must really be a problem left in your minds. It is this. If you take everything I have put before you—how for example the Raphael forces are active in spring and in autumn are carried over by Raphael into the inwardness of the breathing system—you must have been led to suppose that man is entirely bound up with the working of the forces of the cosmos through the course of the year. Originally, indeed, that is how it was. But because man is a being who remembers, so that an outer experience is preserved in memory and after days or years can be relived as an inner experience, so these truths remain entirely valid for the cosmos; but a man does not inwardly experience the Raphael force in his breathing system only in the autumn, but on through the winter, summer and spring. A kind of memory of it, more substantial than ordinary memory, remains.

So while things are arranged in the way I have described, their effects are active in human beings throughout the year. As an experience remains fixed in the memory, so these effects continue all through the year; otherwise man could not be a uniformly developing being all the year round. In physical life, one person forgets more readily, or less readily, than another. But the influence Raphael has implanted in our breathing system during the autumn would disappear by the following autumn when Raphael came again. Until then this nature-memory in the breathing organ remains active, but then it has to be renewed.

So is man placed in the course of nature; he is not excluded from the way the world goes, but planted in the midst of it. But he is placed there in yet another way. It is true that man, standing here on Earth, enclosed within his skin, with his organs embedded in his body, feels himself somewhat isolated in the cosmos, for the connections I have described are indeed full of mystery. But this is not so when man is a being only of spirit and soul—in his pre-earthly existence, for example. Between death and a new birth he lives in a realm of spirit; his soul gazes down not at an individual human body—it chooses this in the course of time—but at the whole Earth, and indeed at the Earth in connection with the whole planetary system, and with all the interwoven activities of Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, Michael. In that realm, one is looking at oneself from outside.

It is there that the door opens for the entry of souls who are returning from pre-earthly to earthly life. It opens only during the period from the end of December to the beginning of spring, when Gabriel hovers above as cosmic Archangel, while below at man's side is Uriel, carrying cosmic forces into the human head. In the course of these three months the souls who are to be embodied during the whole year come down from the cosmos towards the Earth. They remain waiting there until an opportunity occurs in the Earth's planetary sphere: even the souls who will be born in October, let us say, are already within the Earth sphere, awaiting their birth. Much, very much, depends on whether a soul, after it has entered the Earth sphere and is already in touch with it, has to wait for its earthly embodiment. One soul has a longer wait; another, a shorter one.

The particular secret here is that—just as, for example, the fructifying seed enters the ovum at only one spot—the heavenly seeds enters into the whole yearly being of the Earth only when Gabriel rules above as the cosmic Angel, with his mild, loving look and gesture of benediction, while below is Uriel, with judicial gaze and warning gesture. That is the time when the Earth is impregnated with souls. It is the time when the Earth has its mantle of snow and surrenders to its crystallising forces; then man can be united with the Earth as the thinking earth-body in the cosmos. Then the souls pass out of the cosmos and assemble, as it were, in the Earth sphere. That is the annual impregnation of the Earth's seasonal being.

To all these things we come, if we have insight not only into the physical aspect of the cosmos, but into the activities of those cosmic Beings I have described for you in the four pictures. And if we have arrived at that, we can find in many a poem some indications of the cosmic creative activity, for it is there in the world:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt
Eins in dem andem wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Von Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen!

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.

In these very words we can discern something of that wonderful working together of the four Archangel Beings who, in conjunction with the forces of nature, permeate and animate the bodily nature, the soul and the spirit in man—working in one another, working with one another.

• 1. From the translation of Faust: Part One, by Bayard Taylor, revised and edited by Stuart Atkins. Published by Collier Books, New York, 1962.