The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have now studied your questions, which are all connected with the matters of which we spoke yesterday. A first category of questions has arisen out of a certain uneasiness. Single questions will find their answer in the course of the lectures: in the case of others which are fundamentally similar, it will not be possible to give theoretical answers—the answers will only emerge as a result of the whole course of lectures. Fundamentally, the trend of all these questions is: How can those who are attending this course develop their medical work in association with Dornach? The true development of the impulse of which I spoke in the esoteric sense yesterday and shall speak of again tomorrow—this true and real development of our work is the foundation of everything, although, naturally, such matters can only be inadequately dealt with in so few lectures. To begin with, I will make certain general remarks in connection with what was said yesterday.

Little is accomplished, my dear friends, if we simply direct a person's general attention, or if he does this himself, from the material world to the spiritual world. In every sphere of life—and most strongly of all in the medical sphere and for the physician—this general indication towards the spiritual does correspond with an innermost need of the soul. But in many respects this need requires much greater definition and clarity and also possibly most important of all—a greater inner strength than that with which it usually arises. It is a striving in you, my dear friends, but a definite path must be taken. The impulse towards this path can, in the first place, be given by me, but having received this impulse you yourselves must continue to work in association with Dornach—definitely those of you who have set yourselves this task.

It is not enough to strive, in a general way, towards the spiritual; this striving towards the spiritual must be concrete and real in every domain of life. We must enter into a real communion with the being of the world, with the being and reality of the external cosmos. Man has no experience of the cosmos today and because he does not experience the cosmos, he does not experience spirituality, for spirituality can only be acquired by way of the cosmos. In its external form, medical science yields no spiritual knowledge concerning existence. It is only by being able to place things in their whole cosmic connection that we learn to see through the veil of nature to the spiritual forces behind her.

For more than twenty years now within the Anthroposophical movement, it has been possible to study and to get a very exact knowledge of the difficulties that may arise in the pursuit of the spiritual life. And it may sound rather trivial when one describes, in a few brief words, in what these difficulties have consisted. They have consisted simply in the fact that those who were striving for esotericism in some domain or other wished to make things too easy, too comfortable for themselves. The esoteric path is either difficult or it is no path at all! Esoteric development is not to be obtained along an easy or comfortable path. We must take in complete and solemn earnestness the general and often repeated statement that it is a matter of overcoming difficulties, of man growing out of and beyond himself. From now onwards, from the time that began with our Dornach Christmas Foundation Meeting, a kind of change must take place in our whole conception of the anthroposophical movement. This change must also take place in the individual sections of the work. And you who are seeking to find your path in the medical sphere, must, from the very beginning, share in this essential change. There can be no question of regarding the esoteric path as a mere adjunct to life; one's path of life must be completely filled with esoteric impulses. The help that can be given will be given in the lectures. But, as I shall say at the end of this lecture, something else must be added as well.

Let us first consider one particular detail. For if you have not the will to enter into details in spiritual studies, you will not be able to find the way to the spiritual. Let it not be imagined that one can really find the spiritual as a dreamer, or as a person who gives himself up to all kinds of vague inspirations and the like. The spiritual must be attained today by the most intensely earnest, inner striving. And it can only be attained through the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world.

I have already said that much can be learned from the world of the plants. And now let us think of a plant. People study plants today by looking at the root, stem, leaves, flowers, pistil, stamens, seed. The seed develops in the ovary, and then people describe what they thus see in the plant more or less as they would describe an armchair, adding that they often sit in one! This, more or less, is the way in which a plant is described. We are told how the roots are set in the soil, how they draw in physical and chemical forces and substances, how the saps rise up through capillary action, or the like. To speak of a spiral arrangement of the leaves is considered an error, an aberration. At any rate, it is not known that this spiral arrangement is connected with the cosmos. So far as the blossoms and flowers are concerned, the most that can be said is that botanists picture some kind of force in connection with the colors and substances of the flowers, or with fertilization. The whole thing is described entirely from the external point of view, just as one describes how a person sits in an armchair. Yes, but the reality that must be grasped simply cannot be grasped by these methods. In studying a plant we must realize that a wonderful mystery is indicated as it stands there with its root sunk in the soil. The stem with the leaves points to another mystery and the processes in the blossom to yet another mystery.

Think of it, my dear friends—the root, sinking into the soil, represents the end of the plant existence in the direction of the solid earth. But this root could receive nothing from the soil if the soil of the earth had not first come under the influence of the cosmic environment. The cosmic environment, not only the warmth and light of the sun but also those forces which proceed from the rest of the planetary system belonging to the earth, influence the earth from the surface a little way inwards. And the forces that are quickened in this way in the earth's substances make it possible for the root to be within the earth.

Now in the human head we find the same forces that play around the roots of plants, but in the human head we find them in quite a different form from that in which they exist around the roots of plants in the soil. Inner perception of these things will never unfold if we go no further than what can be learned today from natural science. Many of your questions speak of this as the chaotic knowledge given you by contemporary natural science. What is necessary is to understand, out of real experience, the nature of what was once called the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. For if you simply go on speaking about hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, in the way modern chemistry speaks, these things will always remain something quite external. You will never be able to think in any other way than that you stand there as a human being and somewhere outside there is oxygen or nitrogen. What modern physiology or chemistry tells you about oxygen or nitrogen is something quite direct. Physiology tells you that nitrogen exists in the organism, but you do not experience nitrogen in the organism. What is necessary is to take one's start from what can be experienced. And things that can be experienced must be deeply united with our whole being, if it is our aim to place ourselves in the service of the shaping of the world. And that is what we are doing when we heal.

Now so far as one of the elements of antiquity is concerned, everyone can know that he experiences it. This element is warmth, warmth as a quality of nature. We experience warmth, for we feel warm, or we feel cold. We are not as external to warmth as we are to oxygen and nitrogen.

It was characteristic of ancient study of nature that it took as its fundamental element something that could actually be experienced, something in which a man can be, not something that he must remain outside of. Let us first take this element of warmth, of fire, because here it is easiest to grasp the factor of actual experience. We know that as human beings we experience warmth. Now what is, for the plant, the earth—the earthy element is, for the human head, warmth.

Suppose you have here the earth, and 'think away' from it what appears to you as the earthy element; also think away the fluid and the airy, but let the warmth remain, so that you have a kind of ‘soil’ of warmth. You can picture this quite easily. Now take the whole thing (See Illustration I on the next page) and turn it round, so that what was formerly below is now above (See Illustration I on the next page)—it is a polar opposite.

You can now say: I behold the root of the plant, it is within the earthy soil; I behold the human head, it is in the 'warmth' soil, but the soil is in the reverse position. That is because what happens here (See Illustration I on the next page) lies four stages further back than this. (See Illustration I on the next page) If you speak of what goes on in the plant root as an earth happening, you must speak of what goes on in the human head, out of the warmth, as a Saturn happening. Between them are Sun and Moon happenings. And now 'think away' from the human head everything that came into it at later stages. Think away the earthy, the watery, the airy, and picture merely the warmth working in the human head, the warmth that provides the rest of the organism with differentiated warmth—and then you have the human head as it is today, a miniature Saturn. In the human head today you have the old Saturn organization. And if you understand the connection, then you say to yourselves: In the cosmos, untold millennia ago, there was a structure that anticipated everything that exists today as warmth in the human head. And the plant root in the earthy element today creates an image of the condition that thus preceded it.

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There you have a connection. You behold ancient Saturn in the warmth organization of the human head. But if this act of beholding is to be true, it must be connected not merely with theoretical ideas but with inner, moral impulses. Looking at the human head must be an experience that moves us inwardly; we feel that the human head is the living, embodied remembrance of a very ancient evolutionary period of the cosmos, of the old Saturn period. Try, for once, to let this feeling permeate you. I am a human being who has reached a certain age. My childhood stands before me; the remembrance of childhood rises up. As one who has grown older, I sink myself into the remembrances of my childhood. This in itself gives rise to a certain inner experience which we can confront with moral power. And now expand this feeling to the point where you say to yourselves: “As a human being I was present during the old Saturn period. If, in this present time I understand my head truly, it is like a living remembrance of a primeval evolutionary period of the cosmos.” All that takes shape through the remembrances of childhood is infinitely multiplied when contemplation of the living head leads us back to the time of Old Saturn.

Such knowledge is only of value when it is steeped in moral feeling, when one can really be filled with awe by the fact that our own activity leads us into a real experience of the cosmos. Meditation, above all for the physician, does not consist in merely brooding over thoughts; meditation consists in actually bringing such interrelationships before the soul and having, in regard to them, manifold feelings through which one may experience all kinds of inner shocks and emotions. Suppose I meet a human being whom I have not seen for, say, forty years. As he comes before me in his present form, the picture of his childhood stands before my soul. I see him before me as a child. This gives rise to certain inner emotion or shock. I look at the root nature of the plant, I acquire the capacity to relate this root nature to the human head, and the human head leads me back to the time of Old Saturn. Meditation must penetrate to the very soul; it must quicken a deep inward life.

This is an indication of how, after the foundation has been laid by a course of exoteric study, everything in the esoteric domain must aim at promoting intuitive experience of the cosmos in connection with the whole being of man. For just as the Old Saturn existence can arise within you when you study the connection between the human head and the root of a plant, so too can the Old Sun existence arise within you when you study the connection between the human heart and the development of the stem and leaves of a plant. The stem and leaf development in the plant is, again, a remembrance that has now become living, of the Old Sun existence.

The flower in which the seed is produced is connected with the human metabolic system, the limb-metabolic system. And when we study what goes on in the flower in connection with the metabolic or limb system in man, a remembrance of the Old Moon period arises. And if you have this inner experience, if in deepest meditation you feel these connections inwardly, then you experience still more.

Something of great significance is experienced. If with this deepened feeling you turn your soul to the root of the plant, you will begin to feel as if no plant root were really still, but as if it were moving. You learn to recognize this movement. I can only give an outline of these things. I can only point to an impulse, to the way in which inner experience must be built up and how knowledge of nature becomes a real wisdom. You will experience this movement in the root of the plant. And contemplating it, you will feel as if, together with the root, you were moving through cosmic space. Through this very experience, in which you seem to be in the chariot which travels with you through the cosmos with the swiftness of the plant root, you will discover that what you are really experiencing is the movement of the planetary system through cosmic space. In the root of the plant you experience the movement of the whole planetary system through cosmic space. And if then, in the same way, you experience the growth of the leaves, again you experience a movement in which you yourselves participate. And this is the true movement, the inwardly experienced movement of the earth.

What the Copernican system has to say about the revolution of the earth around the sun is nothing but a series of constructions. The true movement of the earth becomes an

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inner experience when we deepen ourselves in the connection which exists between stem and leaves. In your contemplation of stem and leaves you move, together with the earth, in the wake of the sun, so that the earth really seems to be doing what the Copernican system describes. But the movement is, in reality, a much more complicated one.

If you contemplate the processes in the blossom around the stamens and the pistil deeply enough, you will experience the movement which the moon carries out around the earth. In experiencing the flower you experience the movement of the moon—a movement that is already separate from the earth. The planetary system as a whole is experienced in the root of the plant, the earth's movement in the stem and leaves; the moon's movement which has been separated off, is experienced in the generation of the seed in the plant.

I say this to you, my dear friends, in the first place, in order that you may learn to have insight into things of which ordinary science takes no account at all, because it considers that such matters are neither knowable nor worth knowing. But they must be known—otherwise nothing of reality can be known. And I tell you all this for yet another reason. I do not think that, in the ordinary way, anybody gets a shock or feels emotion from what he learns about the plants. It causes him no inner concern—he simply assimilates it. And he experiences nothing at all, in reality. But in a second medical course such as that of which we spoke, if you begin to know the planets' movements, the earth's movement, the moon's movement from your contemplation of the plants, the minerals, (though here things are rather different) and also of the human being—then these things will not leave you indifferent.

It is essential for us today, my dear friends, to bring activity of knowledge into these things. The heart feels that these are the ways which knowledge should take. But what is offered to the heart is something that is merely didactic, containing nothing of the realities. People think they have the realities in what is nothing more than a tiny fragment.

What is the attitude of science today? It always seems to me to be rather like this—suppose someone were to go to Dresden and were looking at the Sistine Madonna. A scientist might come up to him and say: This Sistine Madonna is, after all, nothing but an external impression which comes to you from outside. Then he might proceed to take the Madonna out of the frame and break it up into fragments getting smaller and smaller until they were mere atoms. And then he might say: Now you have real knowledge of this Madonna. But this is all wrong. If we want to have a real understanding of the Sistine Madonna we must first be able to enter into the aims of religion, then into all that poured into this Madonna figure from Raphael's spirituality, then into many other things too, but this is the first: we must try to enter into the intentions of the Gods, of the Divine Spiritual Beings behind the physical world. This would have to form part of the second medical course of which I have spoken. Only in such ways is it possible to bring people near to reality.

If you will take what I have just said as a stimulus, you will understand the two meditations which will awaken the power of medical understanding within you. In this meditation you may proceed as follows: First of all you can deepen yourselves in contemplation of the external phenomenon of fire, of fire that gives warmth, realizing in this contemplation that this external manifestation of fire is Maya, semblance, illusion. Behind the fire there is something quite different. Behind the fire there is working, active will.

You may ask: Yes, but how do I get to know that there is active, working will behind the fire? All true esoteric instruction addresses itself to the powers in the pupils themselves. If you will allow what I have said today really to enter into your hearts, there will arise within you the realization that wherever there is fire, there, too, is active working will—just as when you see the form of a human countenance, a human figure, you realize that here there is spirit and soul. Wherever you have fire, even in the tiniest match, there is active, working will. In order that you may also be able to penetrate the other substances of nature, you must reach the point where a burning match is no longer merely the external phenomenon that would be described today, but where you actually see it as active, working will. When you are able in this way to transform your minds and hearts, you will find that your soul learns to experience quite differently, to have quite a different attitude to the environment in which you find yourselves. You will find that your own working, active will is akin to fire. You will live out into the world from your own inner being and you will have a much more subtle and delicate perception of fire than before, because you realize its kinship with your own will. You will find this kinship wherever there is fire. You must learn to realize: I am really within this fire, for it is active, working will; it belongs to me, just as my own finger belongs to me.

Air must be encouraged in you as courage. Wherever wind blows, you will experience it in your own soul as courage. What you see in outer nature as air—this is courage. Courage is air. This must be an experience in your soul.

Water is the outer manifestation of feeling. In feeling there is the same inner activity as is present in the external world, in water. Water is feeling.

Earth, solid earth, is the same as thought. In thought, life freezes.

If you can grasp these four points in meditation; if you can learn to think of fire as active, working will—if you can take the external appearance of fire as manifestations of this active will—if you see in the fire this active will just as you see spirit and soul in the form of a human being—if you can feel that the external form of the fire is maya—if you can feel that the blowing wind and the clouds are phenomena which are a revelation of courage—if you can see water as an expression of feeling, and the earth as something that resembles your own thoughts—then you will discover that this organic process, which arises in your own being as an earthly going out from the head and stretching downwards, is a continuation of the earth formation, the uniting of a substance of earth formation which has weight, and this is the nature of thought.

If you then pass to the breathing and feel how, in the breathing the aeriform nature of the human being is circulating, then you will recognize, in the activity of man's aeriform nature, everything that may be called activity in the human being, that takes him into the outer world, in order that he may assert himself within this outer world. And you will try to learn from the study of many phenomena in outer nature, what it is that happens to the air in the human being.

And you will know that the watery organism of man, the fluid organism with its inner mobility, is the seat of feeling, the feeling that flows in the centrifugal and centripetal directions. You will know that the movement of air is a semicircular movement, from above downwards. You will know that what lives in the fluid nature has a centrifugal and centripetal movement in man and strives everywhere to hold the balance.

Thus, from observation of what exists outside in nature, you will find the transition to what happens with these elements in the human being. The essential point is that we shall not rest content with observation of the ordinary kind, for this makes us earthy ourselves, dried up and rigid, and we lose our mobility.

Much has been given in what I have sketched today. Intermediary stages have been left out because it would take too long to give you every detail. I can only give suggestions. You will have realized from what I have said that the whole method, the whole way of medical study must become different. And now see to it that what I have told you here really bears fruit within you. Many of the questions which you have put with heavy hearts and which I have read with a heavy heart because they point so tellingly to what is needed in our times, will be answered if you always remain in connection with the Goetheanum. If you do this, your medical studies, wherever they may be, will constantly be enriched.

It is, of course, essential that you should realize the necessity of earnest striving, earnest learning. You must work seriously and earnestly. And you must have a second feeling which arises in you in all sincerity—you must decide whether you will follow this feeling, or whether you will not. This feeling must be that the enrichment of medical study is to proceed, in future, from Dornach; in Dornach we shall try to give the enrichment that is so needed today. You must choose the path you are going to take in medicine. For one thing, there will be the problem of karma. In the nature of things, those who want to heal must have an intimate understanding of karma in the world. I shall speak of this again. In healing, one cannot run counter to karma; one can only heal in accordance with karma. But where karma is concerned one cannot say superficially: When someone is ill, it is his karma to remain ill; and when he is well again, his karma has given him health. It is not right to speak thus. The question of how karma works in human life needs a real, fundamental deepening, a cosmic deepening. These things will be taken care of in Dornach for those who seek them.

I have already said that in the future, impulses will be given from esoteric sources, for account must be taken of the realities which exist and which were reckoned with in the foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Meeting. As I said yesterday, the question of others copying the remedies causes me no anxiety, if in Dornach, it is really understood that esoteric medical study must be carried on in a much deeper connection with Dornach. To this end it will be necessary to carry out this medical work in the same way as other branches of the spiritual life in Dornach.

In the life of the Anthroposophical Society it was always the case that those who wanted to become esotericists did not pay enough heed to the inner conditions of the esoteric life. And so the years went by. It has only been in two spheres that we have been able to achieve what is necessary, namely, in the sphere of General Anthroposophy and in the sphere of Eurythmy and the Art of Speech. But the independent, inner activity that has developed in these spheres must be developed in all the Sections now to be formed. And to this end you must really submit to the conditions that will be made; you must submit to them in full confidence and trust.

One of these conditions is that I shall carry out everything connected with the medical sphere in association with Dr. Wegman, who in the course of years within the anthroposophical movement has prepared herself for medicine and whose place in this medical movement is such that it will be led by her in association with me. And so those who join Dr. Wegman with confidence will get help from Dornach as they go along. An arrangement will have to be made that those who want to remain permanently connected with the Section for the renewal of medicine shall address themselves, with their requests, to Dr. Wegman, in complete confidence.

Periodically—perhaps about every month—we will answer, in a circular letter, the questions of those who, at the end of this lecture course, want to become pupils at the Goetheanum. It will be the same in all the sections. This circular letter will answer the questions put by individuals and all those who are members of the corresponding section will receive the answers. But unless there is inner confidence, there will be no success. A real link will be created by these means, and all your human and medical needs will be satisfied.

This is how things will be arranged to begin with, until we can take further steps. The great failing that has existed in the esoteric life hitherto is that people have been arrogant enough to think that they should always receive their esoteric exercises from me. They all wanted to come to me, not to others. That is where the esotericism has foundered hitherto. For inner, occult reasons, the only possible way is for what lives in the well-spring of esotericism to be led and guided by the personalities who are suited for this work. This leadership by persons who are destined for it by fate—this is part of esotericism. It is a principle that has been rejected because people were immodest. If this principle is not adopted we shall not make progress, even in the newly founded Anthroposophical Society.

Thus I have sketched, and I will still further develop, how the true esotericism must work on into the future. Tomorrow I will try to answer the greater part of the questions which have been put and will all amount to this: How can I find my way into a training that has its center in Dornach? You will be able to find the way, but you must have confidence. It is not a matter of belief in authority but of an intelligent building upon an inner foundation, and an acceptance of conditions that are created by destiny.

Yesterday, my dear friends, I explained the primary difference between a society like ours and other societies or associations. I said its statutes and the points on its program do not exhaustively describe the character of our Society—if we add or delete points and statutes, nothing significant will be added to or subtracted from what our Society is essentially meant to be. I also pointed out the most obvious way in which our Society differs from the usual kind of program-based society or association. That kind of association can be dissolved at any moment. But if it became necessary to dissolve our Society and we actually disbanded, that would in no way change the real state of affairs since our Society, unlike others, is based not on illusory human inventions such as programs and statutes, but on realities. We touched on one of these realities, namely that the lecture cycles are in the hands of all our members, a fact that would not change in the slightest if the Society were dissolved. And the same applies to many other realities on which our Society is based.

Consequently, we really must get to know the conditions necessary for the survival of our Society and not delude ourselves about them. I gave a rather superficial explanation of these conditions yesterday, and would like to go into them more deeply today.

You all know that in many materialistic discussions on the nature of life itself, we can find many definitions or explanations of what constitutes a living being. You have probably learned enough on that subject from spiritual science to realize that all these explanations and definitions are of necessity one-sided and incomplete. The greatest mistake or illusion of materialistically minded people is to think they can encompass the essence of a thing in a single definition or explanation. To illustrate how grotesque this idea is, I once told you the story of how a Greek school of philosophy was searching for a definition of the human being. What they finally came up with was that a human being was a living being with two legs and no feathers.¹ Well, this is undoubtedly correct; it is an absolutely correct definition. But the next day, someone who had understood this definition brought in a plucked chicken and said, “Here is a living thing that has two legs and no feathers, so it must be a human being!”

The usual attempts at defining life are no better than that. That's just the way it is with definitions, and we have to be aware of that fact. There is also a comparable materialistic definition of life given by a famous zoologist, a definition that is quite correct and useful within the limits of its applicability: ² “A living thing is something that can leave a corpse behind under certain circumstances; what it leaves behind when it is destroyed is thus not a living thing.” Clearly, this definition applies only to the outer limits of the physical plane, where a living being does in fact leave a corpse behind at its demise; thus, this definition is valid there. When a machine is destroyed, it does not leave a corpse behind; we would be speaking metaphorically if we talked about the corpse of a watch, for instance. However, if our Society were dissolved, it would actually leave behind a real corpse, in the truest sense of the word.

What is the nature of a corpse? Once a corpse has been abandoned by its soul, it no longer obeys the same laws as it did when it was united with that soul. Instead, it begins to obey the physical laws of the earthly elements. The same thing would be true of the corpse of our Society as soon as the Society was dissolved. In addition, the Society's vehicle, namely all the lecture cycles now in the members' possession, would also be part of this corpse.

We can be quite precise and scientific in taking this comparison further. If a corpse is not to have a detrimental effect on its surroundings, it must be cremated or buried. This would also apply to the corpse our Society would undoubtedly leave behind at its dissolution. As a consequence, once we know what our Society really is, we become aware of our responsibility toward what it is based on. A society or association based on statutes and programs is like a machine that leaves behind only pieces if you destroy it, but our Society would leave an actual corpse behind if it were dissolved. It would leave behind something that would have to be thought of as a corpse and treated accordingly.

My friends, we really must think about what our Society requires to survive. For the time being, let's turn away from the superficial fact that the lecture cycles exist and look at their content, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is now present in a certain number of heads. It exists not only in the heads of people who took it in properly and harmoniously, but perhaps also of those—present company excepted, of course, for politeness' sake—who took it up in a distorted form and go on distorting it as they talk about it. All of this is really there and is alive in the Society. And just think of the effect it would have as the Society's corpse if the Society were to disband. That is why we must take responsibility for guarding what our Society requires for survival, and why I appealed to you yesterday in various ways to safeguard those needs.

Now, I just said that if the Society were dissolved, it would leave behind a corpse. This characteristic tells us that in the truest sense of the word, the Society is a real living being. But the Society also possesses another characteristic of living things, namely the fact that it can get sick. I told you that an association founded on the basis of a program and statutes is like a machine or a mechanism, and when members do something that does not fit in with the machine, they are expelled. Expelling members from an association founded on statutes is always just a matter of “lovingly” applying a rule.

However, in the case of a society like ours, which is a living organism rather than a mechanism, taking the action of expelling a member will very seldom have any significant effect on the actual problem. In our circumstances, expelling a member who has done something wrong is simply taking the easy way out. That is not to say that we cannot do it, but we do have to realize that it is much more important to keep the organism of our Society so healthy that it acts as a healer in its totality when confronted with individual unhealthy growths. In most cases, healing a sick organism is nothing more than calling up the healing forces of the entire organism when an individual member or organ is ill. It is important that we understand the process of potential illness within our Society and become aware of the need to call up the healing forces of its entire organism.

Now, I already explained yesterday that one important force for healing consists in getting used to being absolutely exact with regard to phenomena on the physical plane—truth in exactitude, and exactitude in truthfulness. In outer exoteric life, if some bit of information is altered through gossip or lack of precision in being passed on from one person to the next, that doesn't matter nearly as much as it would matter if we were to let this become habitual within our Society. One of the most urgent needs, then, is for us to take exactitude as our guiding principle in everything we say and do.

It is only natural for people to ask what they must do in order to help strengthen the Society. The answer is that the single most important thing is for each individual to really feel like a member of the Society in the right way. Members must experience the Society as an organism and themselves as its organs. That requires, however, that we all make the affairs of the Society our own and that we are able to follow the Society's train of thought. Knowing about the concerns of the Society and wanting to know about them is of fundamental, crucial importance. Of course, this presupposes a certain interest in the Society as such, and to develop this interest, we have to know that the Society is an organism and take this fact seriously. It is much more than just a metaphor.

For example, we need to understand the following. We have three points listed in our statutes.³ It follows from what I said before that statutes are only of secondary importance for us. Nonetheless, they are there. In fact, they have to be there. And if we consider these three statutory points, we can describe them best by saying that they represent our work, the work of our Society. But if you think about how it is with human beings and their relationship to their work, you will find that people's work is what makes them tired and wears them out. Describing a person's work, however, by no means definitively characterizes that person, and it makes just as little sense to say that the work within the confines of these three points on our program encompasses the whole nature and essence of our Society.

However, performing this work does wear the Society down. This means that our Society, just like a human being, needs to be taken care of. Just like a human organism, the organism of the Society also needs care. And it's not enough to think that being a member of the Society means nothing more than using the Society as a place for fostering what is expressed in these three points in our statutes. It also means taking an interest in the guidance and management of the Society as such. When someone lacks this interest, that really means that person is opposed to the Society's ongoing existence. Being interested only in the work the Society does is not the same thing as being interested in the Society as such. But in order for our Society to exist as a basis for this work, a certain interest in the Society as such, in the Society as an organism, must also be present. That is, a certain principle of togetherness, of living and working together, has to be cultivated within our Society.

I said yesterday that in certain cases it is necessary to become quite drastic in calling a spade a spade, and also that it belongs to the very nature of our Society to be able to count on not having these things spread abroad immediately. The grotesque example I used yesterday, the example of the man in the barbershop whose habits were at odds with those of his surroundings, was meant to show that the motive behind this kind of clash is often quite different from what people claim. As I showed, the man in question was motivated by hysterical vanity.

Karma has led us to set up our headquarters here in this area, and so we find ourselves living under conditions that are not exactly ideal in all respects, if I may put it like that. That was what I meant when I said that even if each of us behaved in an absolutely exemplary manner, we might be attacked with still more slander and so on, even if all our members were absolutely exemplary in how they behaved within the general population. So you see, I am not saying that we must take all possible prejudices into account, but only that we need to look at the living conditions our Society needs.

In terms of our own human nature, our own physical body, we know that we have to be physically adapted to the external conditions of life around us, on which we depend, and that our physical organism is in constant interaction with the outside world. The same thing applies to the outer organism of our Society. It has to develop within the social framework in which our karma has placed us, and this makes it imperative that our members respect our Society's needs with regard to living conditions. I have explained what these conditions are time and time again.

An important point I once expressly stated in a rebuttal ⁴ of a local pastor's article attacking our Society ⁵ was that our Society as such does not have anything directly to do with religion. After all, what matters is not only to always say the right thing, but also to say what needs to be said in each particular instance. That is what is important. And one of the things most crucially needed for our whole movement to flourish is for the outer world to finally realize something I've tried to explain again and again. I have said repeatedly that our movement has no more to do with religion than the Copernican view of the solar system at its inception had to do with any particular religious confession. That the religious denominations were opposed to the Copernican system was their problem, and no reflection on the Copernican view itself. And now we must stand firm on one point, namely, that we have no intention of founding a sect or a religious movement. At one point, I had to get downright unpleasant, because, with the best will in the world, people were writing articles about our building and calling it a “temple,” which was very detrimental to us. It made it seem, quite unnecessarily, as if we were competing with the religious denominations. That is why I always remind our members to try to popularize the term “School for Spiritual Science.”

It is really important for people to hear again and again that we have nothing to do with a religious sect or with founding a new religion or anything like that. Our members commit untold sins against the Society when they fail to point out, when providing information, that our Society has nothing to do with founding a religion. Not only that, but by omission they actually do a lot to make it seem as if we were trying to found a religion. It is important to take this into account even in trivial instances and to take every opportunity to beat it into people's hard heads that this is not a temple and not a church, but something that is dedicated to scientific purposes.

Sometimes, my friends, what is said is less important than how it is said. We have to realize that we will always give outsiders the impression that we are a sect or some kind of new religion if we invariably put on a long face in talking about anything happening in our movement—“so long a face that your chin hits your stomach,” as someone once put it to me.⁶ I know this is not a nice way of putting it, but it is certainly to the point. Of course, this is because many people imagine that this kind of exaggerated seriousness is the only way to talk about feelings related to religious life. But we must make every effort to free our movement from the preconceived idea that we are trying to found a church, a religion, or a sect, and to popularize the idea that this is a spiritual scientific movement taking its place in the world just as the Copernican system did, so that everyone can see that we are the ones being wronged. The Church made a mistake in opposing the teachings of Copernicus; it had to accept them eventually anyway.⁷ The same thing will happen with our movement as well—the Church will have to accept it.

This is an example of how we have to learn to speak very exactly, and precise speaking must be considered the lifeblood of our Society in its relations with the outside world. It is one way of doing something really constructive on behalf of the Society. People who are only interested in reading lecture cycles—which has its uses, of course, and we couldn't do without it—and take no interest in the governance of the Society, especially here, where you are all in such close contact—well, people who do not want to develop that interest are actually not in support of the Society as such, as I said before. You must develop an interest in the Society! The point is not simply to be there for the sake of participating somehow in the work the Society has to do, but to develop an interest in the Society as such. This means, however, that the affairs of the Society as a living entity have to enter our individual awareness. And the less we need statutes in order to do that, the better.

You see how necessary it is for us to become more and more able to stand firm when someone from the outside says something negative about our Society, and to be able to say that we can vouch for the fact that something like that could not possibly happen in our Society. We must be able to count on the fact that the kind of slander that gets circulated is false in almost all instances—although exceptions are always possible, of course. This, however, requires a really vital interest in the affairs of the Society.

Let's assume that some kind of indiscretion occurs. For example, let's take the hypothetical case of a man and a woman who, one fine afternoon in May, are so indiscreet as to do something they shouldn't do, outside and in full view of the people in the neighborhood. Let's assume that this kind of indiscretion takes place. What ought to happen as a matter of course if our Society were constituted as it should be? The natural thing would be for the people in question to realize in the course of the next few days that they ought to find an older member in whom they could confide, and ask what can be done about it. That would mean that they are making their own private matters the concern of the Society.

Please note the kind of example I have chosen. It is not simply the kind of thing we should regard as a strictly private matter that is none of our business. Rather, it is something that could be extremely damaging to the Society. We cannot function on the principle of the knee that says, “That's my private business”; the knee has to feel like a part of the whole organism. Of course, such things must also be received with real interest. They have to be seen as a concern of the Society; there must always be someone there who is aware of not only what is of immediate interest to him or her, but who also knows a lot about the Society and can contribute to the Society's ongoing well-being.

In other words, this means that we have to get beyond saying, “I have my own circle of friends, and it's to my credit that I brought them into the Society; this circle of friends is what interests me.” I certainly do not mean to criticize people for developing friendships and personal connections—that is none of the Society's business. However, it does have an immediate effect on the Society if people are only interested in the Society because of their own membership in it. We have to make the concerns of the Society our own. We must preclude the possibility of first hearing about some offensive incident from someone outside the Society rather than from within our own membership, and we will automatically take a step toward preventing this when the right kind of interest in our internal social relationships is present.

For instance, at present you can ask four or five people whether a particular person has been attending our lectures in the past few weeks, and discover that none of them knows. That can easily happen among us. Of course, it is understandable if one or the other person doesn't know anything about it, but if you cannot find out anything at all, even by asking around among people who can be presumed to be in the know, that demonstrates a lack of interest and shows that our Society is a mechanism, not an organism. It shows that people are not taking an interest in its life and vitality. That is what I want to emphasize again and again—the need for an interest in our Society's life and vitality.

You see, my friends, we are sometimes surprised by events in our Society that would not surprise us if the members were sensitive to their obligations—and I use that word deliberately—and were participating in the thinking, feeling, and doing of the Society as if they were part of a living organism. But two things are necessary for that to happen. First, each one of us must be willing not to deal with incidents touching on the Society's needs as if they were his or her strictly private concerns. And second, anyone willing to do that must seek out another member with a sympathetic ear.

In this present crisis involving the part of the Society around the building in Dornach, regardless of how many formal resolutions and new paragraphs you formulate, you will still not be able to cope with what is going on in the Society. In spite of all that, we will still not be able to prevent ending up with the above-mentioned corpse on our hands. You can only prevent it by beginning to take an active interest in the affairs of the Society. This means more than the one-time application of intelligence and good sense to formulating new paragraphs and setting up tribunals to deal with “transgressions”; it means making the Society an ongoing object of interest in a living context. But above all, it means we must not be afraid to think, regardless of how unsettling that may be.

I have already mentioned that we are now living in a highly abnormal phase of European history, which we hope will soon come to an end. In times like this, we have to realize that we should not feel free to send anything and everything we happen to think of over international borders, even if it is nothing incorrect or offensive. I am not talking about private matters, I'm talking about things that concern the Society. In fact, however, a large number of our members do not want to think at all about what might or might not be appropriate to the times. Of course, nothing wrong has been done and I do not mean to reprimand anyone, but only to encourage you all to give it some thought and consideration before you act.

We all know that applications for membership or notices of acceptance are totally innocuous documents that cannot possibly cause political repercussions. However, that is not how nations at war look at things. So why do our members insist on sending membership cards out of the country? Perhaps out of thoughtlessness, perhaps out of stubbornness, because they have a point to prove. But if such things continue to happen on a large scale, people will mistakenly read all kinds of things into them, and it will become impossible for the Society to continue to exist. Our members, of all people, ought to be distinguished by their ability to think! But we have to pay attention to these things, or we will not see the Society continue for very much longer.

Once in a while I need to refer back to things in the past. For example, our criterion for admitting members to the Society has never been that only exceptional human beings who were head and shoulders above the rest of humanity would be considered. That is what many people think, but it's not true, and there are others who think that people who are admitted to the Society are in no way exceptional. In fact, we also made a point of admitting people to help them become healthy. And then what happened? Other members began to regard one of these people, someone who was to be helped by being admitted, as a kind of apostle, as someone who was there to heal the Society.

Why is it possible, my friends, for something like that to happen? It is because we are not adequately aware of the ways and means we have at our disposal to prevent it. Just think back to some of the things that have happened—and think we must, if we are to sustain an esoteric movement! If you think back, you will find that whenever something like that happened, whatever you needed in order to be able to assess the situation was usually made available in a lecture; it was spoken out. You only had to be alert to it whenever some danger was present. This means, however, that you really have to consider in detail the lectures given during the time in question. There is no need for us to make the mistake of getting overly personal in our efforts to do the right thing; we can stick to objective facts. But we have to understand what is objectively true on a case-by-case basis.

At this point, there can be no doubt that something radical and fundamental has to happen, especially for that part of our Society gathered around this building. But it is high time to make sure that we do not look for this fundamental and radical action in the wrong direction, that we do not believe it can be accomplished through a few simple things, a few principles and resolutions. That will not bring about any fundamental change or any fundamental healing.

My friends, I must confess that it is not at all easy for me to discuss these things as I have been doing yesterday and today, simply because I would prefer to be talking about other things, of course, and because I also know that many of you have no desire to hear such things, since, after all, your reason for being here is to hear various esoteric truths. However, my friends, if the Society continues to be of as little use as the recent actions of some individuals suggest, we may have to concede that it is no longer possible to use it as a vehicle for introducing spiritual science into the world. Just think of the discrepancy between what I have just said and something else I have had to say here many times in the last few weeks, namely, that spiritual science as we know it must be the greatest influence of our times in counteracting the presumptuous, superficial, and deceptive knowledge existing in the name of science and research. Indeed, spiritual science must make itself felt as a fundamentally progressive element within humankind. And yet we still have to talk about things that should really be self-explanatory, and all this at the risk of being constantly misunderstood. We all tend to see the sins of the other and not make the effort to see our Society as a real living organism, that is, to experience ourselves as organs within this organism.

Of course, members who have joined us only recently can easily make mistakes, but I wonder what some of the long-term members are doing here if they are not doing anything to prevent the mistakes of the newcomers. It should be a principle of ours that longtime members pay attention to the new members as individuals and offer help, in word and deed, to protect them against mistaking foolishness for cosmic wisdom.

It is inherent in the very nature of an esoteric society, however, that foolishness occurs every now and then. Thus, there have to be as many members as possible who can see through the foolishness and prevent it from being implemented. That includes what is in Mr. Goesch's letter.⁸ He claims that promises have been made and not kept, and has tried to confirm this through a member who he believes or assumes has been promised something. When this member told him that this was not the case, Mr. Goesch, instead of admitting he was wrong, said that this was one more proof that magic is at work—when I shake hands with somebody on something, the handshake wipes out the promise in that person's memory. This is one of the main accusations in Goesch's letter.

It is obvious, my friends, that Mr. Goesch has not only written about these things, but has talked to a number of individuals about them. A vital interest in the affairs of the Society would really have required these people to go in all due haste to a more experienced member and make him or her aware of this situation. It is absolutely incomprehensible how anyone can allow Goesch to say something as impossible as, “When people tell me no promise has been made to them, the conclusion I come to is not that they really were not promised anything, but that their memory of the promise has been wiped out by the power of suggestion,” and let it stand uncontested. When things like this are allowed to happen unhindered, then clearly the Society is not viable and cannot be used as a vehicle for esoteric truths.

There are two things, my friends, that are very much on my mind. One is the fact that everything I know compels me to consider bringing spiritual science to human beings as both necessary and urgent. But I am equally aware of another fact, namely, that the instrument established for this purpose is in the midst of a crisis. That is why I cannot help “tormenting” you with what I had to say yesterday and today. After all, meetings to take remedial action have been announced. But if these meetings run their course the way they did in earlier, similar cases, we will get nowhere.

Please be aware that the simple measure of expelling some one will never accomplish anything. Expulsion cannot resolve any concern of the Society. As you recall, we expelled Dr. Hugo Vollrath many years ago, and he managed to do everything he did later on in spite of having been expelled.⁹ The same thing will happen in similar cases. It is possible to expel a member, but that is not enough; we cannot rest content with that.

If you will get out Theosophy, which is the first book I wrote in the theosophical movement on the subject of theosophy, and read the chapter entitled “The Path of Knowledge,” you will find certain things that, if you think them through, will make it easy for you to come up on your own with what I said yesterday and today.¹⁰ It is all there in that chapter. However, I must assume that not even this very first book of mine has been understood, for if it had been, many recent events could not have taken place.

When the special members' meeting takes place tomorrow, we must be sure that we are looking at these things with all due seriousness and dignity.¹¹ We need to ask ourselves whether we really want to let things get to the point where we have to admit that spiritual science cannot be disseminated by means of a society like this one. If that is the case, if it becomes impossible to do this through the Society, then we will need to find other ways of dealing with what is left behind as its corpse, and that will be much more difficult.¹²

I am not responsible for making the agenda for tomorrow, but how that agenda is dealt with will play a part in deciding whether the Anthroposophical Society will continue to exist in the future. Therefore, I will content myself with making an urgent appeal to you to deal with this situation with the greatest possible responsibility and to not gloss over things that are of the utmost significance for human civilization as a whole.

Tomorrow there will be a eurythmy performance at half past ten, followed by a lecture.

• 1. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, The Life and Opinions of Famous Philosophers, VI, 40 (about Diogenes of Sinope): “When Plato proposed the definition, which met with approval, that the human being is a featherless two-footed creature, he (Diogenes) plucked the feathers from a chicken and brought it into Plato's school, saying, ‘Here is Plato's human being.’ ”
• 2. Investigation into the supersensible concealed in everything sense-perceptible shall be fostered and the dissemination of true spiritual science promoted.
• 3. Knowledge of the core of truth in the philosophies of different peoples and times shall be fostered. [This draft was not published in English — Translator]
• 4. “What Are the Intentions of Spiritual Science? A Response to ‘What Do the Theosophists Want’ ” in the Tagblatt (“Daily News”) fiir das Birseck, Birsig, und Leimental, Arlesheim, Vol.43 no. 50, February 28, 1914. Now printed in Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Gesammelte Aufsatze 1904–1923, GA 35, (Domach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [See next note. Not published in English — Translator]
• 5. “What Do the Theosophists Want?” — a talk given at the family night of the Reformed Church in Arlesheim on February 14, 1914, by E. Riggenbach, pastor. It was printed in the supplement to the Tagblatt, Arlesheim, February 1914.
• 6. It has been reported that this is how the Italian Princess D'Antuni, Elika del Drago, expressed herself to Rudolf Steiner. At her invitation, Steiner held lectures in the Palazzo del Drago in Rome in 1909 and 1910. He used this expression quite a few times.
• 7. On March 5, 1616, under Pope Paul V and as a result of the turmoil surrounding Galileo, Copernicus's work, “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI” (1543) was placed on the Index of forbidden books by the Inquisition charged with that task. On May 10, 1757, the Index Commission resolved to rescind the decree forbidding books saying that the sun stands still while the earth moves in the new edition of the Index, and Copernicus's book was no longer listed in the Index from then on. However, it was only on September 11 and 25, 1822, that the Holy Office and Pope Pius VII allowed the printing and publication of such works.
• 8. See Part Two, pp. 123-135.
• 9. Dr. Hugo Vollrath, theosophical book dealer and publisher (Theosophisches Verlagshaus) in Leipzig. In addition to being a member of the German Section of the Theosophical Society led by Rudolf Steiner, he also belonged to the so-called Leipzig Society and tried to bring its intentions, which were quite different in their orientation, into the German Section. This made their cooperation very difficult. Primarily at the insistence of the Leipzig branch of the German Section, he was excluded from membership in the German Section by its VIlth General Assembly in October, 1908.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, GA 9, repr., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988).
• 11. See Part Two, p. 170.
• 12. Several lines have been omitted here because the stenographic record did not make sense.

[ 1 ] Today I will take the opportunity of giving some further thoughts in line with my article ‘At the Dawn of the Michael Age’.

The Michael Age has taken its rise in the evolution of mankind at a time that follows on the one hand the predominance of the intellectual ‘forming of thoughts,’ and on the other hand the turning of human perception and vision to the outer world of the senses, to the physical world.

[ 2 ] Thought-forming is in its nature not essentially an evolution in the direction of materialism. That which in bygone times came to the human being as something inspired into him, namely, the world of ideas, became, in the time that preceded the Michael epoch, the property of the human soul. The soul no longer receives the ideas ‘from above’ out of the spiritual content of the Cosmos: it draws them itself actively forth out of the human being's own spiritual nature. Man has thereby become ripe for reflection upon his own spiritual being. Hitherto he did not penetrate to these depths of his own nature. He saw in himself as it were a drop out of the sea of cosmic spirituality, a drop that has separated itself off for the time of this earthly life, only to unite itself again when the earthly life is over.

[ 3 ] The thought-forming that goes on in the human being marks an advance in human self-knowledge. Viewed from the supersensible, it appears thus. The spiritual Powers that we may designate with the Michael-name held rule over the ideas in the spiritual Cosmos. The human being experienced these ideas by partaking with his soul in the life of the Michael-world. This experience has now become his own, and a temporary separation of the human being from the Michael-world has therewith come about. With the inspired thoughts of earlier times man received at the same time the content of the spiritual world. Since this inspiration has ceased and man now forms his thoughts from his own activity, he is referred to the perception of the senses to find a content for these thoughts. Thus was man obliged to fill with material content the spirituality that he had won. He fell into the materialistic outlook in the very epoch of time that brought his own spiritual being a stage higher in development.

[ 4 ] This is easily liable to misunderstanding. We may observe only the ‘fall’ into materialism and lament over it. Whilst, however, the perception and vision of this age had to be limited to the external physical world, there was unfolding within the soul, as actual experience, a purified and self-subsisting spiritually of the human being. And now in the Michael Age this spirituality must no longer remain as unconscious experience, it must become conscious of its own proper nature. This signifies the entry of the Michael Being into the human soul. For a certain length of time man has filled his own spirit with the material side of Nature; he is to fill it again with cosmic content consisting of a spirituality that is his very own.

[ 5 ] Thought-forming was lost for a time in the Matter of the Cosmos; it must be found again in the cosmic Spirit. Into the cold, abstract world of thought can enter warmth, can enter a spirit-reality that is filled with being. That represents the dawn of the Michael Age.

[ 6 ] The consciousness of freedom could develop only in the depths of the human soul through this separation from the thought-being of the world. What came from the heights had to be found again in the depths. For this reason the development of the consciousness of freedom was connected first of all with a knowledge of Nature that was directed only to the external. While man was unconsciously developing his mind in the formation of clear ideas, his senses were directed outward solely to what is material, but this did not in any way disturb the tender seed that was beginning to germinate in the soul.

[ 7 ] But the experience of the Spiritual, and together with it the vision of the Spiritual, can re-enter the vision of the outward material world in a new way. The knowledge of Nature acquired during the age of materialism can be comprehended in the soul's inner life in a spiritual way. Michael, who has spoken ‘from above,’ can be heard ‘from within,’ where he will begin to dwell. Speaking more imaginatively this may be expressed as follows: The Sun-nature which for long periods man received only from the Cosmos, will begin to shine within his soul. He will learn to speak of an ‘inner Sun.’ This will not prevent him from knowing himself to be an earthly being during his life between birth and death; but he will recognise that this his earthly being is led by the Sun. He will learn to feel as a truth, that a being places him, in his inner nature, into a light which shines indeed upon earthly existence but which is not enkindled within it. In the dawn of the Michael Age it may still seem as if all this were very far remote from humanity; but ‘in the spirit’ it is near; it only needs to be ‘seen.’ A very great deal depends upon this fact, that the ideas of man do not merely remain ‘thinking,’ but in thought develop sight.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 8 ] 85. It is in the waking day-consciousness that man experiences himself to begin with, during the present cosmic age. This experience conceals from him the fact that in this waking state the Third Hierarchy is present in his experience.

[ 9 ] 86. In the dream-consciousness man experiences, in a chaotic way, his own being unharmoniously united with the Spirit-being of the world. When the Imaginative Consciousness is realised as the other pole of the dream-consciousness, man becomes aware that the Second Hierarchy is present in his experience.

[ 10 ] 87. In dreamless sleep-consciousness man experiences, all unconsciously, his own being united with the Spirit-being of the World. When the Inspired Consciousness is realised as the other pole of the sleep-consciousness, man becomes aware that the First Hierarchy is present in his experience.

Rudolf Steiner often visited Edith Maryon in her sickbed. During these visits, he kept her up to date on the content of his lectures and on events in Dornach. He conveyed to her the contents of the esoteric lessons and informed her about the development of the constitution and the events in the Anthroposophical Society. He also read the daily newspaper to her or commented on articles from the newspaper. It is therefore understandable that political events were also discussed.

The verses and drawings with which Rudolf Steiner helped Edith Maryon to distract her from her pain also bear witness to these visits. Here, too, the close connection to everyday life on the “hill” becomes clear.

On the following pages, a selection of such verses and drawings is shown in a reduced format.

It goes without saying that these verses and drawings were not made with the intention of being published; this should always be borne in mind by the viewer.

Yesterday I spoke of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. To-day I propose to speak of certain cognate matters, and in such a way that the present lecture will be comprehensible in itself.

Everything that will have to be achieved in the present epoch of evolution as a preparation for spiritual happenings in the near and more distant future, is connected with what, among anthroposophists, I have often called the Michael Event. And in connection with this Michael Event I want to speak to-day about something that concerns the Anthroposophical Movement.

In speaking of a happening such as this Michael Event, it must always be remembered that the world develops by stages. When we study the evolution of the world with the faculties which man's earthly life between birth and death enables him to possess to-day, we see humanity evolving on the Earth, we see ancient peoples arising from still earlier peoples; we see that from the background of very ancient Oriental civilisations, from the Indian, the Chinese, the Arabian and the Chaldean-Egyptian peoples, the Greeks and the Romans gradually emerge; then we come to the Middle Ages and finally to our own age—our modern age with all its aberrations but also with its great technical achievements. Yet not only is there this external development of the peoples but as it were behind it, evolution is also taking place. We can perceive evolution being passed through not only by mankind but also by spiritual Beings who are connected in certain ways with the evolution of humanity. In their ranks are those Beings called the Angeloi—the Angels in Christian terminology. They are directly connected with the individual human being. They lead, or guide him in so far as he needs guidance, from one earthly life to another and are his Guardians, his Protectors, whenever and wherever he needs their protection. Therefore, super-sensible though they be and imperceptible to earthly sight, the Angeloi are directly connected with mankind's evolution.

In the next immediately adjacent spiritual realm, the Beings whom we call the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, the Archangels, unfold their activity. The Archangeloi have to do with much that also plays a part in the evolution of humanity. They have to do, not with the individual human being, but with groups of human beings. Thus, as I have said in many anthroposophical lectures, the evolution of the peoples is under the rulership of Archangelic Beings. But it is also the case that certain epochs in Earth-evolution receive their essential impulses from individual Archangeloi. For example, during the three centuries preceding the last third of the nineteenth century, namely during the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth centuries and part of the sixteenth, we must think of the civilised world as being essentially under the dominion of the Archangel known to Christians capable of speaking of these things, as Gabriel. This period was therefore the Age of Gabriel.

This particular Gabriel Age is of great significance for the whole evolution of mankind in modern times, for the following reason. Since the Mystery of Golgotha took place it has been possible for men on the Earth to have this realisation: Through the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ, the sublime Being of the Sun, has come down to the Earth. He has descended from the Sun to the Earth, entering into the body of Jesus and uniting Himself with Earth's destiny. But although the Christ Being has remained united with the Earth, it has not been possible through the succeeding rulerships of Archangeloi from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha until that of the dominion of Gabriel, for the Christ Impulse itself actually to lay hold of the inner physical and etheric forces of mankind. This became possible for the first time under the Gabriel impulse which began to work about three hundred years before the last third of the nineteenth century. Thus, in reality, it is only since that time that by way of the forces of heredity themselves the Christ Impulse has been able to penetrate humanity inwardly. As yet this has not been achieved.

Gabriel rules over the whole realm of the physical forces of heredity within humanity. He is the super-sensible Spirit who is connected essentially with the sequence of the generations, who is—if I may put it so—the great Guardian Spirit of the mothers who bring children into the world. Gabriel has to do with births, with the embryonic development of the human being. The forces of Gabriel work in the spiritual processes underlying the physical process of propagation. And so it is only since this recent Gabriel rulership that the physical propagation of mankind on Earth has come into connection in the real sense with the Christ Impulse.

From the end of the eighteen-seventies, the rulership of Michael begins. It is a rulership altogether different in character from that of Gabriel. Whereas the rulership of the Archangel in the three preceding centuries comes to expression in spiritual impulses working in the physical, Michael is the Archangel who in his rulership has paramountly to do with the powers of the intelligence in mankind, with everything, therefore, that concerns the intellectual, the spiritual evolution and culture of mankind. In any study of the earthly circumstances of humanity it is extremely important to realise that the Gabriel rulership which in the spiritual sphere has an effect upon what is most deeply physical, is always followed by the regency of Michael, who has to do with the spiritual element in culture. The Archangel Gabriel, therefore, is the Divine Guardian of the process of physical propagation. The Spirit who has to do with the development of the sciences, of the arts, of the cultural element of the epoch, is the Archangel known in Christianity as Michael. Over those civilisations which are predominant in every epoch, seven successive Archangel-rulerships take place. Six other such rulerships have therefore preceded the present rulership of Michael. And if, beginning with Gabriel, we go backwards through these rulerships, we come to an epoch when Michael again held sway. Every such rulership, therefore, is always the repetition of earlier, identical rulerships, and the evolution of the Archangels themselves takes place through this cyclic progress. After a period of about two thousand years, the same Archangel always assumes the rulership again within the predominating civilisation.

But these periods of rulership, each of which lasts for a little over three hundred years, are essentially different from one another. The difference is not always as great as it is between the Michael rulership and the Gabriel rulership, but the rulerships are, nevertheless, essentially different. And here we can say: Each reign of Gabriel is preparatory to an age when the peoples become more widely separated from one another and more differentiated. In the age following his dominion the nationalistic tendency also becomes accentuated. So, if you ask yourself why it is that such strong nationalistic feeling is asserting itself to-day under the rulership of Michael, which has now begun, the answer is that preparation took place spiritually a long time ago; the influence worked on and then began to decline, but the after-effects—often worse than the event itself—continue. It is only by degrees that the impulse of Michael can make its way into what is, to a great extent, a legacy from the past reign of Gabriel. But always when an age of Michael dawns, a longing begins to arise in mankind to overcome racial distinctions and to spread through all the peoples living on the Earth the highest and most spiritual form of culture produced by that particular age. Michael's rulership is always characterised by the growth of cosmopolitanism, by the spread of a spiritual impulse among peoples who are ready to receive it, no matter what language they speak. Of the seven Archangels who send their impulses into the evolution of humanity, Michael is always the one who gives the cosmopolitan impulse—and at the same time the impulse for the spreading of whatever is of most intrinsic value in a particular epoch.

If we turn now to past times in the evolution of humanity, asking ourselves in what period the previous Michael Age occurred, we come to the epoch which culminated in those cosmopolitan deeds springing from the impulse of the lofty spiritual culture of Greece, whose fruits were carried over to Asia through the campaigns of Alexander. There, developing from the foundations of the ancient culture, we see the urge to take the spiritual culture of Greece—the little land of Greece—over to the Oriental peoples, to Egypt; there is an urge to spread a cosmopolitan impulse in this way among all the peoples able to receive it. This cosmopolitan impulse, this urge of the earlier Age of Michael, to spread over the world all that the Greek culture had achieved for humanity, was of the very greatest possible significance. The crowning triumph of that Age was represented, in a certain sense, by the city of Alexandria in its prime, standing yonder in North Africa.

These things came to pass in the preceding Age of Michael. Thereafter the other six Archangels assume in time their dominions. And in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the end of the seventies, a new Michael Age begins. But never yet in the whole of earthly evolution has the difference between two Ages of Michael been as great as that between the Michael Age at the time of Alexander and the one in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of the last century. For between these two reigns of Michael falls the Event which gives Earth-evolution its true meaning: the Mystery of Golgotha.

Let us now consider what it is that Michael has to administer in the spiritual Cosmos. It is Michael's task to administer a power that is essentially spiritual, reaching its zenith in man's faculty of intellectual understanding. Michael is not the Spirit who, if I may put it so, cultivates intellectuality per se; the spirituality he bestows strives to bring enlightenment to mankind in the form of ideas, of thoughts—but ideas and thoughts that grasp the spiritual. His wish is that man shall be a free being, but one who discerns in his concepts, in his thoughts, what comes to him as revelation from the spiritual worlds.

And now think of the Michael Age at the time of Alexander. As I have so often said, human beings in our day are extremely clever—that is to say, they form concepts, they have ideas; they are intellectual, possessing as it were a self-made intellectuality. People were clever, too, in the days of Alexander. Only if in those times they had been asked: Whence do you derive your concepts, your ideas?—they would not have said: We have produced them out of ourselves. ... No, they received into themselves the spiritual revelations, and together with these revelations, the ideas. They did not regard the ideas as something which man evolves out of himself, but as something revealed to him in his spiritual nature. The task of Michael at that time was to administer this heavenly Intellectuality—in contrast to earthly Intellectuality. Michael was the greatest of the Archangels who have their abode on the Sun. He was the Spirit who sent down from thence to the Earth not only the Sun's physical-etheric rays but, within them, the inspired Intellectuality. And in those past days men knew: the power of Intelligence on Earth is a gift of the Heavens, of the Sun; it is sent down from the Sun. And the one who actually sends the spiritual Intellectuality down to the Earth, is Michael. In the ancient Sun Mysteries this wonderful Initiation-teaching was given: Michael dwells on the Sun; there he administers the Cosmic Intelligence. This Cosmic Intelligence, inspired into human beings, is a gift of Michael.

Then came the epoch when man was to be made ready to unfold intellect out of his own, individual force of soul; he was not merely to receive the Cosmic Intelligence through revelation but to evolve Intelligence out of his inner forces. Preparation for this was made by Aristotelianism—that remarkable philosophy which arose in the twilight period of Greek culture and was the impulse underlying the campaigns of Alexander the Great in Africa and Asia.

By means of Aristotelianism, earthly Intelligence emerged as though from the shell of the Cosmic Intelligence. And from what came to be known as Aristotelian Logic there arose that intellectual framework on which the thinking of all subsequent centuries was based; it conditioned human intelligence.

And now you must conceive that through this single deed the Michael Impulses culminated: the earthly-human Intelligence was established, while, as a result of the campaigns of Alexander, the culture of Greece was imprinted upon those peoples who at that time were ready to receive the cosmopolitan impulse.

The epoch of Michael was followed by that of Oriphiel. The Archangel Oriphiel assumed dominion. The Mystery of Golgotha took place. At the beginning of the Christian era, those human souls who had been conscious of the leadership of the Archangel Michael in Alexander's time and had participated in the deeds of which I have just spoken, were gathered around Michael in the realm of the Sun. Michael had relinquished his dominion for the time being to Oriphiel, and in the realm of the Sun, together with those human souls who were to be his servants, Michael witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun.

This, too, is something of which we must be mindful.—Those human souls who are connected with the Anthroposophical Movement may say to themselves: We were united with Michael in the realm of the Sun. Christ, who hitherto had sent His Impulses towards the Earth from the Sun, departed from the Sun in order to unite Himself with earthly evolution!—Try to picture to yourselves this stupendous cosmic event that took place in realms beyond the Earth: it lies within the mighty vista open to those human souls who at that time were gathered around Michael as servants of the Angeloi, after his rulership on Earth had ended. In the realm of the Sun they witnessed the departure of the Christ from the Sun. “He is departing!” ... such was their great and overwhelming experience when He left in order to unite His destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity.

Truly it is not only on the Earth but in the life between death and rebirth that the souls of human beings receive the impulse for the paths they take. Above all was it so in the case of those who had lived through the time of Alexander. A great and mighty impulse went forth from that moment in cosmic history when these souls witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun. They saw clearly: the Cosmic Intelligence is passing over gradually from the Cosmos to the Earth! And Michael, together with those around him saw that all the Intelligence once streaming through the Cosmos was now sinking down, stage by stage, upon the Earth.

Michael and those who belonged to him—no matter whether they were in the spiritual world or incarnate for a brief earthly life—were able to visualise the rays of the Intelligence arriving, in the eighth century of the Christian era, in the earthly realm itself. And they knew that down upon the Earth the Intelligence would unfold and develop further. Now, on the Earth, the appearance of the first ‘self-made’ thinkers could be observed. Hitherto, great human beings who were ‘thinkers’ had received their thoughts by way of Inspiration; the thoughts had been inspired into them. Only now, from the eighth century A.D. were there those who could be called ‘self-made’ thinkers—those who produced their own thoughts out of themselves. And within the Archangelic host in the realm of the Sun, the mighty proclamation rang forth from Michael: The power belonging to my kingdom and under my administration in this realm is here no longer; it streams downwards to the Earth and must there surge onwards!

From the eighth century onwards this was the spectacle of the Earth as witnessed from the Sun. And within it was the great mystery: The forces which are pre-eminently the forces of Michael have descended from the Heavens and are now upon the Earth. This was the profound secret which was known to Initiates in Schools such as those I spoke of yesterday, for example, the renowned School of Chartres. In earlier times, when men wished to discover the true nature of Intelligence they had been obliged, in the Mystery Centres, to look upwards to the Sun. Now the Intelligence was upon the Earth, though not as yet very clearly perceptible. But gradually there was recognition that human beings were now evolving who possessed an individual intelligence of their own. One of those in European civilisation in whom the first sparks of personal thinking were alight was Johannes Scotus Erigena. I have often spoken of him. But there had been a few others, even before him, whose thoughts were not merely inspired, who no longer received revelations, but who could be called self-made thinkers. And now this individual thinking became more and more widespread.

There was a possibility in Earth-evolution of making this self-produced thinking serve a particular end. Consider what it represented: it was in actuality the sum-total of those impulses from Michael's realm in the Heavens which had found their way to the Earth. And for the time being Michael was called upon to allow the Intelligence to unfold without his participation. Not until the year 1879 was he to re-assume his rulership. In the meantime, the Intelligence developed in such a way that at the first stages he could not have exercised his dominion. His influences could not be exerted over men who were unfolding their own, individual thoughts. His time had not yet come.

This profound secret of the descent of the pan-Intelligence in the evolution of humanity was known in a few Mystery Centres over in the East. And so, within these particular Oriental Mysteries, a few chosen pupils could be initiated into this secret by certain deeply spiritual, highly developed men. Through dispensations of a nature which it is difficult for the earthly intellect to comprehend, the illustrious Court of which I have spoken at the Goetheanum and in other places, came into touch with this secret of which certain Oriental Mysteries were fully cognisant. In the eighth and at the beginning of the ninth century, under the leadership of Haroun al Raschid, this Court wielded great power over in Asia. Haroun al Raschid was a product of Arabian culture, a culture tinged with Mohammedanism. The secret of which I have spoken found its way to some of Haroun al Raschid's initiated Counsellors—or to those who possessed at least a certain degree of knowledge—and the brilliance of his Court was due to the fact that it had come in touch with this secret. At this Court were concentrated all the treasures of wisdom, of art, of the truths of religious life to be found in the East—coloured, of course, by Mohammedanism. In the days when, in Europe, at the Court of Charlemagne who was a contemporary of Haroun al Raschid, men were occupied in collating the first rudiments of grammar and everything was still in a state of semi-barbarism, there flourished in Baghdad that brilliant centre of Oriental, Western Asiatic spiritual life. Haroun al Raschid gathered around him men who were conversant with the great traditions of the Oriental Mysteries. And he had by his side one particular Counsellor who had been an Initiate in earlier times and whose spiritual driving forces were still influenced by the previous incarnations. He was the organiser of all that was cultivated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in the domains of geometry, chemistry, physics, music, architecture, and the other arts—above all, a distinguished art of poetry. In this renowned and scintillating assembly of sages, it was felt, more or less consciously: the earthly Intelligence that has come down from the Heavens upon the Earth must be placed in the service of Mohammedan spiritual life!

And now consider this: from the time of Mohammed, from the time of the early Caliphs onwards, Arabian culture was carried from Asia across North Africa into Europe, where it spread as the result of warlike campaigns. But in the wake of those who by means of these campaigns spread Arabism as far even as Spain—France was affected by it and, spiritually, the whole of Western Europe—there also came outstanding personalities. The wars waged by the Frankish kings against the Moors, against Arabism, are known to all of you ... but that is the external aspect, that is what happens in external history ... much more important is it to know how the spiritual streams flow on perpetually within the evolution of mankind.

Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed through the gate of death. But after their life between death and rebirth they continued to pursue their earthly aims in remarkable ways. It was their aim to introduce Arabian modes of thinking into the European world with the help of the rudiments of the Intelligence now spreading in Europe. And so after Haroun al Raschid had passed through the gate of death, while his soul was traversing spiritual, starry worlds, we see his gaze directed unswervingly from Baghdad across Asia Minor, to Greece, Rome, Spain, France and then northwards to England. Throughout this life between death and rebirth his attention was directed to the South and West of Europe. And then Haroun al Raschid appeared again in a new incarnation—becoming Lord Bacon of Verulam. Bacon himself is the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid who in the intervening time between death and rebirth had worked as I have just described.

But the other, the one who had been his wise Counsellor, chose a different direction—from Baghdad across the Black Sea, through Russia and then into Middle Europe. The two individualities took different paths and directions. Haroun al Raschid passed to his next earthly goal as Lord Bacon of Verulam; the wise Counsellor during his life between death and a new birth did not divert his gaze from the sphere where influences from the East can be increasingly potent, and he appeared again as Amos Comenius (Komenski), the great educational reformer and author of “Pan-Sophia.” And from the interworking of these two individualities who had once been together at the Court in Baghdad there subsequently arose in Europe something which unfolded—more or less at a distance from Christianity—in the form of Arabism derived from influences of that past time when the Intelligence had first fallen away from Michael on the Sun.

What came outwardly and physically to expression in wars was, as we know, repelled by the Frankish kings and the other European peoples. We see how the Arabian campaigns which with such a powerful initial impetus were responsible for the spread of Mohammedan culture, were broken and brought to a halt in the West; we see Mohammedanism disappearing from the West of Europe. Nevertheless, divested of the outer forms it had assumed and the external culture it had founded, this later Arabism became modern natural science, and also became the basis of what Amos Comenius achieved for the world in the domain of pedagogy. And in this way the earthly Intelligence, ‘garrisoned’ as it were by Arabism, continued to spread right on into the seventeenth century.

Here we have indicated something that lies as sub-strata of the soil into which we to-day have to sow the seeds of Anthroposophy. We must ponder deeply over the inner and spiritual reality behind these things.

In Europe, while this stream was flowing over from Asia as the spiritual continuation of that Illustrious Court of Baghdad, Christianity was also developing and spreading. But the spread of Aristotelianism in Europe was fraught with great difficulties. The natural science of Aristotle had been carried to Asia by the mighty deeds of Alexander and the impulses flowing from Hellenistic spiritual life, but here it had been seized upon by Arabism. In Europe, within the expanding Christian culture, Aristotelianism was at first known in a diluted form only. Then, in the manner which I have already indicated, Aristotelianism joined hands with Platonism—Platonism, which was based directly upon the ancient teachings of the Greek Mysteries.

But at the very outset, Aristotelianism spread in Europe by slow degrees while Platonism took the lead and prompted the establishment of schools, one of the most important being the School of Chartres. At Chartres, the scholars of whom I spoke yesterday—Bernard Sylvestris, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury and, foremost among them all, Alanus ab Insulis—were all working in the twelfth century. In this School men spoke very differently from those whose teachings were merely an echo of Arabism. The teachings given in the School of Chartres were pure and genuine Christianity, illumined by the ancient Mystery-wisdom still remaining within reach of men. And then something of immense significance took place. The leading teachers of Chartres, who with their Platonism had penetrated deeply into the secrets of Christianity and who had no part in Arabism, went through the gate of death. Then there took place, for a brief period at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a great ‘heavenly conference.’ And when the most outstanding of the teachers—foremost among them Alanus ab Insulis—had passed through death and were in the spiritual world, they united in a momentous cosmic deed with those who at that time were with them but who were destined in the very near future to come into earthly existence for the purpose of cultivating Aristotelianism in a new way. Among those preparing to descend were individualities who had participated with deep intensity of soul in the working of the Michael Impulse during the time of Alexander. And at the turn of the twelfth century we may picture, for it is in keeping with the truth, a gathering-together of souls who had just arrived in the spiritual world from places of Christian Initiation—of which the School of Chartres was one—and souls who were on the point of descending to the Earth. In the spiritual realms, these latter souls had preserved, not Platonism, but Aristotelianism, the inner impulse of the Intelligence deriving from the Michael Age in ancient times. Now, in the spiritual world, the souls gathered together ... among them, too, were souls who could say: We were with Michael and together with him we witnessed the Intelligence streaming down from the Heavens upon the Earth; we were united with him too in the mighty cosmopolitan Deed enacted in earlier times when the Intelligence was still administered from the Cosmos, when he was still the ruler and administrator of the Intelligence.

And now, for the time being, the teachers of Chartres handed over to the Aristotelians the administration and ordering of the affairs of the spiritual life on Earth. Those who were now to descend and were by nature fitted to direct the earthly, personal Intelligence, took over the guidance of spiritual life on Earth from the Platonists, who could work truly only when the Intelligence was being administered “from the Heavens.”

It was into the Dominican Order above all that those individualities in whose souls the Michael Impulse was still echoing on from the previous Age of Michael, found their way. And from the Dominican Order issued that Scholasticism which wrestled through many a bitter but glorious battle to master the true nature and operation of the Intelligence within the human mind. Deeply rooted in the souls of those founders of Dominican Scholasticism in the thirteenth century was this great question: What is taking place in the domain of Michael?

There were men, later on known as Nominalists, who said: Concepts and ideas are merely names, they have no reality. The Nominalists were under an Ahrimanic influence, for their real aim was to banish Michael's dominion from the Earth. In asserting that ideas are only names and have no reality, their actual aim was to prevent Michael's dominion from prevailing on Earth. And at that time the Ahrimanic spirits whispered to those who would lend their ear: The Cosmic Intelligence has fallen away from Michael and is here, on the Earth: we will not allow Michael to resume his rulership over the Intelligence! ... But in that heavenly conference—and precisely here lies its significance—Platonists and Aristotelians together formed a plan for the furtherance of the Michael Impulses.—In opposition to the Nominalists were the Realists of the Dominican Order who maintained: Ideas and thoughts are spiritual realities contained within the phenomena of the world, they are not merely nominal.

If one understands these things, one is often reminded of them in a really remarkable way. During my last years in Vienna, one of my acquaintances among other ordained priests was Vincenz Knauer, the author of the work, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, which I have often recommended to Anthroposophists. In the nineteenth century he was still involved in this conflict between Nominalism and Realism. He was trying to make it clear that Nominalism is fallacious and he had chosen a very apt example to illustrate his arguments. It is also given in his books. But I remember with deep satisfaction a certain occasion when I was walking with him along the Wahringstrasse in Vienna. We were speaking about Nominalism and Realism. With all his self-controlled enthusiasm which had something remarkable about it, something of the quality of genuine philosophy in contrast to the philosophy of others who had more or less lost this quality—Knauer said on that occasion: I always make it clear to my students that the Ideas made manifest in the things of the world have reality—and I tell them to think of a lamb and a wolf. The Nominalists would say: A lamb is muscle, bone, matter; a wolf is muscle, bone, matter. What receives objective existence in lamb-flesh as the form, the idea of the lamb—that is only a name. “Lamb” is a name there and not, as idea, a reality. Similarly, as idea, “wolf” is not anything real but only a name. But—Knauer went on—it is easy to refute the Nominalists for one need only say to them: Give a wolf nothing but lamb's flesh to eat for a time and no other food whatever. If the idea “lamb” contains no reality, is only a name, and if the lamb is nothing but matter, the wolf would gradually become a lamb. But it does not do so! On the contrary, it goes on being the reality “wolf.” In what stands there before us as the lamb, the idea “lamb” has, as it were, gathered the matter and brought it into the form. Similarly with the wolf: the idea “wolf” has gathered the matter and cast it into the form.

This was the fundamental issue in the conflict between the Nominalists and the Realists: the reality of what is apprehensible only by the intellect.

Thus we see that it was the task of the Dominicans to work in advance, at the right time, for the next Michael rulership. And whereas in accordance with the decisions of that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Platonists—the teachers of Chartres, for example—remained in the spiritual world and had no incarnations of significance, the Aristotelians were to work at that time for the cultivation of the Intelligence, on Earth. And from Scholasticism—which only much later, in the modern age, was distorted, caricatured and made Ahrimanic by Rome—from Scholasticism there has proceeded all intellectual striving in so far as it has kept free from the influence of Arabism.

So at that time when these two streams of spiritual life are to be perceived in Middle and Western Europe: on the one side, the stream with which Bacon and Amos Comenius were connected; on the other side, the stream of Scholasticism that was and is Christian Aristotelianism takes its place in the evolution of civilisation in order to prepare, as was its task, for the new Age of Michael. When, during the rulership of the preceding Archangels, the Schoolmen looked up into the spiritual realms they said to themselves: Michael is yonder in the heights; his rulership must be awaited. But some preparation must be made for the time when he once again becomes the Regent of all that which, through the dispensation of cosmic evolution, fell away from him in the Cosmos. This time must be prepared for! ... And so a stream began to flow which, though diverted into a false channel through Ultramontanism, continued and carried with it the impulse of preparation proceeding from the thirteenth century.

It was a stream, therefore, whose source is Aristotelian and whose influence worked directly on the ordering of the Intelligence that was now in the earthly realm. With this stream is connected that of which I spoke yesterday, saying that one who had remained a little longer with Alanus ab Insulis in the spiritual world, came down as a Dominican and brought a message from Alanus ab Insulis to an older Dominican who had descended to the Earth before him.

An intense will was present in the spiritual life of Europe to take strong hold of the thoughts. And in realms above the Earth these happenings led, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a great, far-reaching Act in the spiritual world where that which later on was to become Anthroposophy on the Earth was cast into mighty Imaginations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, and even for a short period at the end of the eighteenth, those who had been Platonists under the teachers of Chartres, who were now living between death and rebirth, and those who had established Aristotelianism on Earth and who had long ago passed through the gate of death—all of them were united in the heavenly realms in a great super-earthly Cult or Ritual. Through this Act all that in the twentieth century was to be spiritually established as the new Christianity after the beginning of the new Michael Age in the last third of the nineteenth century—all this was cast into mighty Imaginations.

Many drops trickled through to the Earth. Up above, in the spiritual world, in mighty, cosmic Imaginations, preparation was made for that creation of the Intelligence—an entirely spiritual creation—which was then to come forth as Anthroposophy. What trickled through made a very definite impression upon Goethe, coming to him in the form, as it were, of little reflected miniatures. The mighty pictures up above were not within Goethe's ken; he elaborated these little miniature pictures in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Truly, it opens up a wonderful vista! The streams I have described flow on in such a way that they lead to those mighty Imaginations which take shape in the spiritual world under the guidance of Alanus ab Insulis and the others. Drops trickle through, and at the turn of the eighteenth century Goethe is inspired to write his Fairy Tale. It was, we might say, a first presentation of what had been cast in mighty Imaginations in the spiritual world at the beginning of the nineteenth, indeed by the end of the eighteenth century. In view of this great super-sensible Cult during the first half of the nineteenth century, it will not surprise you that my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—which in a certain respect aimed at giving dramatic form to what had thus been enacted at the beginning of the nineteenth century—became alike in outer structure to what Goethe portrayed in his Fairy Tale. For having lived in the super-earthly realms in Imaginative form, Anthroposophy was to come down to the Earth. Something came to pass in the super-earthly realms at that time. Numbers of souls who in many different epochs had been connected with Christianity came together with souls who had received its influences less directly. There were those who had lived on Earth in the Age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place and also those who had lived on Earth before it. The two groups of souls united in order that in regions beyond the Earth, Anthroposophy might be prepared. The individualities who, as I said, were around Alanus ab Insulis, and those who within the Dominican stream had established Aristotelianism in Europe, were united, too, with Brunetto Latini, the great teacher of Dante. And in this host of souls there were very many of those who, having again descended to the Earth, are now coming together in the Anthroposophical Society. Those who feel the urge to-day to unite with one another in the Anthroposophical Society were together in super-sensible regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to participate in that mighty Imaginative Cult of which I have spoken.

This too is connected with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement. It is something that one discovers, not from any rationalistic observation of this Anthroposophical Movement in its external, earthly form only, but from observation of the threads that lead upwards into the spiritual realms. Then one perceives how this Anthroposophical Movement descends. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it is, in very truth, the “heavenly” Anthroposophical Movement. What Goethe transformed into little miniature images in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily were drops that had trickled through. But it was to come down in the real sense in the last third of the nineteenth century, since when Michael has been striving—but now moving downwards from the Sun to the Earth—to take hold of the earthly Intelligence of men.

We know that since the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has been united with the Earth—with humanity on Earth. But, to begin with, He was not outwardly comprehended by human beings. We have seen also that in the age of Alexander the last phase of the rulership of Michael over the Cosmic Intelligence was taking place. By the eighth century A.D., the Cosmic Intelligence had descended to the Earth. In accordance with the agreements reached with the Platonists, those who were connected with Michael undertook to prepare this earthly Intelligence in Scholastic Realism in such a way that Michael would again be able to unite with it when, in the onward flow of civilisation, he would assume his rulership at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century.

What matters now is that the Anthroposophical Society shall take up this, its inner task—this task which is: not to contest Michael's rulership of human thinking! Here there can be no question of fatalism. Here it can only be said that men must work together with the Gods. Michael inspires men with his own being in order that there may appear on the Earth a spirituality consonant with the personal Intelligence of men, in order that men can be thinkers—and at the same time truly spiritual. For this and this alone is what Michael's dominion means. This is what must be wrestled for in the Anthroposophical Movement. And then those who are working to-day for the Anthroposophical Movement will appear again on Earth at the end of the twentieth century and will be united with the great teachers of Chartres. For according to the agreement reached in that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aristotelians and the Platonists were to appear together, working for the ever-growing prosperity of the Anthroposophical Movement in the twentieth century, in order that at the end of this century, with Platonists and Aristotelians in unison, Anthroposophy may reach a certain culmination in earthly civilisation. If it is possible to work in this way, in the way predestined by Michael, then Europe and modern civilisation will emerge from decline. But verily in no other way than this! The leading of civilisation out of decline is bound up with an understanding of Michael.

I have now led you towards an understanding of the Michael Mystery reigning over the thinking and the spiritual strivings of mankind. This means—as you can realise—that through Anthroposophy something must be introduced into the spiritual evolution of the Earth, for all kinds of demonic, Ahrimanic powers are taking possession of men. The Ahrimanic powers in many a human body were exultant in their confidence that it would no longer be possible for Michael to take over his rulership of the Cosmic Intelligence which had fallen down to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed: Michael will not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the heavens to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed that Michael would not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the Heavens to the Earth. Verily, great and mighty issues are at stake! For this reason it is not to be wondered at that those who stand in the midst of this battle have to go through many extraordinary experiences.

Stranger things have been said about the Anthroposophical Movement than about any other spiritual Movement. The curious statements made indicate in themselves that with its spirituality and its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, it is beyond the comprehension even of some of the most enlightened minds of the present day.—Does anyone ever tell you that he has seen a man who is black and white at the same time? I hardly think you would regard him as sane if he said such a thing to you. But to-day people are quite capable of writing in a similar strain about the Anthroposophical Movement. In his book, The Great Secret [Le Grand Secret. Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1921. The passages concerned have been translated from the German version of Maeterlinck's book from which Dr. Steiner was quoting. The original French of these passages will be found on page 182 of the present volume.], Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, taking me to be the pillar of the Anthroposophical Movement, applies in regard to myself a kind of logic entirely similar to that used by someone who claims to have seen a man who is black and white, a European and a Moor at the same time. Now a man can be one of the two, but certainly not both simultaneously! Yet Maeterlinck says: “What we read in the Vedas, says Rudolf Steiner, one of the most erudite and also one of the most confusing among contemporary occultists ...” If somebody were to say he had seen a man who was a European and a Moor at the same time, he would be considered crazy; but Maeterlinck uses the words “erudite” and “confusing” in juxtaposition. He also says: “Rudolf Steiner who, when he does not lose himself in visions—plausible, perhaps, but incapable of verification—of the prehistoric ages, and in astral jargon concerning life on other planets, is a clear and shrewd thinker who has thrown remarkable light on the meaning of this judgement” (he is referring to Osirification) “and of the identification of the soul with God.” In other words, therefore: when Rudolf Steiner is not talking about Anthroposophy, he is a clear and shrewd thinker. Maeterlinck allows himself to say this—and other remarkable things too, for example the following: “Steiner has applied his intuitive methods, which amount to a kind of transcendental psychometry, in order to reconstruct the history of the Atlanteans and to reveal to us what takes place on the sun, the moon and in other worlds. He describes the successive transformations of the entities which become men, and he does so with such assurance that we ask ourselves, having followed him with interest through the introductions which denote an extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind, if he has suddenly gone mad or if we are dealing with a hoaxer or with a genuine seer.” ... Now just think what this means.—Maeterlinck states that when I write books, the introductions are admittedly the product of an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” But when he reads on he does not know whether I have suddenly gone mad or whether I am a hoaxer or a genuine seer. Well, after all I have not written only books! It is always my custom to write an introduction to each book first. Very well, then ... I write a book. Maeterlinck reads the introduction and I seem to him to have an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads on, and I turn into someone who makes him say: I don't know whether Rudolf Steiner has suddenly gone mad or whether he is a hoaxer or a seer. Then it happens again ... I write a second book: when he reads the introduction Maeterlinck again accepts me as having an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads the further contents and again does not know whether I am a lunatic or a hoaxer or a seer. And so it goes on ... But suppose everybody were to say: when I read your books you seem, at the beginning, to be very clever, balanced and logical, but then you suddenly go mad! People who are logical when they begin to write and then as they write on suddenly become crazy, must indeed be extraordinary creatures! In the next book they switch round, are logical at the beginning and later on again lunatics! There seems to be a rhythmical sequence ... well, after all there are rhythms in the world!

Such examples indicate how the most enlightened minds of the present age receive what must be established as the Michael Epoch in the world and what has to be done in order that the Cosmic Intelligence which in accordance with the World-Order fell away from Michael in the eighth century A.D., may again be found within earthly humanity. The whole Michael tradition must be renewed. Michael with his feet upon the Dragon—it is right to contemplate this picture which portrays Michael the Warrior, defending the Cosmic Spirit against the Ahrimanic Powers under his feet.

This battle, more than any other, is laid in the human heart. There, within the hearts of men, it is and has been waged since the last third of the nineteenth century. Decisive indeed will be what human hearts do with this Michael Impulse in the world in the course of the twentieth century. And in the course of the twentieth century, when the first century after the end of Kaliyuga has elapsed, humanity will either stand at the grave of all civilisation—or at the beginning of that Age when in the souls of men who in their hearts ally Intelligence with Spirituality, Michael's battle will be fought out to victory.

In my attempt to describe the career of the various societies, or associations, with which the Anthroposophical Society has a certain connection (though one, which at the present day is much misunderstood), I was led yesterday to allude to the phenomenal appearance of H. P. Blavatsky, and I tried to give some idea of the manner in which this personality entered into the spiritual life of the closing nineteenth century. I was obliged to go back to this particular personality, because, after all, the impulse which, at the end of the nineteenth century, led to the association of the people, whom I classed two days ago under the name ‘homeless souls’, came from those works of which Blavatsky was the author.

Although Anthroposophy, and its appearance on the scene, has in reality scarcely anything to do with the works of Blavatsky, still I do not merely want in these lectures to describe the historic aspect of the anthroposophic movement only; I want also to point out its associative features, as we have them before us in the anthroposophic movement to-day. And this makes it necessary to take such points to start from, as I have selected in the past two days.

Now of course, as regards everything that may be said about Blavatsky, it is very easy to-day, if one wants to discredit the kind of spiritual aspirations that manifested themselves, say, in the ‘Theosophical Society’,—it is easy enough to dismiss a phenomenon like Blavatsky by pointing out the very dubious character of what one finds in this individual's personal biography.

I might instance a great number of things. I only need allude to the notions, which arose amongst the society that had gathered round Blavatsky and her spiritual life, that certain information about the spiritual world had been made known through the transmission of physical letters, physical communications,—by means, that is, of writings on paper,—from a quarter not situated within the physical world. They used to call these documents ‘Masters' Letters’,—used to exhibit them, and declare them not to have been written in the ordinary way, or at least not conveyed in the ordinary way to the place from which they were then produced. It was therefore an affair which made a considerable stir, when subsequently, in the house in which these letters had been exhibited under H. P. Blavatsky's leadership, a whole conjuror's apparatus of sliding doors was disclosed, by means of which the letters could simply be pushed in, through these doors, in the ordinary physical way, but fraudulently, into the room where they then turned up as magic documents; and other things of the sort.

It is, of course, exceedingly easy for people in our times to point to such things, and to find in them plain evidence that such a personality as Blavatsky's can be simply settled with the words: ‘She was just a swindler’.—Well, as to this aspect of the phenomena that. played around Blavatsky, we shall still have several things to say. But, for the moment, there is another standpoint still that we may take, namely, of not troubling ourselves for the moment with all that went on on the external side of the affair.

Certainly, there are things in it which have raised objection. But let us just neglect these objections for a while; say that we don't trouble ourselves about all the things which went on on the exterior, and simply consider the written works themselves. And, if one does so, one will then come to the conclusion which I described to you recently,—to the conclusion, namely, that in Blavatsky's works one is largely dealing with a mass of chaotic, dilettante stuff, which has been scribbled down amongst the rest; but that, along with all this, there are things which unmistakably, when they come to be tested by proper methods, are in every way to be regarded as reproductions—by some means or other—of a very extensive knowledge of the spiritual world, or from the spiritual world. This is something which cannot be denied, despite any objections that may be raised.

And here then arises the exceedingly important and, as I think, crucial question for the inner history of civilized evolution: How and from what cause could it happen that, at the end of the nineteenth century, from—let us say so far—a questionable quarter, there could come actual tidings from a spiritual world? that there could come revelations of a spiritual world, which at the least, when taken as occasions for examining into the state of the facts, do show themselves, even to a spiritual observation of the objective and scientific kind, to be in every way deserving of most studious attention?—revelations which, about the fundamental laws of the world, the fundamental forces of the world, have more to tell, than everything which in modern times has been brought to light about the world's secrets, either by philosophy, or by any other of the different tendencies of world-conception. The question may well seem a crucial one,

And then, to face this, there is another problem again in civilized evolution, which must not be forgotten when speaking of the life-conditions of anything such as the Anthroposophical Society, or indeed in connection with any endeavours to find a way into the spiritual world. And this phenomenon of civilized evolution is: that the capacity for judgment, the power of conviction in any judgment, has altogether suffered very greatly in our age,—has gone back.

People allow themselves to be deceived in this respect by the great steps that have been made in progress. But if one considers these very steps of progress, and what the connection has been between these great steps forwards, that have been made in our day, and the course followed by its spiritual life, in so far as the individual human personalities have intervened as judgmatic persons in this spiritual life's course,—then one gets a background, so to speak, for observing with what capacity our age approaches phenomena of any kind, that appeal to the human powers of judgment.

There is really uncommonly much that might be mentioned. I will only pick out just a few instances. I would ask, for instance, those who have had anything to do with applied electricity, whether as professionals or amateurs,—I would ask them, what the so-called Ohm's Law means to-day for applied electricity? The answer would be, of course, that Ohm's Law forms one of the fundaments on which the whole system of applied electricity is built up.—When Ohm produced his first work, which was the basis for his later, so-called Ohm's Law, this work was rejected as ‘unusable’ by a distinguished learned faculty at one of the universities. Had things gone according to this learned faculty, there could be no applied electricity to-day.

Again, to take perhaps something more directly obvious to you:—you all know what the telephone means for us to-day in the whole of our civilized life. When Reis, who was outside the ring of official science, put on paper for the first time his idea of the telephone, and sent in his manuscript to one of the best-known periodicals of the day, the Poggendorff Annals, the work was returned as unusable.

So great, you see, is the power of conviction residing in people's judgment to-day,—and one might multiply such instances indefinitely. Great is the judgment of our times in its powers of conviction. One must simply look at these things with perfect objectivity.

One may pick out anything, lying, so to speak, on our top-peaks of civilization, and one will find everywhere the same kind of thing. Or, if one goes more into the hidden corners, well, there too very pretty examples may often be found, to illustrate the capacity of judgment in those quarters which have the leading voice to-day in all that may be termed the management of spiritual life.

And the public again, the mass of the public, who follow along the broad high-road of which I spoke two days ago,—they are entirely under the impress of all this, which is accepted as the recognized thing to-day.—Well, civilization is common to all countries; in no country is it better nor worse than in another.

Take an illustration such as this: Adalbert Stifter is a poet of some distinction. I don't, however, want now to go into his distinction as a poet, but to tell something out of his life. He passed,—extremely well indeed,—through the classical side of the secondary school, and then studied natural science, with the intention of qualifying as a secondary school teacher. But he was judged to be quite unsuit-able for a secondary school teacher. His talents were not judged adequate for a secondary school teacher. In the judgment of the authorities he was not talented enough to become a teacher at a secondary school.

Now strangely enough it happened, that a certain Baroness Muenk, who had nothing whatever to do with judging the qualifications of secondary school teachers, heard of the poet, Adalbert Stifter, made him read to her the poems which he had so far written, and to which he himself attached no great value, and downright compelled. him to publish them. They made at once a great sensation. And the authorities now said: We can have no better man to make school inspector for the whole country. And so it came about, that the very person, who but a little while before had been deemed incompetent to be himself a teacher, was now appointed chief superintendent over the whole of these teachers.

It would be extremely interesting, some time or other, to describe a series of such things, collected from all the various departments of spiritual life, beginning with a phenomenon like that of Julius Robert Mayer. The law connected with his name, that of the conservation of energy, is one, as you know, which I am obliged to contest in certain of its fields of application. Modern physics, however, does not contest it; it upholds it indeed in every particular, and is altogether built up on this law of the conservation of energy. Julius Robert Mayer, who to-day figures as a hero (you have heard me mention others before, such as Gregory Mendel, who had a similar fate),—Julius Robert Mayer, born at Heilbronn on the Neckar, was always at the bottom of his class; and at the University, to which he went on,—it was Tuebingen,—he one fine day was advised, on account of his performances, that it would be better for him to with-draw from the university. It is certainly no merit of the university's, that he came upon his discoveries; for, at the university, they wanted to turn him out, before ever he had a chance to take his degree and become a doctor.

Beginning with such things, down to the vast tragedy attending the name of that man, to whose immense desert it is owing, that puerperal fever,—which simply swept its people away until Semmelweiss appeared,—is to-day reduced to a minimum,—down to this whole vast tragedy of Semmelweiss, which finally resulted, as in the case of Julius Robert Mayer, in Semmelweiss' ending his days in a mad-house, despite the fact that he is one of mankind's greatest benefactors ... if one were to put all these things together, one would have an extremely important element in the history of civilization in recent times, and would thence be able to judge, how little power this externally progressive age had for hitting the facts, in its estimation of spiritual phenomena,—how little readiness there was, really, to enter into any signs that showed themselves on the horizon of its spiritual life.

Such things as these have to be taken into account, if one wishes to form a true picture of the antagonistic forces opposed to the intervention of any spiritual movement. And then one learns to know, what capacity there is for any sort of judgment in this, our present age, which is so specially proud of these powers of judgment that it does not possess.

Now it is really a remarkably symptomatic phenomenon, that what otherwise had only existed traditionally, hoarded up in all manner of secret societies, who had no intention whatever of letting it become public,—that all this hoarded store, or a great part of it, should suddenly appear openly published in the book of a woman, Blavatsky,—in a book bearing the title Isis Unveiled.

Naturally, it gave alarm to all the people who said to themselves: ‘This book contains a whole mass of things, that we have always kept under lock and key.’ And these societies, I may say, paid more heed to their locks and keys than our present Anthroposophical Society does.

In the Anthroposophical Society there most certainly was never any intention of keeping the contents of the cycles totally and absolutely secret; but what happened was, that, at a particular time, I found myself required to let those things, which otherwise I give by word of mouth, he made accessible to a larger circle. And since there was no time to go through the things and edit them, one simply let them be printed as ‘manuscript’ in the form they were in, which was not that in which one would otherwise have published them,—not, however, because one did not want to publish the material, but because one didn't want to publish the material in this form, and also because, after all, one wanted to see that these things should he read by people who have the preparatory training, for otherwise they are inevitably misunderstood.

But in spite of this, every one of the cycles is to be had to-day by anyone who requires it for antagonistic purposes. Those societies I am speaking of, who kept a certain spiritual treasure under lock and key, and put their people under oath to betray no word of it, they knew better how to take care of things. And they knew, that something very particular must be behind it, when a book suddenly appears, which this time really gave something of importance, such as I indicated. As for the things which have no importance, you need only go down a side-street in Paris to pick up basketfuls of the writings of the secret societies on sale; but the publication of these writings will occasion no alarm to the people who have kept the traditional knowledge locked up in their secret societies; for as a rule they are very valueless things that one finds published in this way.

Isis Unveiled, however, was not something valueless. This Isis Unveiled, indeed, delivered itself with a certain substantiality, that made the knowledge seem original which it imparted, and which had been so carefully preserved over from an ancient wisdom until now.

Well, as I said, those people, who were alarmed, could but think that there was something very particular behind it,—a betrayal from some quarter. I do not so much want now, in these lectures, to emphasize the inner side of the affair, which I have repeatedly discussed at one time or another in previous lectures from this or that aspect. I want more to-day to deal with the outer side of it, as the world judged it, which is of special importance for the history of the movement,—to describe how the world judged it, rather than what went on as facts behind the scenes.—This, then, the people could tell: namely, that somebody or other, who was initiated in these things, who had received traditional knowledge of them, must for some reason,—not necessarily a particularly good one—have given hints to Blavatsky. This, it was very easy to tell, without being wide of the truth, that somewhere or other, from some secret society, or group of societies, there had been a betrayal; and that then Blavatsky had been the means of making the thing public.

There would quite well, though, have been other ways of giving such things to the public, than by employing a lady of Blavatsky's kind as the means of publication.

There was, however, a reason, of which again I will only give the outer aspect, for employing this particular lady. And here I come to a chapter in our spiritual history, which is really a very curious one. At that time, when Blavatsky and her books came on the scene, there was but very little talk of what is in everybody's mouth to-day, namely, of Psycho-Analysis. But I can assure you, my dear friends, that the people, who had any powers of judgment,—that these people experienced in living truth, through this same phenomenon of Blavatsky, something, compared with which all that ever yet was written by any of the leading lights of Psycho-Analysis is really—as I said lately in another connection—a dilettanteism to the second degree.—For what does Psycho-Analysis propose to show?

In the point wherein Psycho-Analysis is in a sense right, it shows, that down below, at the bottom of the human being, there lives something, which,—whatever this ‘down below’ may be,—can be brought up to consciousness, and, when brought up, extends beyond what man has in his conscious-ness originally. So that one may say, if you like, that, hidden in the corporeal body, there is something which, when brought up into consciousness, looks like spirit. Through the corporeal body runs a rumble of spirit.—It is of course extremely elementary for the psycho-analyst in this way to fish up a few fragmentary leavings of life-experience from the bottom of the human being,—leavings, that is, remnants of life-realizations, which have not been lived through with quite sufficient intensity for the emotional requirements of the person in question,—which, as it were, have deposited themselves, form dregs in the man, and thereby bring him into a state of unstable, instead of stable equilibrium; and that then, what has thus collected during a man's life should be fished up, although it rumbles down below in unconsciousness, and when fished up into consciousness proves to be something spiritual, something which simply is not, so to speak, properly assimilated to the human being, and therefore rumbles in a disagreeable manner. When it becomes conscious, however, it can then be dispelled by the proper reaction, and so the man gets rid of the disagreeable rumbling.

It is interesting, though, what a point this psycho-analytic, dilettante method of investigation has reached to-day. With Jung, particularly, it is extremely interesting. Jung has found out, that down below,—the ‘down below’ can't, of course, be very exactly determined, but somewhere down below (its whole being is after all very indeterminate!),—that somewhere then, man has within his being everything in the nature of undigested experience that he may have lived through since his birth; that there, down below, within his human being, he has all sorts of things, that go back to his early forefathers, that may take us back indeed all the way through the life-experiences of the various races, and further back still. So that it seems to the psycho-specialists to-day by no means improbable, for instance, that some experience which they met with, like the OEdipus problem say, in Greece, left an impression on the people; and that then it was transmitted by heredity, on and on. And to-day some poor devil comes to the psycho-analyst's clinic, and he psycho-analyses him, and gets up something that is seated so deep down in the patient, that it doesn't come out of his own, present life, but from his father and forefather and fore-forefather, and so on, away back to the time of the ancient Greeks who lived in the days of the OEdipus problem. And so it has run down through the whole blood-stream, and can be psycho-analysed out again to-day. There are the OEdipus sensations, rumbling about in the man, and can be psycho-analyzed out of him. And then they think that they will come on really very interesting trains of connection, and on something that will lead back far into the races, if they psycho-analyse it out.

Only,—you see,—these are altogether dilettante methods of investigating. For you only need a little acquaintance with Anthroposophy to know, that it is possible to bring up a very great many things out of the under depths of man's life: his pre-natal life to begin with, his pre-earthly life, what the man went through before he came down into the physical world; that one can bring up out of him what he went through in previous earth-lives. There one comes out of dilettanteism and into actual reality!

And there, too, one comes to recognize, that in Man the whole secret of the Universe is contained, involved, rolled up together, as it were, in him. It was the view, after all, of ancient times as well, that the secret of the Universe is un-rolled, when Man brings up from within him all that lies hid in his own inner depths. That was why they called Man a Microcosm, not for the sake of a fine phrase, such as people are so fond of to-day, but because it was a fact of actual experience, that from the bottom depths of Man every conceivable thing can be fetched up whatsoever, that lies spread as a secret through the width and breadth of the Cosmos.

It is in reality the merest elementary dilettanteism, which one finds to-day as psycho-analysis. For, firstly, it is psychologic dilettanteism,—they don't know, that, when you get to a certain depth, physical and spiritual life are one. They merely regard the soul-life swimming on the top, and apply abstract notions to this surface soul-life; they never get down to those lower depths, where the soul-life lives creative, weaving, pulsing in blood and in breathing, where it is one, in fact, with the so-called material functions. They study the soul's life in a dilettante way. And again, they study the physical life in a dilettante way, inasmuch as they study it merely in its external appearance to the senses, and don't know that everywhere, in all sense-life, and above all in the human organism, there is hidden spirit.

And when two dilettanteisms are so interwoven, that the one is used to throw light on the other, as is done in psycho-analysis, then the dilettanteisms do not merely add, but they multiply together, and one gets dilettanteism squared.

Well, what displays itself in the form of this squared dilettanteism, was, in a way, to be seen unmistakably in the psychologic problem of Blavatsky. From some quarter or other there may have been something betrayed, which gave an incentment; and this incentment worked practically in the same way as though an invisible psycho-analyst—but a wise one this time!—had fetched up out of Blavatsky, by means, namely, of a sudden jerk, a whole mass of knowledge; which this time came from the actual person herself, and not from old writings that had been handed down by tradition from olden times. Something had here been brought to light out of the actual human being itself, by what I might call the invisible psycho-analyst. For, whether there was any traitor in the question, he, at any rate, was not the psycho-analyst; he only gave the jerk. The circumstances, however, themselves gave the jerk.—And what were the circumstances?

Look back at the evolution of the ages, to about the fifteenth century, and you will find, my dear friends, that it still, indeed frequently, happened, if people were stirred and roused by something or other (it merely needed to be some external phenomenon, that specially struck them), that then out of their own inner being there rose up before them some revelation of world-secrets. Later on, this has become something mystical and legendary; and the story told by Jacob Boehme, of how he had a marvellous revelation from gazing at a pewter plate, is thought very wonderful, simply because people do not know how things were in earlier times, and that down even into the fifteenth century it was still possible, through a comparatively, to all appearance trifling occasion, to call forth out of the inner man stupendous revelations of world-secrets, which the man then saw in a vision.

But ever more and more has the possibility decreased for men to have inner revelations through incentments of such a kind. This comes, you see, from the increasing ascendancy of intellectualism. Intellectualism, is of course, involved with a definite form of development in the brain; the brain becomes ... one cannot, of course, prove it physiologically in externals, by anatomic means, but one can prove it nevertheless spiritually ... the brain becomes in a way calcified, stiver. And, in matter of fact, the brains of civilized mankind have grown considerably stiver since the fifteenth century. And this stiff brain does not allow man's inner revelations to come to the surface in his consciousness. And now I must say something exceedingly paradoxical, but which nevertheless is true. This greater stiffness of brain showed itself, as a fact, mostly in male humanity;—which I do not say as a special ground of rejoicing for any particular female brain, for towards the last half of the nineteenth century the women's brains too began to be stiff enough;—still, the vantage in respect of intellectuality and stiffness of brain lay with the men. And with this is connected the decrease in judgment.

Now this was the very time, when the practice of keeping secret the old knowledge was still very largely maintained. And the case then turned out to be, that the men were not much affected by this knowledge; for they learnt it by memory, in grades, and it did not much affect them;—besides, they kept it under lock and key. Supposing, how-ever, there were someone, who in some way wanted to set this old knowledge working once more with peculiar activity, then he might quite well make the peculiar experiment of administering this old knowledge (which he himself need not perhaps even understand), just in a small dose maybe, to a woman,—and to one moreover, whose brain was very specially prepared; for the Blavatsky brain was, after all, somewhat different from other woman-brains of the nineteenth century. And then it might be, that,—just from the contrast of it with everything else that was there as education in these woman-brains,—what was otherwise old, dried-up knowledge might catch fire and so,—just as the psycho-analyst gives some particular lead, that stirs up the whole human being,—so it might stir up the peculiar personality of Blavatsky. And. then, through this stir, she out of her-self discovered what had been altogether forgotten by the whole of mankind, except those who were in secret societies, and by the others, who were in secret societies, had been kept carefully under lock and key,—to a great extent indeed not even understood. In this way it could all come out, as though, one might say, through a cultural vent-hole.

But at the same time there was no sort of foundation there, for the things to have been worked up in a reasonable form. For Madame Blavatsky was certainly anything but a logical reasoner. In logic she was exceedingly weak; and whilst in actual fact she could produce out of her total human being revelations of world-secrets, she was by no means also adequate to describing these things in a form for which one could be answerable to the scientific conscience, say, of the modern age.

And now, consider for a moment. Seeing the scant measure of judgment that was brought to hear upon spiritual phenomena, what possibility was there for a thing such as this,—which only showed itself again one might say, twenty years later, in a quite primitive, dilettante fashion at most, in psycho-analysis, and then only in a very tiny field,—how was it possible for a thing such as this, that could grow to a living experience of gigantic size and grandeur, such as psycho-analysis will only one day be able to rise to, when it has been purified, clarified, when it is placed on a reasonable basis and conducted really scientifically, when people no longer psycho-analyse out of the blood, that comes from men who lived in the days of the OEdipus problem and has run through the veins down into our present generation, but when they really understand how the web of the world is woven ... yes, indeed, how could such a living experience, which, in the face of to-day's degenerate psycho-analysing, displays what I might call its grand, gigantic counterpart, freed of all its caricature,—how, at a time when the capacity for judgment was what I have described to you, how could this thing hope, in any wide circle of people, to meet with an adequate measure of under-standing?

In this respect, one could really make many experiences as regards the comprehension to be met with in our days, when one made the least attempt to appeal to a somewhat larger measure of judgment.

To give an instance as illustration. These illustrations are necessary, and you will see as the lectures go on, how necessary it is that I should enter into these seemingly quite personal matters. I should like to tell you an example of how hard it is in these modern times to make oneself at all understandable, directly there is some point about which one desires to appeal to a somewhat larger measured, larger hearted judgment.

There was a time, about the turn of the century, in Berlin, where I was then living, when Giordano Bruno Associations used to be founded, and amongst others was a ‘Giordano Bruno League’. There were other Giordano Bruno Associations, but this, that was founded, was a ‘Giordano Bruno League’. It had in it truly admirable people, according to the fashion and notions of the time,—people really with a profound interest in every sort of thing in which one could possibly take an interest in those days, and round which one could centre the whole range of one's thoughts and feelings and will. Indeed, in the abstract fashion which is usual in modern times, there was even reference made in this Giordano Bruno League to the Spirit. A notable personage in this Giordano Bruno League prefaced its foundation with an introductory lecture on, ‘Matter is never without Spirit.’ But it was all so hopeless! For this ‘Spirit’, and all that went on there, was at bottom a pure abstraction, nothing which could ever get near any actual reality in the world. The whole way of thinking was terribly abstract!—What in particular seemed to me very irritating, was the way in which the people every moment, on every possible occasion, dragged in the word monoism: One must worship the one-and-only reasonable and man-befitting Monoism; and Dualism is a thing of the past. And then came always a reference to the way in which in these modern times we had emancipated ourselves from the Dualism of the Middle Ages.

These, you see, were things which at the time I found uncommonly irritating. I found them irritating for the reason ... in the first place, all this gassing about monoism, and dilettante rejection of any dualism ... and then I found it irritating to talk about the Spirit in this general, pantheistic way,—that the Spirit is ... well, that there is, after all Spirit too everywhere,—until nothing was left of Spirit but the word. I found all this considerably irritating.

As a matter of fact, after the delivery of the very first lecture on ‘Matter never without Spirit’, I came to words with the man who had delivered the lecture; which brought me already at the time into very bad odour. But this whole monistic business went on ever further, and grew more and more irritating,—interesting, but irritating,—until I decided once for all to lay hold of the people at a salient point, and so at least, as I hoped, shake up their powers of judgment a little. And after a whole series of lectures, through which the tirades had gone on about the darkness of the Middle Ages and the horrible dualism of the Scholastics, I determined,—it was just at the time, in which people now declare, at that very time, that I was a rabid Haeckelite!—I determined for once to do something which should give the people's judgment a little shaking-up. And so I held a lecture on Thomas Aquinas, in which—to put now into a couple of sentences what I then expounded at length—I said somewhat as follows: There was absolutely xiii justification,—I said,—as regards the spiritual life of the past and its ideas, for talking of the darkness of the Middle Ages and in particular of the Dualism of Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics; for that, if Monoism was the order of the day, I would undertake to show that Thomas Aquinas was a thorough monoist. Only then one must not give the name of Monoism only to what the present age understands by it, as materialistic Monoism; but one must give the name of Monoist to everyone, who looks on the Universal Principle as residing in a Monon, in a Unity. And that—I said—Thomas Aquinas most certainly did; for he obviously saw in the Unity of the Godhead the Monon underlying everything that exists as creation in the universe. Here—said I you have a basis of the purest Monoism. Only that Aquinas according to the method of those times, drew this distinction: that the one half could be comprehended by ordinary human knowledge, through the senses and the understanding,—the other half by means of another kind. of knowledge, which in those days was called Belief. But what the Scholastics still understood by Belief, is not understood by mankind to-day at all. And so one must be clear, I said, that Thomas Aquinas wanted to approach the Universe on its one side by this investigation and knowledge of the understanding but that, on its other side, he wanted to supplement and complete this investigated knowledge of the understanding by the displayed truths of revelation. And it was precisely by this means that he sought to penetrate to the Monon of the Universe. He only sought to proceed by two roads. And it was all the worse for the present age, I said, that this present age had. not sufficiently large-hearted ideas to look round about it a little in history.

In short, I wanted to assist the dried-up brains to a little moisture. Rut it was all in vain; for the effect was a most extraordinarily curious one. The people could make nothing at all of the matter to begin with. They were all thorough-going evangelical protestants, and thought: here was an attempt to smuggle in Catholicism. It's a defence of Catholicism,—they thought,—with its horrible Dualism! It is really dreadful!—they said:—Here are we, taking every possible pains to deal Catholicism its death-blow; and now comes a member of this very Giordano Bruno League, and takes Catholicism into defence!

Really, the people didn't know at the time, whether I had not gone mad in the night, when I gave this lecture. They could make nothing at all of the affair. And. they were really people of the most enlightened brains, at that time. In fact, there was only one, really, who afterwards came forward as a sort of apologist. It was the poet Wolfgang Kirchbach. He was the only one, who then devised a formula, under which the lecture could enjoy civic rights in the Giordano Bruno League. And this was the formula he devised: He said: What Steiner wanted, was not by any means to smuggle in Catholicism; but he wanted to show, that in that ancient scholastic wisdom of Catholicism there still lay something much weightier, than all that we have ourselves to-day in our superficial ideas. That was what he wanted to show. He wanted to show us, that the reason why Catholicism is such a powerful enemy, is because we are such weak opponents, that we must furnish ourselves with stronger weapons. That was what his lecture was intended to show.

And this was the only formula, under which the lecture then, by one-third, by a minority, so far managed to obtain civic rights, that I was at any rate not excluded from the Giordano Bruno League. But with the majority I passed for a man, who had had his brain turned by Catholicism.

Well, you see, this is just an episode out of the same period, at which I am now said. to have been a rabid disciple of Haeckel. Through such things, however, one gained practical experience as to the capacity of judgment, namely as to the largeness of judgment, with which anything was welcomed, which was not bent in the first place upon theoretic formulas, but was bent on actually pursuing the road to the spirit, on actually getting into the spiritual world.

For, getting into the spiritual world really does not depend on what particular theory one has about Spirit or Matter, but on whether one is in a position to bring about an actual living experience of the spiritual world. As I have often pointed out before, the Spiritualists most certainly believe that all their proceedings make for the spirit; but their theories all the same are so empty of spirit!—they certainly do not lead men spiritwards. One may be a materialist even, and yet inspired with a great deal of spirit; it is real spirit, too, even though it be spirit mistaken in error. One need not of course set up self-mistaken spirit as something very valuable; but self-mistaken spirit, spirit which cheats itself by taking Matter to be the one and only reality, can at any rate be much richer in spirit, than that spiritual poverty which seeks the spirit after a material fashion, because it can find no spirit whatever within itself.

In looking back, then, to its first beginnings, which must be rightly grasped in order to understand the whole meaning and life-conditions of the movement, one must know, in the lit st place, in what an exceedingly problematic manner the spiritual world's revelations made their entrance at first—if I may use the expression—into the earth-world, in the last third of the nineteenth century, and how little people's judgment in general was ripe for the reception of these spiritual revelations,—and then, above all, how strong the determination was in certain definite circles, that nothing whatever which really leads to the spirit should be allowed to get out amongst the people. Most undoubtedly, there were a large number of by no means negligible persons, on whom the apparition of Blavatsky could not fail to act with rousing effect.

And that is what it did do at first. The attitude of the people who still preserved some judgment, was, that they said to themselves: This, after all, is something that speaks for itself: It is strange that it should come into the world just in the way it has now; but it is a thing that speaks for itself. One need only apply sound ordinary understanding to it, and it speaks for itself.

There were, however, many people, as I said, whose interest it was, that just this kind of arousing influence should on no account be allowed to come into the world.

And now the thing was there; there, in a person such as Blavatsky, who in a certain sense again was quite naive and helpless in the face of her own internal revelation. This can be seen from the very style of her writings.—The thing was there, then: and this was how she herself stood towards it: naive and helpless in a sort of way, and at the mercy of much that afterwards took place in her surroundings. For do you think it was especially difficult,—especially with H. P. Blavatsky it was not very difficult,—for people, whose desire it now was, so to manipulate the world that it should be proof against every sort of spirituality,—for these people to get at Blavatsky and form her surroundings. Just because she was so naive and helpless before her own internal revelations, she was in a way credulous. In the affair of the sliding-doors, for instance, through which were shoved letters ostensibly from the Masters, but which some person outside—whether B ... or another—had written and shoved in, it is by no means a necessary assumption that Blavatsky had said in the first instance to B ... : You shove them in!—but rather, she was again, in a way, native, and believed, herself, in letters of the kind. The same person, who shoved them in, deceived Blavatsky, It was then of course very easy to say before the world: The woman is a swindler. But don't you see, my dear friends, Blavatsky herself might very well be swindled. For there was a certain capacity in her for quite uncommon credulity, as a consequence just of this peculiar, let me say, non-hardness of her brain. The problem therefore is altogether an extremely complicated one; and really demands,—as everything genuinely spiritual does, which comes into the world to-day,—really calls for power of judgment, for a certain soundness of human understanding.—It is not exactly sound human understanding, when people first judge Adalbert Stifter not even competent to be a teacher, and then afterwards ... in this case again it was a woman,—probably one again with a softer brain than those committee-men all had in the government offices, or the school-boards, ... afterwards, when a hint came from this quarter, they then declared him qualified to inspect all the very people to whose ranks he might not even belong.

To perceive the truth in such matters does, you see, amongst other things, require sound human understanding. About this sound human understanding, however, there are peculiar notions. Last year, when I was holding a fairly big course of lectures in Germany, I made frequent use of the expression ‘sound human understanding’, and said, that everything which Anthroposophy has to say from the spiritual world can be tested by sound human understanding. One of the critics, and by no means the worst of them, caught this up, and made the following criticism. He said, almost word for word: To talk of sound human understanding was, after all, bait for gudgeons; for everybody to-day, who has had any sort of scientific training, knows very well, that the human understanding, when it is sound, knows next to nothing; and when it fancies that it knows something, then it is not sound.—This was the sub-stance of a critical judgment, written with no lack of esprit.

Put more into general words, then, this means, that anyone, who to-day is as clever as he should be, after all the steps that have been made in human progress, is aware that one can know nothing: if he thinks that he knows anything, he is mad.—So far have we come already in our reception of the gifts of the spirit.

And now that I have given you some instances, before the anthroposophic movement began, of the capacity for apprehending a spiritual manifestation, and have given you now the judgment of an at any rate standard critic only a year ago, you have a tolerable picture of how this disposition of the age has pursued the whole movement. For, after all, seeing the general atmosphere of the age, and especially that a personage so hard to understand as Blavatsky was there in addition, to point to as an illustration,—there could but proceed from this atmosphere of the age the one judgment, which is simply the same as is repeated to-day in all manner of variations,—only that one person says it in one way, another in another: Everyone to-day, who is clever, who has sound human understanding, says, Ignorabimus. Everyone, who doesn't say Ignorabimus, is either mad, or a swindler.

One must not look on this as simply proceeding from ill-will. In order to be able to take one's place rightly in the age, in order to perceive a few of the necessary life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement, or e must not see in all this merely the ill-will of private individuals, but one must recognize it as something that belongs to the colour of the times in all countries, amongst the whole of modern mankind, and that must be recognized for what it is.

Then, it is true, in the whole stand which one takes up,—and which one must take up vigorously and boldly!—one will then also be able to mingle what must be there besides, when speaking about the age from the anthroposophic standpoint,—what, after all, must be present in all refutation, however sharp—sharp in soul,—of our opponents: and that is, compassion. One must, nevertheless, have com-passion, because the judgment of the age is clouded.

How things now went with the anthroposophic movement, and were bound to go, circumstances being as they are,—of this we will speak more tomorrow.

Dr. Unger: With regard to the Boldt motion, we have to work through to understand why we entered into this at the general assembly. It is not about us making the Boldt case a big case. Mr. Boldt has hurled accusations and insults in his brochure and forced a matter on us that we do not like. But if it is to have a general significance, then we must pay attention to what is typical about such a phenomenon.

First of all, it is quite impossible to force members to buy a brochure so that they are informed about its contents at the general assembly. The only correct thing, in accordance with the rules of procedure, is for someone who wants to orientate a meeting to provide the relevant material and not to demand 50 pfennigs from each person in order to be able to orientate themselves. In addition, if you have read the brochure, in which there is nothing at all that we can use, you are supposed to buy the book as well. These are things that are impossible for us. That is why we did not need to meet here. But it is typical and significant of the case. It is important for us to learn something from it and to become aware that it is necessary within our society to emancipate ourselves from certain prejudices and suggestions that the whole of life and thought in our time wants to impose on us. In this regard, we must pay attention to some of the things in the brochure. For the accusations, which need not be taken personally at all, relate, among other things, to the fact that something has been rejected here that deals with an important problem of our time, which supposedly deals with a problem in the manner of “spiritual science” and claims to be a scientifically significant matter, as can be seen from the “blurb” read out yesterday. Such an accusation is unjustified from the outset; for no one can demand that any intellectual products should be read, but one can only wait and see what each individual wants to do of his own free will. Then it is claimed that all those who have rejected the matter are supposed to have done so out of ignorance. It was therefore very commendable that some samples from the book were given yesterday, so that anyone who has not read it because they did not want to can now say from their own experience: there is nothing in the book that could have any value for us. What matters is that we educate ourselves to be able to judge what has value and what has no value. And since this is precisely the kind of problem that should be placed at the center of our attention, that should be imposed on us as a problem even though it is not one at all, it is important to work through the question of this alleged problem.

We want to come together here to cultivate knowledge, to gain insight into the workings of spiritual beings. This means that we do not take the starting points from external appearances and symptoms, from what is imposed by sensory experience or what could be gained from the habituation of scientific observation, but that we recognize that all true knowledge can only be found in spiritual reality. It is important that we learn to hold fast to this, that we learn to recognize how much of what passes itself off today as “scientific” is reality and what is not. And that is why it is important that this is not just a “Boldt case,” but a case that gives us the opportunity to shed light on the workings of scientific claims and prejudices in our time. An example will be given that, in terms of its content, already points to the problems that are to be brought home to us here. If we want to look at any vital questions from the spiritual-scientific point of view - that is, from the point of view that we seek to gain on the basis of what is communicated to us from higher knowledge - then it must be the first condition for us to know something know something about it, to know something from the spiritual sources; otherwise we are not in the channel of a spiritual movement, the spiritual movement in question here, but only deal with what is prepared as “scientific phenomenology”. So an example is to be given that, as it were, introduces us to our subject.

When we are led to the basic principles of how man has been born out of the spiritual worlds and has developed under the guidance of spiritual beings, we are then shown that this is not a theory, but a reality of the spiritual worlds, which in the past has also worked in a pictorial way into the pictorial consciousness of mankind, and the expression of these images has been preserved in myths and legends. When we occupy ourselves with myths and legends, we have something that touches our inner hearts, and what would otherwise be presented to us in dry, sober thoughts is presented to us in pictorial thoughts. The legends of the gods are higher realities for us, and in this respect they are a force that reaches deep into our hearts, with which we can approach the problems of existence. They contain something that can work as an element of progress for our movement. We can gain knowledge within our movement from research in the spiritual world about a certain area of existence, namely about the origin of myths and legends and about their significance for the past and present of humanity. If we now ask the circles that behave scientifically about this, we do find a reliable collection of myths and legends as fact. It is not characterized by the fact that one says: it is superficial or not. For such a collection is something that is still most to be praised for in this day and age, namely the diligence in collecting facts. What is then added to such a collection is usually very little. But among the things that are added, we find something typical: a tendency to look at everything from the point of view of a preconceived favorite subject. In this, so-called “sexual literature” is particularly distinguished by the fact that nothing is sacred to it; and in this sexual literature we find volumes of descriptions that trace myths and legends back to the lowest sexual elements - not only to what belongs to natural or animal life, but all excesses, perversions and decadent phenomena are placed in the most arbitrary way at the beginning of the cultural history of mankind and thus the legends and myths are explained. If we wanted to pay attention to it at all, then we would have to give up our entire spiritual-scientific point of view from the outset. The moment we open our ears to what not only wants to reach us from such circles, but also wants to behave in an “occult” manner, we pronounce our own death sentence!

And this is the significant lesson that arises from this: that we must beware of anything that, in whatever way, with great ingenuity, perhaps even wit, presses itself upon us and seeks so easily to associate itself with the name “occultism”; that, on the contrary, we learn to recognize it, see through it and reject it out of our innermost knowledge and understanding. It is not necessary to point out the dangers that beset us in this regard; even the name Leadbeater can be avoided. But one thing must be emphasized: that we also find something in the newer Adyar literature that must be rejected by us in the strongest possible terms: Mrs. Besant refers to her earlier work, to her collaboration with Bradlaugh, to the possibility of limiting the population in the sense of Malthusianism, and so on. What was spread at that time from England, out of the general materialistic spirit of the age, was superseded by Mrs. Besant when Mrs. Blavatsky approached with her spiritual aspirations. Today it is rearing its head again, “illuminated by the glory of occultism.” We see in what presents itself as “occultism” the face of materialism, and we must pay attention to this and draw attention to it. It is certainly true that the influence of materialism on our movement is very strong, so that we must be on our guard, must sharpen our judgment, must learn to stand firmly on spiritual ground, and must learn to seek and find the starting-point for our world-related thinking more and more in the spiritual worlds and beings. In this sense, my request is that, in dealing with this matter, we should look less at the personality of the unfortunate Mr. Boldt than at the typical contemporary phenomena that it expresses, which we must take into account if we want to continue our movement in the right direction.

Mr. von Rainer: Dearly beloved! It may be necessary, after all, to shed light on this “Boldt case,” which has already been examined in some respects because it is symptomatic, from a perspective that plays a major role in our spiritual movement in our time. And if I am obliged to say some things in such a way that it appears as if I wanted to give good teachings, it may be necessary to preface this with a personal comment: that I am fully convinced that all people are children of their time, and that in can only speak with such conviction about something if you feel clearly within yourself how much you are a child of your time and how much opportunity you have to observe how being a “child of your time” creates an enormous obstacle for all ideal endeavors.

From the letters of Mr. Boldt, which he writes to the two representatives and chairmen of the Munich Lodge, the word has been read that he “has been insulted in his theosophical honor.” Even in today's world, the word “honor” actually has only a passive side and no longer an active one. One's honor is continually offended, but today one does not ask oneself whether one might offend the honor of other people. And if we ask ourselves why such a fact plays a significant role in our movement, we must remember the cycle of lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Norrköping on “Theosophical Morality”, where he pointed out that the moral qualities of the Orient, of India, for example, were different from those of Europe. While the Indian was characterized by devotion and worship, courage, standing up for one's convictions with clenched fists, so to speak, was always what distinguished the Westerner. The spiritual impulse of the theosophical movement has now been brought to the West with thoroughly Indian concepts, including the Indian concept of worship, of devotion – certainly justifiably – towards everything that exists in the world. But in doing so, it has been completely overlooked that in the West one is faced with a different audience than in India. In India, the caste system excludes the democratic spirit of the West from the outset; and it is already expressed in political institutions that veneration and devotion must then be modified somewhat differently in a certain way depending on what one is facing. But the West has been a pioneer for humanity in precisely this respect, in that the development of freedom has found a certain support through the democratic spirit of the time. But the whole nature of intellectual life in our time is such that it does not understand when it is stopped. Therefore, one did not understand how to stop in the democratic spirit of the time, in this spirit, which I would like to characterize for you through the saying of a poet, because precisely this poet, the Austrian poet Grillparzer, can be considered quite distant from all political endeavors...

Here Mr. von Rainer quoted a passage from the drama “A Brother Quarrel in the House of Habsburg,” which was put into the mouth of Emperor Rudolf II, and which ended with the following lines:

I say to you: not Scythians and Khazars,
Who once extinguished the splendor of the ancient world,
Are threatening our time, but foreign peoples:
The barbarian struggles loose from his own bosom,
Who, once without reins, everything great,
Art, science, state, church
falls from the heights that protect it,
to the surface of its own vulgarity,
until everything is the same, yes, because everything is low.

And following on from this, Mr. von Rainer pointed out that there is also a certain danger looming in our circles, from which we must protect ourselves. He then continued:

It is not always the case in the world that when someone comes along with certain pretensions and also displays on the other hand all the qualities that should lead to his condemnation as a human being, that these should also make him unworthy of human compassion. We must show a personality like Mr. Boldt's the greatest compassion, indeed the greatest love, but we must not be deceived by it. We must remember that love does not consist in overlooking or even excusing the dangers inherent in a fellow human being. If we examine the dangerousness of what is written in this brochure, objectively, regardless of what kind of person Mr. Boldt is, we must say: What is written here has emerged from the school of Vollrath, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden and so on. But it is also written entirely in the spirit of our time, about which we heard again yesterday from Dr. Steiner, that it really leaves much to be desired in terms of truthfulness. And I must also cite evidence of the way in which people and things are judged today, without even informing themselves about what the personalities in question actually want with their appearance.

An essay by Dr. Wilhelm Oehl entitled “Modern Theosophy” has been published in the magazine “Der Aar”, a monthly publication for the entire Catholic intellectual life of the present day. It states:

In stark contrast to the reserved Hübbe-Schleiden and even more so to Hartmann, who emphasized ethics, the magician Rudolf Steiner is at the center of a large group of followers who hold his person and his supernatural secret forces in absolute devotion. (“Der Aar,” July 1913 issue, p. 519).

At the beginning, the author writes in a footnote:

As sources, I used the writings of Blavatsky, Besant, Hartmann, Hübbe-Schleiden, Collin, Brahmacharin-Bodhabhikshu and Hermann Rudolph, as well as many essays in the journals “Theosophische Kultur”, “Sphinx”, “Lotosbl , Prana and The Theosophical Path; valuable material is contained in the two brochures by Hans Freimark, Moderne Theosophen und ihre Theosophie and Die okkultistische Bewegung, both published in Leipzig in 1912 by Wilhelm Heims (Leipzig). Finally, attention is drawn to the excellent essay by P. Zimmermann in the 'Stimmen aus Maria Laach': 'Die neue Theosophie' (1910, pp. 387ff.). The various conversation encyclopedias and church encyclopedias offer almost nothing or very little about Theosophy. - Several years of contact with the Theosophists, occultists and astrologers of Vienna, Berlin and Zurich gave me the most desirable opportunity to thoroughly get to know the thinking of these circles.

These were the sources that he said he had used; and yet he has the nerve to write what I read about Dr. Steiner's personality, even though it is clear from his own statements that he is not familiar with any of Dr. Steiner's books! And while he cites the titles of books and publishers for other authors, he only says in the rest of the essay that Dr. Steiner published the magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”; he says nothing about any of his other books. Perhaps it could be objected that this is a journal that serves a certain tendency; but it is precisely in these circles that people pride themselves on being “modern” and on wanting to draw modern aspirations into the church.

So I saw a poster for a lecture: “Modern Theosophy in the Spirit of Christianity”. Where pretensions arise that “modern theosophy also wants to represent a surrogate for Christianity”, one speaks of a person as a “fantastic magician” and does not even know what books he has written!

These are terrible times in which the reader is deprived of any basis for judging something correctly; because one must be able to read between the lines of such articles and see that, for example, Hans Freimark and Father Otto Zimmermann are opponents of Dr. Steiner. These are the kinds of signs that should make us extremely vigilant about our time and ourselves. It is a tremendous slogan to write on a brochure: “A free word to free Theosophists”. You can quite calmly write this as a powerful motto at the top of your brochure, and then later say: If Dr. Steiner had said something good about my book, I have no doubt that it would have been considered thoroughly Theosophical and would have been read and distributed in the widest circles.

What about “freedom” here? If you speak well of a book that someone writes and publishes, you can be sure that you will be called a “free person”; if you say nothing or cannot say anything commendatory, then you have violated freedom! It is entirely possible that someone comes along with the pretension of redeeming the gagged Frei and then says quite calmly: If the person in question, whom I naturally do not recognize as an authority, had asserted his authority for me, I would not have objected; then the whole brochure would not have been written, and everything else would have been avoided. On page 23, Mr. Boldt writes:

I had to come to the conclusion [at that time] that Dr. Steiner's negative attitude had not remained without influence on these events.

the “events” that his book was not recommended!

As a result, he only encouraged the prudishness and herd prejudices in theosophical circles. I am certain that if he had devoted even a single good word to my work, which has been appreciated by many Theosophists, no one would have dared to find the book un-Theosophical and to object to the sale of the book or to the announcement of the prospectus within the lodges.

Thus, the representative of freedom and opponent of authority would have had no objection to the “herd-like human prejudices” if they had proved useful in the dissemination of this book.

So it is that someone can say, “I am offended in my theosophical honor,” but does nothing for the honor of the other people, the 75 percent, as he says, that he counts among the “partisaners”; because he insults them with the brochure. If we are guided by the perhaps “outdated” but nevertheless existing concepts of honor that prevail in the West, namely to have strong convictions for the moral foundations of Western man, then it is no longer possible to accept what is offered to us. We seem to be like game that anyone can shoot, just because we have a conviction – and not only can anyone from outside shoot at it, whom one cannot blame for it for certain reasons, but everyone within the movement shoots at it! However profound this movement is, among ourselves the individual is actually treated very superficially. In these circles anyone who dares to write anything that condemns 75 percent of the people in a movement dedicated to a high ideal, lock, stock and barrel. One has only to recall the unheard-of nature of such an act! It is always said that it is the belief in authority that we have towards Dr. Steiner. No - our own honor, our theosophical honor is at stake here, because we cannot allow ourselves to be disparaged in this way by a person who knows nothing about the view of life that we want to realize and who wants to exploit for his own purposes what we want to create in the world with this view of life.

Where are the 25 percent he refers to? They should show themselves, these 25 percent, and if there are more of them, they should show themselves too, because we are tired of being attacked in this way. We are Westerners in the sense that we say: We don't have to do theosophical work if there is no one for whom it is suitable. But we would like to hear it! So someone writes this and goes around in the Society! He speaks of “masks and gestures.” But there are many people going around who are saying the same thing! In this regard, we must cultivate a certain honor and say: We will give a fitting answer to anyone who speaks like that, even if it is in the most trivial private conversation, because otherwise a poison will enter the movement and spread! We can only make progress if we are clear about the active part of the theosophical honor. It is not acceptable that just anyone who has barely sniffed into the theosophical movement can appear and say, “All this is blind faith in authority”; or that someone can express such a thoroughly dishonest view that he says, “I am completely permeated with love and admiration for the personality of Dr. Steiner , but this personality of Dr. Steiner adheres entirely to Nietzsche, who says, 'One must not come to people with the truth', and then in a certain way acts as if Dr. Steiner had the same personality in Nietzsche, from whom he gets everything he needs to lead this movement.

In the face of such a thing, it is also necessary to state very precisely what can shed light on the matter. In the first chapter of Dr. Steiner's book “Friedrich Nietzsche – A Fighter Against His Time” it says:

The words that he (Nietzsche) has spoken about his relationship to Schopenhauer, I would like to say about mine to Nietzsche: “I belong to those readers of Nietzsche who, after reading the first page of him, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said. My trust in him was immediate... I understood him as if he had written for the sole purpose of expressing himself clearly, but also immodestly and foolishly.” You can speak in this way and be far from professing yourself a ‘believer’ in Nietzsche's world view.

This is stated at the beginning of the book and should be borne in mind when quoting from it. Mr. Boldt is not justified in quoting Dr. Steiner as saying: 'Dr. Steiner himself admitted that Nietzsche is an authority on this point ($. 16).

In his discussion of this topic, Dr. Steiner himself characterized the unconditional striving for truth and truthfulness, as advocated by Fichte, as “superficial,” whereas Nietzsche's view is said to be “rooted deeply in the essence of human nature.

Such a juxtaposition cannot help but create the impression that Dr. Steiner is of the opinion that the pursuit of truth and truthfulness must be characterized as “superficial.” What is meant, of course, is that, as it also appears in the book “Friedrich Nietzsche - A Fighter Against His Time,” Nietzsche himself raised the question: Must one strive for truth? Why does one want truth and not rather untruth? These are philosophical, intellectual processes about which one can say: It takes tremendous courage to express such things; but they cannot be taken as a basis for the practice of a way of life, especially not in a circle like ours, where we know where we want the foundations of the truth. We only need people who remain true to this truth. After all, truth no longer needs to be invented.

One need not say of a book like Mr. Boldt's that the author also has good aspirations. He should develop them wherever he wants, but not within the Anthroposophical Society, which has its store of truth. If one really always works positively, one already comes to such concepts to advance the movement.

This is not a matter of Theosophical honor revolting against what someone else does; rather, Theosophical honor should be flexible enough to allow us to do something that someone else does not. That is one side of it. But there is also a second side. For it would be easy to object to such statements: Are we not really doing everything that is humanly possible, so to speak? Are we not truly completely honest for this movement?

With regard to this movement, we must truly also think that we are children of our time. We are children of our time for the Movement itself, and it is not at all certain that those who write in this way are not also completely children of their time. But the misfortune is when we always “soar on clouds” in a certain respect, when we want something, and believe that we must always achieve something great, and think that there are no “little things”. You have to start with the little things! At the beginning of our movement, there were many who said, “How can I be useful to the movement?” before they really knew what it was about. But the more the movement needs strength, the more those same people show themselves to be truly willing to work where they are placed by karma. It is not enough to work for a worldview if you are with the “idea” of the matter. In terms of the practice of a worldview, one can be there for an idea and yet be a crass materialist. In this respect, it is perhaps good to take a historical look at our society, at what has happened since the time of the Constituent Assembly.

The lunch break begins around two o'clock; the continuation of the business negotiations is scheduled for four o'clock.

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of deprivation. What does the young person, who becomes aware of his or her youth, lack? After all, there is so much to “learn” in today's civilization. Not only is there a wealth of knowledge, but an overabundance. It is tempting to think that young people are confused because of this overabundance, that they cannot “understand” the content of the overabundance. But experience shows that this belief is wrong. Young people “understand” quite well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And despite its overabundance, our present-day civilization can almost be grasped entirely in thought.

The young person becomes aware when he begins to develop a relationship with civilization that he understands. And a right instinct tells him that this understanding, this thinking grasping should also be his further destiny. But it is not possible to be young with “understanding” alone. One can only be young when one experiences with one's whole heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one will grow old when one gradually leads the experienced into the understood.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that allows them to grow old, but not to be young. This civilization has almost nothing to give to the first age of life. One would have to enter the earth at the age of twenty today, then one could imbue oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It only brings matter into thoughts. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie in the soul, as hard as stone, incapable of transformation. They are already fully ripe when they arise; they cannot grow because of this. But the young person must grow; and he wants what he takes up into his soul to be able to grow with him.

A real spiritual science can only reveal itself in thoughts. But these thoughts can be seen and experienced; they can be taken up by no one with a higher degree of maturity than he himself has. But they are akin to the human being. They grow and mature with him. If someone gives me material thoughts when I am eighteen years old, I take them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone allows me to experience thoughts that arise from the spirit, then they may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen years old, they will harmonize with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and looking at things demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old” things. But young people want to experience their youth. Therefore, “experiencing age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living knowledge that can be used to grasp being young in a living way. Today's civilization has no thoughts with which one can experience “being young”. A real spiritual science will have such thoughts.

If you are an older person today and hear young people speak, you often have the feeling: Oh, how old the speeches sound that come out of young mouths! But these are the words that young people find among the “old” today. They absorb them, but do not unite them with themselves. In wanting to experience them, they feel untrue. They speak what cannot have truth in them; and they carry their truth within them, without being able to reveal it to themselves. It chokes them; it becomes a nightmare coming from within.

The young want freedom of breathing in a living spiritual life, so that the nightmare will disappear. They want to awaken to a healthy mental outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake when they are young; but the thoughts of materialistic civilization only allow them to dream of it. But one can only dream if one has dulled one's consciousness. So the consciousness of youth must walk through the mechanical reality in a dulled state. Its hammer blows, its electric waves pierce into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are extra-human.

Spiritual science can be for souls that want to awaken. It does not just want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then it will be given to their freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe they are poets, but who are really just philistines, object: Take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak thus know not that dreams attain their full value only when illuminated by the light of waking. Mechanistic civilization does not bring the dreams of youth to their joyful revelation, but rather wears them down as they emerge, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can it be said here what the Youth Section wants to achieve. It will not publish a “programme”; it will not give an explanation of the “nature of youth”. It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience of the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew in life every day.

Immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since, young people living at the Goetheanum have expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first call, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood for what it is meant. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right “understanding”. Not the “understanding” of which I have spoken here, and which is lacking in youth, but the kind of understanding that is designated by the same word but is quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect but from the whole human being.

The longing of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can only be to feel a receptive enthusiasm. Then it may hope that the life force of spiritual science is sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to take. This board would like to live with young people in such a way that they can lead their youth towards old age in true humanity, because it believes that in doing so it is addressing what young people lack and long for with all their hearts.

(continued in the next issue).