The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Before the lecture Rudolf Steiner spoke to the audience regarding the Founding of the Dutch National Society. See GA 259]

We will use the time that is available for lectures at the Goetheanum between now and Christmas in such a way that those who are here in anticipation of the Christmas Meeting may absorb as much as possible of what the Anthroposophical Movement can convey to the hearts of men. Those who will be here until Christmas will therefore be able to bring their thoughts to bear upon what can still be given. I shall not deal with matters concerning the international Anthroposophical Society—that will be done at the meeting to be held shortly—but I shall try to formulate our studies in a way that will help to prepare the right mood of soul for the forthcoming Christmas Gathering. I shall therefore speak from a different point of view of a subject with which I have been dealing in recent weeks and I will begin by saying something about man’s life of soul, leading on from there to a survey of cosmic secrets.

Let us start from something quite straightforward and consider what happens in man’s life of soul if he practises self-mindfulness beyond the point I actually had in mind when I was writing the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly. These four articles can serve as an introduction to what we are now to study.

If we practise self-mindfulness thoroughly and comprehensively we shall realise how the life of soul can be enhanced and intensified. What happens in the first place is that we let the external world work upon us—as we have done from childhood onwards—and then we have thoughts which are the product of our inner world. Indeed, what makes us human beings in the real sense is that we allow the effects produced in us by the external world to live on further in our thoughts and are able to experience ourselves inwardly in these thoughts. We create a world of mental pictures which in a certain way reflects the impressions made upon us from outside. It is probably not very helpful to our inner life to ponder a great deal upon how the external world is reflected in our soul. By doing that we simply acquire a shadowy picture of the world of ideas within us. A better form of self-mindfulness is to concentrate on the activity itself, endeavouring to experience ourselves in tire actual element of thought without regard to the external world, pursuing in thought what came to us as impressions of the external world.

It will depend on a man’s particular nature whether he is then led more in the direction of abstract thoughts; he may or may not devise philosophical world-systems or make schedules of everything in existence. Another man who has reflected about things that have made an impression upon him and then goes on spinning thoughts, may be following certain fantasies. We will not go further into how this inner thinking without any external impressions takes its course according to a man’s temperament, character or other traits. We will rather make ourselves conscious of the fact that it is important, as far as our senses are concerned, to withdraw from the external world and live in our thoughts and mental pictures, developing them to further stages, often perhaps merely as possibilities.

Some people, of course, consider this unnecessary. Even in difficult times like the present you will often find people who are occupied with their business the whole day in order to provide all kinds of things required by the world, afterwards getting together in little groups to play cards, dominoes or similar games, in order—as is frequently said—to ‘pass the time away’. But it will not often happen that people come together in groups in order to exchange thoughts, for example, about what might have happened in connection with the day’s business if things had gone differently in one way or another. They would not find that as entertaining as playing cards, but they would at least have been carrying their thoughts to further stages. And if on such an occasion they also retained a healthy feeling for reality there is no reason why such thinking should end in fantasy.

This living in thoughts leads finally to what you will experience if you read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. If you read that book as it is meant to be read you will understand what it means to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is based upon experience of reality; but at the same time it was entirely the product of thinking. Hence you will find a fundamental tone in the book. I conceived it in the 1880’s and wrote it in the early 1890’s; but from men who at that time ought at least to have taken notice of the book, I was faced with misunderstanding everywhere. There is a particular reason for this: even those who are called thinkers today are unable to experience their thinking otherwise than as a picture of the outer physical world.

And then they say: perhaps something belonging to a superphysical world might arise in a man’s thinking but then this thinking which is acknowledged to be within him would have to be able to experience something supersensible outside him, in the sense that a table or chair are outside him. This was approximately Eduard von Hartmann’s conception of the function of thinking.

Then he comes across The Philosophy of Freedom. In that book the argument is that to experience thinking in the real sense means that a man can come to no other realisation than this: If you live in thinking in the real sense, you are living in the Cosmos even if, to begin with, somewhat diffusely. This connection in the most intimate experience of thinking with the secrets of the world-process is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Freedom. Hence the statement is made in the book that in thinking we grasp one corner of the whole world-mystery.¹

This may be putting it simply, but what is meant is that when a man experiences thinking in the real sense he no longer feels outside the mystery of world-existence but within it; he no longer feels outside the Divine but within the Divine. If he comprehends the reality of thinking within himself, he comprehends the Divine within himself.

This was the point that people could not grasp. For if a man really comprehends it, if he has made efforts to achieve this kind of thinking, he finds himself no longer within the world that was previously his, but he is now within the etheric world. It is a world of which he knows that it is not conditioned by any part of the physical Earth but by the whole cosmic sphere. He is within the etheric Cosmos, and he can no longer have any doubts about the law and order of this cosmic sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is understood in The Philosophy of Freedom. Etheric experience, as it may be called, has now been achieved and a notable step forward in life has been taken.

Let me characterise this step as follows.—Our thinking in ordinary consciousness is concerned with tables, chairs, human beings, of course, and so forth; we may think of other things too in the outside world. With our thinking we comprehend these things from the centre of our being. Everyone is aware that with his thinking he wants to comprehend the things of the world. But once you achieve the experience of thinking I described just now, you are not grasping the world; nor are you riveted in your ego. Something quite different happens. You get the feeling—and quite rightly—that with your thinking which is not localised in any particular place, you grasp everything inwardly. You feel you are making contact with the inner man. Just as in ordinary thinking you stretch your spiritual ‘feelers’ outwards, so with this thinking which experiences itself in itself, you are continually stretching inwards, into your own being. You become object, object to yourself.

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It is a very significant experience to realise that whereas hitherto it was always the world that you grasped, now, having this experience of thinking it is your own self you have to grasp. In the course of this firm grasp of your own self you come to realise that you have broken through your skin. You grasp yourself inwardly and in the same way you begin to grasp the whole world-ether from within, not of course in all its details but you know with certainty that this ether spreads over the whole cosmic sphere with which you are living together with stars, sun, moon, and so forth.

There is a second way in which a man can develop his life of soul. Instead of being wholly occupied with thoughts that are prompted from outside, he gives himself up to his memories. If he does this and makes the process an inner reality he will again have a quite definite experience. The experience of thinking I have just described to you does actually lead a man to his own self; he grasps his own self and this process gives him a certain satisfaction. But when he passes on to the experiencing of memories he will find, if he is inwardly active in the real sense, that the most striking feeling is not that of approaching his own self. That is what happens in the experience of thinking; and for that reason man will find freedom in the course of this thinking, a freedom which depends entirely upon the personal element in him. That is why a ‘philosophy of freedom’ must take its start from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience that a man finds his own self, finds his bearings as a free personality. This does not happen in the case of the memory experience. If a man proceeds with real earnestness, and is able to immerse himself entirely in the experience, he will have the feeling of being liberated from himself, of getting away from himself. That is why memories which enable the present to be forgotten are the most satisfying—I do not say they are always the best, but in many cases they are the most satisfying.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world, no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get right away from it. If you can waken memories which, as you give yourselves up to them, give you an enhanced feeling of life, this will be a preparation for what memory can ultimately become.

Memory can become more real if you recall with the greatest possible intensity something you actually experienced years or even decades ago. Suppose, for instance, you turn to a collection of old papers and take out letters you wrote on some particular occasion. You put these letters in front of you and let them carry you back into the past. Or it would be preferable not to take letters which you wrote yourself or which others wrote to you, because the subjective element would be too strong there. Try, rather, to get hold of your old schoolbooks, and peep into them as you did when you first went to school. In this way you can actually call back the past into your life. The effect is remarkable. If you do what I suggest you will entirely transform your present state of mind. You must exercise a little ingenuity here although almost anything will serve. For instance, a lady might come across a dress she has not worn for twenty years; she puts it on and is transported back into the conditions prevailing at that time. You must choose something that will bring the past with the greatest possible reality into the present. In this way you can separate yourself radically from your present experience.

With ordinary-level consciousness we are too close to ourselves in our actual experience to be able to make it into anything valuable. We must be able to stand at a distance from ourselves. Now a man is farther away from himself when he is asleep than when he is awake, for during sleep his astral body and ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies. You will be able to approach this astral body, which as I have said, is outside the physical body during sleep, if you summon up some past experience as vividly as possible into the present. You will probably not believe what I am telling you because you will be reluctant to attribute such significance to something as comparatively trivial as the awakening of past experiences by looking at an old dress. But just put it to the test, and if you succeed in conjuring up some past experience into the present so vividly that you are wholly engrossed in it and can be entirely oblivious of the present, you will find that you are drawing near to your astral body as it is in sleep.

But you will be mistaken if you think that all you have to do is to look right or left, and that you will see a shadowy form that is your astral body; that is not how things work. You must pay attention to what actually happens, which may for instance be that after such experiences you see the dawn and the sunrise very differently from hitherto. On this path you will gradually begin to feel the warmth of the dawn as something prophetic, having a kind of natural prophetic power. You will begin to feel the dawn as something spiritually forceful and that there is some connection between that power and an inner sense within yourself; and although at first you may regard it as an illusion, you will eventually feel that there is some relationship between the dawn and your own being. Through the experience I have described you will gradually come to feel, as you look at the dawn: this dawn does not leave me alone. There is an inner connection between my own being and the dawn. The dawn is a quality of my own soul. At this moment I am myself the dawn—If you have been able to unite yourself with the dawn in such a way that you experience its coloured radiance out of which the sun rises, in your very heart as a living feeling—then you will also feel that you are actually travelling across the heavens with the sun, that as I put it just now, the sun will not leave you alone, that it is not a case of you being here and the sun there, but that in a sense your existence stretches right up to that of the sun—in fact that you journey through the day in company with the fight.

If you develop this feeling, not out of thinking but out of memory in the way I described, if you can develop these experiences out of the power of memory, then you will find that things which you have perceived with your physical senses begin to look different, enabling spirit-and-soul to become manifest; when you have acquired the feeling of travelling with the sun, all the flowers in the field will look different to you. The flowers do not merely display the red or yellow colours on their surface; they begin to speak spiritually to your soul. The flower becomes transparent; a spiritual element in the flower begins to stir and the blossoming becomes a sort of speaking. In this way you are actually uniting your soul with external Nature. In this way you get the impression that there is something behind this Nature, that the light with which you are connected is borne by spiritual Beings. And in those spiritual Beings you gradually recognise the characteristics described by Anthroposophy.

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Let us look at the two stages of feelings which I have just been describing. The first feeling which can be brought by thinking inwardly experienced, is one of expansion. The feeling of being in a confined space ceases altogether. Your experience widens and you have a definite feeling that within your inner being there is a kernel which extends into the Cosmos and is of the same substance as the Cosmos. You feel at one with the etheric substance of the Cosmos. But when you are standing on the Earth you feel that your feet and legs are drawn down by the Earth’s force of gravity; you feel that your whole being is bound firmly to the Earth. At the moment when you have the experience of thinking you no longer feel bound to the Earth; you feel dependent upon the wide expanse of the cosmic sphere. You feel that everything comes inwards, not from below, as it were from the centre of the Earth upwards but from the cosmic expanse, the Universe. And you feel that to understand Man, this sense that something is streaming in from the cosmic expanse must be present.

This applies even to a true understanding of the human form. If I want to give expression to the human form in sculpture or in painting, I must picture to myself that only the lower part of the head proceeds from the inner bodily and spatial nature of man. I shall not be able to get the right spirit into the work unless I am able to convey the impression that the upper part of the head has been brought from outside. The lower part of the head must seem to have come from within outwards, but the upper from outside inwards.

If you looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola of the now destroyed Goetheanum, you will have seen that this principle was everywhere observed: the lower part of the face was always represented as having grown from within the human being and the upper part of the head as something given him from the Cosmos. This was particularly evident in times when these things were known. You will never understand the form of the head in a genuine Greek sculpture unless you associate this feeling with it, for it was out of similar feelings that the Greeks created their works of art.

And so in the Thinking experience you will feel yourself united with the surrounding Universe.

Now it might be imagined that this process would simply continue further outwards as you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience. But it is not so. If you succeed in developing within yourself the Thinking experience you will finally have the impression of the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you can picture man’s bodily experience here on Earth in the working of gravity or in the process of the digestion of foodstuffs, you can picture the conditions under which the Beings of the Third Hierarchy live if, through this Thinking experience, instead of trudging around the confines of Earth you feel yourself borne by forces coming to you from the ultimate boundary of the Cosmos.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy

Now if you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience it is not a matter of being able to reach this ultimate boundary of the cosmic spheres. You can, it is true, reach this boundary if you know the reality of the Thinking experience. But the Memory experience leads to a different result. Suppose, for example, you have here some object—a crystal or a flower or an animal. What happens when you pass from the Thinking experience to all that the Memory experience can offer, is that you can see right into the object.

The gaze which had extended to the ultimate boundary of the cosmic expanse, supplemented by the Memory experience, penetrates into the essence of things. You do not in that case press on into indefinite abstractions but this extended gaze perceives the spiritual quality in all things. For instance, it perceives the spiritual Beings who are active in the light, or the spiritual Beings who are active in the darkness. So we can say: the Memory experience leads us to the Second Hierarchy.

Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy

Now there is something in man’s life of soul which is not subject to the limitations of memory. Let us be clear about what it is. Memory gives our soul its special colouring. Suppose we come across a man who criticises everything adversely, who diffuses his own bitterness over everything we talk about, who whenever we tell him about something really beautiful, at once speaks of something unpleasant. In such a case we may know with certainty that this characteristic is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring.

But there is still something else. We may meet a man who faces us with an ironic sneer particularly when we say something to him, or he wrinkles his forehead or puts on a tragic expression. Or he may give us a friendly look so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by his look. When something important is said during a lecture it is interesting to give a momentary glance at the faces of the audience and see the ironic expressions on some lips, the foreheads with or without wrinkles, the blank or lively expressions on the faces. What is being expressed there is not merely memory that has persisted in the soul and gives the soul its colouring but something that has gone over from memory into a man’s physiognomy, into his different gestures, into his whole bearing. If a man takes in nothing, if his countenance betrays the fact that all the sufferings, sorrow and joy in his life have left him unimpressed, that too is characteristic. A face that has remained smooth and unlined, or one that is deeply furrowed by the tragedy or seriousness of life is as characteristic as one that expresses much happiness. In such cases, what otherwise remains part of the life of soul-and-spirit as the outcome of the power of memory has passed over into actual physical form. The effect is so strong that it is expressed outwardly in later life in a man’s gestures and physiognomy independently of his temperament which remains inward. For in old age we have not always the same temperament as we had in childhood. Our temperament in old age is often a result of what we have undergone in life and has become memory in the inner life of soul.

What enters into a man inwardly in this way, may again—though this is more difficult—become reality. It is comparatively easy to bring before the eyes of our soul something we experienced in childhood or perhaps many years ago, and so make the memory of it a fact. It is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament we had in childhood or in our earlier years. But the practice of such an exercise can bring results of immense significance. And even more is achieved if we can deepen this experience inwardly than if it is merely an external act.

Something can certainly be achieved in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty—naturally within the obvious limits in such circumstances—he plays the games he played in childhood, if he jumps as he did then, or even if he tries to make the same kind of face he made when, as an eight-year-old, his aunt gave him a sweet! If he can transpose himself back into the actual gesture or posture of that moment, again he will find that something is brought into his life whereby he is led to the conviction that the outer world is the inner world and the inner world is the outer world.

We can then penetrate with our whole being into a flower, for instance, and then, in addition to the Thinking experience and the Memory experience we have what I will call, in the truest sense, a Gesture experience. In this way we acquire an idea of how the spiritual is directly at work within the physical.

You cannot, with full consciousness, inwardly apprehend the gesture you made, perhaps twenty years ago in response to some outer provocation, without realising the union of the physical and the spiritual in all things. But then you will have arrived at the experience of the First Hierarchy.

Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

The Memory experience enables us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we confront it, and to feel and inwardly experience its glowing warmth. But with the Gesture experience, what confronts us in the dawn will unite with everything that can be experienced as colour or tone in the objective world.

When we simply look at the objects around us that are illumined by the sun, we see them as they can reveal themselves to the light. But the dawn changes when we pass gradually from the Memory experience to the Gesture experience.

The colour experience detaches itself entirely from materiality in any form; it becomes a living reality of soul-and-spirit, abandons the space in which the outer, physical dawn appears to us and the dawn begins to speak to us of the mystery of the connection of the Sun with the Earth. We experience how the Beings of the First Hierarchy work. If we still direct our gaze to the dawn and it still appears almost as it did during the Memory experience, we learn to recognise the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away; the colour becomes living being, becomes soul, becomes spirit, speaks to us of the relation of the Sun to the Earth as it was in the ancient Sun period, speaks to us in such a way that we experience the Cherubim. Finally, if with the enthusiasm and reverence aroused in us by this twofold revelation of the dawn, by the revelation of Thrones and Cherubim, we live onwards, there penetrates into us from the dawn, transformed now into living being, experience of the nature of the Seraphim.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy
Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy
Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

In all that I have been describing to you today, my aim has been to indicate how, by simply passing in the life of soul from Thinking to Gesture man can develop feelings in himself—to begin with no more than feelings—of the spiritual foundations of the Cosmos right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.

• 1. See Chapter III, entitled Thinking in the service of Knowledge.

I should like during these few days to say something rather especially for the friends who have come here to attend the Easter Course,¹ and who have not heard much of what has connections. Those who were present at the lectures before Easter may find some repetitions but the circumstances make this inevitable.

I have been laying particular emphasis on the fact that study of the historical development of the life of mankind must lead on to study of the human being himself. All our endeavours aim in the direction of placing man at the centre of our study of the world. Two ends are attained thereby. Firstly, it is only in this way that the world can be studied as it truly is. For all that man sees spread around him in nature is only a part—gives as it were one picture of the world only: and to limit study of the world to this realm of nature is like studying a plant without looking beyond root, green leaf and stem, and ignoring flower and fruit. This kind of study can never reveal the whole plant. Imagine a creature that is always born at a particular time of the year, lives out its life during a period when the plant grows as far as the green leaves and no further, dies before the plant is in blossom and appears again only when roots and green leaves are there.—Such a creature would never have knowledge of the whole plant; it would regard the plant as something that has roots and leaves only.

The materialistic mind of to-day has got itself into a similar position as regards its approach to the world. It considers only the broad foundations of life, not what blossoms forth from the totality of earthly evolution and earthly existence—namely, man himself. The real way of approach must be to study nature in her full extent, but in such a way as all the time to realise that she must needs create man out of herself. We shall then see man as the microcosm he truly is, as the concentration of all that is to be found outspread in the far spaces of the cosmos.

As soon, however, as we study history from this point of view, we are no longer able to regard the human being as a resultant of the forces of history, as a single, self-contained being. We must take account of the fact that he passes through different earthly lives: one such life occurs at an earlier time and another at a later. This very fact places man at the centre of our studies, but now in his whole being, as an individuality. This is the one end that is attained when we look in this way at nature and at history.

The other is this.—The very fact of placing man at the centre of study, makes for humility. Lack of humility is due to nothing else than lack of knowledge. A penetrating, comprehensive knowledge of man in his connection with the events of the world and of history will certainly not lead to excessive self-esteem; far rather it will lead the human being to look at himself objectively. It is precisely when a man does not know himself that there rise up in him those feelings which have their source in the unknown regions of his being. Instinctive, emotional impulses make themselves felt. And it is these instinctive, emotional impulses, rooted as they are in the subconscious, that make for arrogance and pride. On the other hand, when consciousness penetrates farther and farther into those regions where man comes to know himself and to recognise how in the sequence of historical events he belongs to the whole wide universe—then, simply by virtue of an inner law, humility will unfold in him. The recognition of his place in universal existence invariably calls forth humility, never arrogance. All genuine study pursued in Anthroposophy has its ethical side, carries with it an ethical impulse.

Unlike modern materialism, Anthroposophy will not lead to a conception of life in which ethics and morality are a mere adjunct; ethics and morality emerge, as if inwardly impelled, from all genuine anthroposophical study.

I want now to show you by concrete examples, how the fruits of earlier epochs of history are carried over into later epochs through human beings themselves. A certain very striking example now to be given, is associated with Switzerland.

Our gaze falls upon a man who lived about a hundred years before the founding of Christianity.—I am relating to you what can be discovered through spiritual scientific investigation.—At this period in history we find a personality who is a kind of slave overseer in southern Europe.

We must not associate with a slave overseer of those times the feelings that the word immediately calls up in us now. Slavery was the general custom in days of antiquity, and at the time of which I am speaking it was essentially mild in form; the overseers were usually educated men. Indeed the teachers of important personages might well be slaves, who were often versed in the literary and scientific culture of the time. So you see, we must acquire sounder ideas about slavery—needless to say, without defending it in the least degree—when we are considering this aspect of the life of antiquity.

We find, then, a personality whose calling it is to be in charge of a number of slaves and to apportion their tasks. He is an extraordinarily lovable man, gentle and kind-hearted and when he is able to have his own way he does everything to make life easier for the slaves. In authority over him, however, is a rough, somewhat brutal personality. This man is, as we should say nowadays, his superior officer. And this superior officer is responsible for many things that arouse resentment and animosity in the slaves. When the personality of whom I am speaking—the slave overseer—passes through the gate of death, he is surrounded in the time between death and a new birth by all the souls who were thus united with him on earth, the souls of the slaves who had been in his charge. But as an individuality he is very strongly connected with the one who was his superior officer. The fact that he, as the slave overseer, was obliged to obey this superior officer—for in accordance with the prevailing customs of the time he always did obey him, though often very unwillingly—this fact established a strong karmic tie between them. But a deep karmic tie was also established by the relationship that had existed in the physical world between the overseer and the slaves, for in many respects he had been their teacher as well.

We must thus picture a further life unfolding between death and rebirth among all these individualities of whom I have spoken.

Afterwards, somewhere about the 9th century A.D., the individuality of the slave overseer is born again, in Central Europe, but now as a woman, and moreover, because of the prevailing karmic connection, as the wife of the former superior officer who reincarnated as a man. The two of them live together in a marital relationship that makes karmic compensation for the tie that had been established away back in the first century before the founding of Christianity, when they had lived as subordinate and superior officers respectively. The superior officer is now, in the 9th century A.D., in a commune in Central Europe where the inhabitants live on very intimate terms with one another; he holds some kind of official position in the commune, but he is everyone's servant and comes in for plenty of knocks and abuse.

Investigating the whole matter further, we find that the members of this rather extensive commune are the slaves who once had their tasks allotted to them in the way I told you. The superior officer has now become as it were the servant of them all, and has to experience the karmic fulfilment of many things which, through the instrumentality of the overseer, his brutality inflicted upon these people.

The wife of this man (she is the reincarnated overseer), suffers with a kind of silent resignation under all the impressions made by the ever-discontented superior officer in his new incarnation, and one can follow in detail how karmic destiny is here being fulfilled.

But we see, too, that this karma is by no means completely adjusted. A part only is adjusted, namely the karmic relationship between the slave overseer and his superior officer. This has been lived out and is essentially finished in the medieval incarnation in the 9th century; for the wife has paid off what her soul had experienced owing to the brutality of the man who had once been the superior officer and is now her husband.

This woman, the reincarnation of the former slave overseer, is born again, and what happens now is that the greater number of the souls who had once been slaves and had then come together again in the large commune—souls in whose destiny this individuality had twice played a part—came again as the children whose education this same individuality in his new incarnation has deeply at heart. For in this incarnation he comes as Pestalozzi. And we see how Pestalozzi's infinite humanitarianism, his enthusiasm for education in the 18th century, is the karmic fulfilment in relation to human beings with whom he had already twice been connected—the karmic fulfilment of the experiences and the sufferings of earlier incarnations.

What comes to view in single personalities can be clear and objectively intelligible to us only when we are able to see the present earthly life against the background of earlier earthly lives.

Traits that go back not merely to the previous incarnation, but often to the one before that, and even earlier, sometimes show themselves in a man. We see how what has been planted, as it were, in the single incarnations, works its way through with a certain inner, spiritual necessity, inasmuch as the human being lives not only through earthly lives but also through lives between death and a new birth.

In this connection, the study of a life of which I spoke to those of you who were in Dornach before Easter, is particularly striking and interesting—the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer presents a very special enigma to those who study the inner aspect of his life and at the same time greatly admire him as a poet. There is such wonderful harmony of form and style in his poems that we cannot help saying: what lives in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer always hovers a little above the earthly—in respect of the style and also in respect of the whole way of thinking and feeling. And if we steep ourselves in his writings we shall perceive how he is immersed in an element of spirit-and-soul that is always on the point of breaking away from the physical body. Study the nobler poems, also the prose-poems, of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and you will say to yourselves: There is evidence of a perpetual urge to get right away from connection with the physical body. As you know, in his incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, it was his lot to fall into pathological states, when the soul-and-spirit separated from the physical body to a high degree, so much so that insanity ensued, or at any rate conditions resembling insanity. And the strange thing is that his most beautiful works were produced during periods when the soul-and-spirit had loosened from the physical body.

Now when we try to investigate the karmic connections running through the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, we are driven into a kind of confusion. We cannot immediately find our bearings. We are led, first, to the 6th century A.D., and then again we are thrown back into the 19th, into the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation. The very circumstances we are observing, mislead us. I want you to realise the extraordinary difficulty of a genuine search for knowledge in this domain. If you are satisfied with phantasy, then it is naturally easy, for you can make things fit in as you like. For one who is not satisfied with phantasy but carries his investigation to the point where he can rely upon the faculties of his own soul not to play him false—for him it is no easy matter, especially when he is investigating these things in connection with an individuality as complex as that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In investigating karmic connections through a number of earthly lives it is no great help to look at the particularly outstanding characteristics. What strikes you most forcibly in a man, what you see at once when you meet him or learn of him in history—these characteristics are, for the most part, the outcome of his earthly environment. A man as he confronts us is a product of his earthly environment to a far greater extent than is generally believed. He takes in through education what is present in his earthly environment. It is the more intangible, more intimate traits of a man which taken quite concretely, lead back through the life between death and a new birth into former earthly lives.

In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you—not so much what he answers but how he answers—whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.

The following may happen.—There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation—let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track.

Now in the case of an individuality like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the point of significance is that while he is creating his poems there is always a tendency to a loosening of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body. There we have a starting-point but at the same time a point where we may easily go astray.

We are led, as I told you, to the 6th century A.D. We have the feeling: that is where he belongs. And moreover we find a personality who lived in Italy, who experienced a very varied destiny in that incarnation in Italy, who indeed lived a kind of double existence. On the one side he was devoted with the greatest enthusiasm to an art that has almost disappeared in this later age, but was then in its prime; it is only in the remaining examples of mosaics that we are still able to glimpse this highly developed art. And the individuality to whom we are first impelled, lived in this milieu of art in Italy at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century A.D.—That is what presents itself, to begin with.

But now this whole picture is obscured, and again we are thrown back to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The darkness that obscures vision of the man of the 6th century now overshadows the picture of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th; and we are compelled to look very closely into what Conrad Ferdinand Meyer does in the 19th century.

Our attention is then drawn to the fact that his tale Der Heilige (The Saint), deals with Thomas à Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England. We feel that here is something of peculiar importance. And we also have the feeling that the impression received from the earlier incarnation has driven us up against this particular deed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. But now again we are driven back into the 6th century, and can find there no explanation of this. And so we are thrown to and fro between the two incarnations, the problematic one in the 6th century and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation—until it dawns upon us that the story of Thomas à Becket as told in history, came up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mind owing to a certain similarity with an experience he had himself undergone in the 6th century, when he went to England from Italy as a member of a Catholic mission sent by Pope Gregory. There we have the second aspect of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in his previous incarnation. On the one side he was an enthusiastic devotee of the art that subsequently took the form of mosaic.—Hence his talent for form, in all its aspects. On the other side, however, he was an impassioned advocate of Catholicism, and for this reason accompanied the mission. The members of this mission founded Canterbury, where the bishopric was then established.

The individuality who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was murdered by an Anglo-Saxon courtier, in circumstances that are extraordinarily interesting. There was something of legal subtlety and craftiness, albeit still in the rough, about the events connected at that time with the murder.

You know very well, my dear friends, how even in ordinary life the sound of something remains with you. You may once have heard a name without paying any particular attention to it ... but later on a whole association of ideas is called up in your mind when this name is mentioned. In a similar way, through the peculiar circumstances of this man's connection with what later became the archbishopric of Canterbury—the town of Canterbury, as I said, was founded by the mission of which he was a member—these experiences lived on, lived on, actually, in the sound of the name Canterbury. In the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation the sound of this name—Canterbury—came to life again, and by association of ideas his attention was called to Thomas à Becket, (the Lord Chancellor of Canterbury under Henry Plantagenet) who was treacherously murdered. At first, Thomas à Becket was a favourite of Henry II, but was afterwards murdered, virtually through the instigation of the King, because he would not agree to certain measures.

These two destinies, alike in some respects and unlike in others, brought it about that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer transposed, as it were, into quite different figures taken from history, what he had himself experienced in an earlier incarnation in the 6th century—experienced in his own body, far from what was at that time his native land. Just think how interesting this is! Once we have grasped it, we are no longer driven hither and thither between the two incarnations. And then, because again in the 19th century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has a kind of double nature, we see how his soul-and-spirit easily separates from the physical. Because he has this double nature, the place of his own, actual experiences is taken by another experience in some respects similar to it ... just as pictures often change in the play of human imagination. In a man's ordinary imagination during an earthly life, the picture changes in such a way that imagination weaves in freedom; in the course of many earthly lives it may be that some historical event which is connected with the person in question as a picture only, takes the place of the actual event.

Now this individuality whose experience in an earlier life worked on through two lives between death and rebirth and then came to expression in the story Thomas à Becket, the Saint,—this individuality had had another intermediate earthly life as a woman at the time of the Thirty Years' War. We have only to envisage the chaos prevailing all over Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and it will not be difficult to understand the feelings and emotions of an impressionable, sensitive woman living in the midst of the chaos as the wife of a pedantic, narrow-minded man. Wearying of life in the country that was afterwards Germany, he emigrated to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he left the care of house and home to his wife, while he spent his time sullenly loafing about. His wife, however, had opportunity to observe many, many things. The wider historical perspective, no less than the curious local conditions at Graubünden, worked upon her; the experiences she underwent, experiences that were always coloured by her life with the bourgeois, commonplace husband, again sank down into the foundations of the individuality, and lived on through the life between death and a new birth. And the experiences of the wife at the time of the Thirty Years' War are imaginatively transformed in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's tale, Jürg Jenatsch.

Thus in the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer we have something that has gathered together out of the details of former incarnations. As a man of letters, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer seems to be an individuality complete in itself, for he is an artist with very definite and fixed characteristics. But in point of fact it is this that actually causes confusion, because one's attention is immediately directed away from these very definite characteristics to the elusive, double nature of the man.

Those who have eyes only for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer the poet, the famous author of all these works, will never come to know anything of his earlier lives. We have to look through the poet to the man; and then, in the background of the picture, there appear the figures of the earlier incarnations.

Paradoxical as it will seem to the modern mind, the only way in which human life can be understood in its deeper aspect is to centre our study of the course of world-events around observation of man himself in history. And man cannot be taken as belonging to one age of time only, as living in one earthly life only. In considering man, we must realise how the individuality passes from one earthly life to another, and how in the interval between death and a new birth he works upon and transforms that which has taken its course more in the subconscious realm of earthly life but for all that is connected with the actual shaping of the destiny. For the shaping of destiny takes place, not in the clear consciousness of the intellect, but in what weaves in the subconscious.

Let me now give you another example of how things work over in history through human individualities themselves.

In the first century A.D., about a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, we have an exceedingly significant Roman writer in the person of Tacitus. In all his work, and very particularly in his ‘Germania’, Tacitus proves himself a master of a concise, clear-cut style; he arrays the facts of history and geographical details in wonderfully rounded sentences with a genuinely epigrammatic ring. We may also remember how he, a man of wide culture, who knew everything considered worth knowing at that time—a hundred years after the founding of Christianity—makes no more than a passing allusion to Christ, mentioning Him as someone whom the Jews crucified but saying that this was of no great importance. Yet in point of fact, Tacitus is one of the greatest Romans.

Tacitus had a friend, the personality known in history as Pliny the Younger, himself the author of a number of letters and an ardent admirer of Tacitus.

To begin with, let us consider Pliny the Younger. He passes through the gate of death, through the life between death and a new birth, and is born again in the 11th century as a Countess of Tuscany in Italy, who is married to a Prince of Central Europe. The Prince has been robbed of his lands by Henry the Black of the Frankish-Salic dynasty and wants to secure for himself an estate in Italy. This Countess Beatrix owns the Castle of Canossa where, later on, Henry IV, the successor of Henry III the Black, was forced to make his famous penance to Pope Gregory.

Now this Countess Beatrix is an extraordinarily alert and active personality, taking keen interest in all the conditions and circumstances of the time. Indeed she cannot help being interested, for Henry III who had driven her husband, Gottfried, out of Alsace into Italy before his marriage to her, continued his persecution. Henry is a man of ruthless energy, who overthrows the Princes and Chieftains in his neighbourhood one after the other, does whatever he has a mind to do, and is not content when he has persecuted someone once, but does it a second time, when the victim has established himself somewhere else.—As I said, he was a man of ruthless vigour, a ‘great’ man in the medieval style of greatness. And when Gottfried had established himself in Tuscany, Henry was not content with having driven him out but proceeded to take the Countess back with him to Germany.

All these happenings gave the Countess an opportunity of forming a penetrating view of conditions in Italy, as well as of those in Germany. In her we have a person who is strongly representative of the time in which she lives, a woman of keen observation, vitality and energy, combined with largeness of heart and breadth of vision.

When, later on, Henry IV was forced to go on his journey of penance to Canossa, Beatrix's daughter Mathilde had become the owner of the Castle. Mathilde was on excellent terms with her mother whose qualities she had inherited, and was, in fact, the more gifted of the two. They were splendid women who because of all that had happened under Henry III and Henry IV, took a profound interest in the history of the times.

Investigation of these personalities leads to this remarkable result: the Countess Beatrix is the reincarnated Pliny the Younger, and her daughter Mathilde is the reincarnated Tacitus. Thus Tacitus, a writer of history in olden times, is now an observer of history on a wide scale—(when a woman has greatness in her she is often wonderfully gifted as an observer)—and not only an observer but a direct participant in historical events. For Mathilde is actually the owner of Canossa, the scene of issues that were immensely decisive in the Middle Ages. We find the former Tacitus now as an observer of history.

A deep intimacy develops between these two—mother and daughter—and their former work in the field of authorship enables them to grasp historical events with great perspicacity; subconsciously and instinctively they become closely linked with the world-process, as it takes its course in nature as well as in history.

And now, still later on, the following takes place.—Pliny the Younger, who in the Middle Ages was the Countess Beatrix, is born again in the 19th century, in a milieu of romanticism. He absorbs this romanticism—one cannot exactly say with enthusiasm, but with aesthetic pleasure. He has on the one hand this love for the romantic, and on the other—due to his family connections—a rather academic style; he finds his way into an academic style of writing. It is not, however, in line with his character. He is always wanting to get out of it, always wanting to discard this style.

This personality (the reincarnated Pliny the Younger and the Countess Beatrix) happens on one occasion brought about by destiny, to be visiting a friend, and takes up a book lying on the table, an English book. He is fascinated by its style and at once feels: The style I have had up till now and that I owe to my family relationships, does not really belong to me. This is my style, this is the style I need. It is wonderful; I must acquire it at all costs.

As a writer he becomes an imitator of this style—I mean, of course, an artistic imitator in the best sense, not a pedantic one—an imitator of this style in the artistic, aesthetic sense of the word. And do you know, the book he opened at that moment, reading it right through as quickly as he possibly could and then afterwards reading everything he could find of the author's writings—this book was Emerson's Representative Men. And the person in question adopted its style, immediately translated two essays from it, conceived a deep veneration for the author, and was never content until he was able to meet him in real life.

This man, who really only now found himself, who for the first time found the style that belonged to him in his admiration for the other—this reincarnation of Pliny the Younger and of the Countess Beatrix, is none other than Herman Grimm. And in Emerson we have to do with the reincarnated Tacitus, the reincarnated Countess Mathilde.

When we observe Herman Grimm's admiration for Emerson, when we remember the way in which Herman Grimm encounters Emerson, we can find again the relationship of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. In every sentence that Herman Grimm writes after this time, we can see the old relationship between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus emerging. And we see the admiration that Pliny the Younger had for Tacitus, nay more, the complete accord and understanding between them, coming out again in the admiration with which Herman Grimm looks up to Emerson.

And now for the first time we shall grasp wherein the essential greatness of Emerson's style consists, we shall perceive that what Tacitus displayed in his own way, Emerson again displays in his own special way. How does Emerson work? Those who visited Emerson discovered his way of working. There he was in a room; around him were several chairs, several tables. Books lay open everywhere and Emerson walked about among them. He would often read a sentence, imbibe it thoroughly and from it form his own magnificent, free-moving, epigrammatic sentences. That was how he worked. There you have an exact picture of Tacitus in life! Tacitus travels, takes hold of life everywhere; Emerson observes life in books. It all lives again!

And then there is this unconquerable desire in Herman Grimm to meet Emerson. Destiny leads him to Representative Men and he sees at once: this is how I must write, this is my true style. As I said, he had already acquired an academic style of writing from his uncle Jacob Grimm and his father Wilhelm Grimm, and he then abandons it. He is impelled by destiny to adopt a completely different style.

In Herman Grimm's writings we see how wide were his historical interests. He has an inner relationship of soul with Germany, combined with a deep interest in Italy. All this comes out in his writings.

These are things that go to show how the affairs of destiny work themselves out. And how is one led to perceive such things? One must first have an impression and then everything crystallizes around it. Thus we had first to envisage the picture of Herman Grimm opening Emerson's Representative Men. Now Herman Grimm used to read in a peculiar manner. He read a passage and then immediately drew back from what he had read: it was a gesture as though he were swallowing what he had read, sentence by sentence. And it was this inner gesture of swallowing sentence by sentence that made it possible to trace Herman Grimm to his earlier incarnation. In the case of Emerson it was the walking to and fro in front of the open books, as well as the rather stiff, half-Roman carriage of the man, as Herman Grimm saw him when they first met in Italy—it was these impressions that led one back from Emerson to Tacitus. Plasticity of vision is needed to follow up things of this kind.

My dear friends, I have given you here another example which should indicate how our study of history needs to be deepened. This deepening must really be evident among us as one of the fruits of the new impulse that should take effect in the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must in future go bravely and boldly forward to the study of far-reaching spiritual connections; we must have courage to reach a vantage-point for observation of these great spiritual connections. For this we shall need, above all, deep earnestness. Our life in Anthroposophy must be filled with earnestness.

And this earnestness will grow in the Anthroposophical Society if those who really want to do something in the Society give more and more thought to the contents of the News Sheet that is sent out every week into all circles of Anthroposophists as a supplement to the weekly periodical, Das Goetheanum. A picture is given there of how one may shape the life in the Groups in the sense and meaning of the Christmas Meeting, of what should be done in the members' meetings, how the teaching should be given and studied. The News Sheet is also intended to give a picture of what is happening among us. Its title is: ‘What is going on in the Anthroposophical Society’, and its aim is to bring into the whole Society a unity of thought, to spread a common atmosphere of thought over the thousands of Anthroposophists everywhere. When we live in such an atmosphere, when we understand what it means for all our thinking to be stimulated and directed by the ‘Leading Thoughts’, and when we understand how the Goetheanum will thus be placed in the centre as a concrete reality through the initiative of the esoteric Vorstand—I have emphasised again and again that we now have to do with a Vorstand which conceives its task to be the inauguration of an esoteric impulse—when we understand this truly, then that which has now to flow through the Anthroposophical Movement will be carried forward in the right way. For Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society must become one. The Anthroposophical Society must make the whole cause of Anthroposophy its own.

And it is true to say that if once this ‘thinking in common’ is an active reality, then it can also become the bearer of comprehensive, far-reaching spiritual knowledge. A power will come to life in the Anthroposophical Society that really ought to be in it, for the recent developments of civilisation need to be given a tremendous turn if they are not to lead to a complete decline.

What is said concerning successive earthly lives of this or that individual may at first seem paradoxical, but if you look more closely, if you look into the progress made by the human beings of whom we have spoken in this connection, you will see that what is said is founded on reality; you will see that we are able to look into the weaving life of gods and men when with the eye of spirit we try in this way to apprehend the spiritual forces.

This, my dear friends, is what I would lay upon your hearts and souls. If you take with you this feeling, then this Easter Meeting will be like a revitalising of the Christmas Meeting; for if the Christmas Meeting is to work as it should, then all that has developed out of it must be the means of revitalising it, of bringing it to new life just as if it were present with us.

May many things grow out of the Christmas Meeting, in constant renewal! May many things grow out of it through the activity of courageous souls, souls who are fearless representatives of Anthroposophy. If our meetings result in strengthening courage in the souls of Anthroposophists, then there will grow what is needed in the Society as the body for the Anthroposophical soul: a courageous presentation to the world of the revelations of the Spirit vouchsafed in the age of Light that has now dawned after the end of Kali-Yuga; for these revelations are necessary for the further evolution of man. If we live in the consciousness of this we shall be inspired to work courageously. May this courage be strengthened by every meeting we hold. It can be so if we are able to take in all earnestness things that seem paradoxical and foolish to those who set the tone of thought in our day. But after all, it has often happened that the dominant tone of thought in one period was soon afterwards replaced by the very thing that was formerly suppressed. May a recognition of the true nature of history, and of how it is bound up with the onward flow of the lives of men, give courage for anthroposophical activity—the courage that is essential for the further progress of human civilisation.

• 1. Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery-Wisdom of Man. (on-line as: The Easter Festival in Relation to the Mysteries) Dornach, 19th–22nd April, 1924.

This lecture is the third lecture in the lecture series entitled, The Karma of Human Vocation as related to Goethe's Life. It was later published in the lecture series, The Karma of Human Vocation.

All of these lectures are tending more or less to the central question of man's calling or profession. Some people may think that the study of this question from the spiritual-scientific point of view is one of the least interesting subjects. But it is not so,—especially not in this present period, the 5th post-Atlantean. For in this period all the conditions in which men live will very largely be changed, as against the conditions that obtained in former periods on Earth. And for this change, man himself, out of his freedom, will have to bring with him more than he brought with him in former times, when his allotted task in earthly evolution worked itself out more or less instinctively, and the direction he had to take in one respect or another was suggested to him, as it were, from a higher source.

Let us look back for instance to the Egypto-Chaldean civilization, or any other civilization of former times. As to the forming of his outer destiny, not nearly so much was left in man's own hands as is the case to-day (and it will be more and more so in the future). In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch each man had his station—his rank in life—and was fastened in it (albeit not so firmly), much like an animal is fixed within its species. Thus many things that come within the scope of human freedom to-day did not do so in the past. There was, however, a certain counterpoise to this restriction of man's freedom in olden times. Our external historians think in a very short-sighted way. People often imagine that it was in olden times as it is to-day; that the leaders of human affairs were inspired by mere human impulses like the leading personalities of our day and generation. But you must remember that in the Mysteries of olden time there were quite definite procedures whereby the leaders informed themselves of the will and intention—not of earthly Beings, but of the Beings who guide this earthly life from realms beyond the Earth. I have told you how the high priest's conducted certain ceremonies of the Mysteries at certain seasons—we need not describe them again in detail now. The purport of the ceremony was, as it were, to place into connection with the Cosmos—with processes beyond the Earth—chosen individuals within the temple-service. For then, into the consciousness of these chosen individuals—who were especially suited to receive Their influence—Beings who guided the Earth from regions far beyond, could work. What the priests thus received of the will of the guiding spiritual Beings, this they accepted as instruction for the measures which they had to take. We may illustrate it by a hypothetical assumption,—though of cour.se in our time things are not done in this way. Let us suppose that our Christmas festival did not take its course as it does to-day, where it remains for most people a more or less external festivity. Let us suppose we were aware throughout the Christmas festival: ‘During the Christmas Season, our Earth as a living Being is peculiarly adapted to receive into its aura Ideas which cannot enter the Earth's aura at other seasons—in summer time for instance.’ I have explained how the Earth is awake during the winter season. One of the brightest points of this awakeness is the time of Christmas. At this time the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts. At this time the Earth is meditating on the surrounding Universe, just as we human beings in our day-waking Life meditate in thought upon the things that surround us. In summer the Earth is asleep. In summer, therefore, certain Thoughts cannot be found in the Earth. In winter it is awake,—and most radiantly of all at the time of Christmas. For then the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts, and in these Thoughts we may read what the Cosmos requires of our earthly happenings.

Certain human beings had to undergo an individual training, so as to become sensitive and receptive to what was living in the Earth's aura. The priests of the sacrifice who trained them were then able, as it were, at certain moments to connect them in the temples with these Thoughts of the Earth, which voiced the cosmic Will. So were the priests enabled to find out the cosmic Will. According to what they thus discovered as the ‘Will of Heaven,’ they could then determine who was to remain within a certain tribe, or who should be received within the Mysteries, thereafter to assume a leading place in statecraft or priesthood.

Mankind has grown out of all these things. Mankind, in a certain sense, is handed over to chaos in this respect. Of that we must be well aware. The transition from these old and definite conditions, when men discovered from the Will of Gods what should take place here on the Earth, took place throughout the fourth post-Atlantean period. For in that period the human individuality was emancipating itself, so to speak, from the cosmic Will, and the old customs gradually passed over into our present, somewhat chaotic conditions. Everything is tending to be placed more into the hands of man. But it is all the more necessary for the Will of the Cosmos to enter into our earthly conditions in a new way. Even in the Egyptian and Babylonian period of civilization (the 3rd post-Atlantean), that which works and weaves into the earthly realm out of the several human trades and callings was to a high degree an image of the cosmic will. It would take us a long time to explain this, but we might well do so. It was brought about in the way above described. But in the course of the 4th post-Atlantean time, all this was growing vague and confused, and it became utterly so during the present time (the 5th post-Atlantean) which, as you know, began about the 15th century. It is a pity the people of to-day do not observe what really happens. It is a pity they dish up a fable convenue in place of real History. If they were more observant they would recognize, even from the outer facts, to how large an extent everything has changed since the 14th and 15th centuries in the living-together of men in their several callings. And from the present conditions they would then perceive how increasingly different these things will become in future. Truly a kind of anarchy would overwhelm the human race if there were no-one to perceive these deeper relationships, and communicate to the spiritual life of man on Earth ideas which can reckon with these changes. For the changes are inherent in the very course of evolution.

Anyone who has a real feeling for human life would be astonished to discover all that is observable even in outer History, in the rise of the modern life of callings and vocations, since the 15th century. Anyone who really let work upon him what is quite recognisable even in this way, would assuredly reproach himself with having lived so sleepily, without giving a thought to what is connected so profoundly with the evolving destinies of mankind.

Now as I pointed out in our last lecture, the life of human callings and professions is by no means without meaning for the cosmic whole, though at first sight if might appear so. We human beings, as I said, have undergone successively the Saturn evolution (when the first plan of the physical human body was prepared), the Sun epoch (when the etheric man was prepared), the Moon epoch (when the astral man was prepared), and we are now undergoing the Earth epoch, during which the Ego is growing and developing. These will be followed by others—the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan epochs. And we may say: As the Earth is the fourth stage from Saturn, so is Vulcan the fourth stage from Earth. Earth is, in a manner speaking, the Saturn of Vulcan. The processes that took place on old Saturn are intimately connected with our evolution, for we owe to them the first plan and beginning of our physical body, which is still working in us. So likewise on the present Earth, something must take place, which, working on in evolution, will attain on Vulcan a fourth stage of development, even as the processes on Saturn have attained a fourth stage of development during the Earth epoch. Moreover, as I showed you, these processes which will correspond on Vulcan to what we have on Earth from Saturn evolution, are none other than what lives and works in the varied callings which men take up upon Earth. Men upon Earth are working at their several callings, and as they do so there evolves on Earth, within their work, something which is a first beginning for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was a first beginning for the physical human body of to-day.

Consider now in this connection the tremendous change which the life of callings and professions has undergone since the fifth post-Atlantean age began. Then you will realise how increasingly necessary it will be to place the life of human callings into the whole course of cosmic evolution, thinking of it from the points of view which spiritual science can evolve. We must first acquaint ourselves with the objective aspects of the vocational life of man. Only then can we arrive at true conceptions of the Karma of vocation. And we must be still more interested in the present tendencies of evolution in this respect. For the tendencies which are at work will give us a clearer idea than the actual conditions which prevail to-day.

Further developments in this respect will lead to the several callings growing more and more specialised and differentiated. This we can easily recognise, if only we look out into the world to-day with common sense. People to-day sometimes speak critically of this increasing specialisation of callings and occupations in modern time. But there is little wisdom in such criticism. ‘Not many centuries ago,’ they say, ‘man at his daily work was still able to see the connection of the thing he made with its use and meaning for the world. He had an intimate vision of what would become of his product in the lives of men.’ So indeed it was in former times, while to-day, for the majority of men, it is no longer so.

Take a radical instance. Destiny places a man into a factory. Maybe he does not even make a nail, but only part of a nail, which another man will then piece together with a different part. He cannot develop any real interest in the way in which, what he has manufactured from early morning till late evening, will place itself into the whole nexus of human life. Compare the former handicrafts with the present factory system. There is a radical difference between what now obtains and what existed not so very long ago. Moreover, what has already taken place to a high degree in certain branches of work will take place more and more. Increasing specialization and differentiation will inevitably come into the life and work of men. Really it is not very wise to criticise the fact. It is a necessity of evolution and it will come about, more and more. There is no escaping it.

What sort of a prospect does this open up? This prospect, we might imagine: Men would increasingly lose interest in that which occupies the greater part of their lives. They would be more or less mechanically given up to their work in the external world. And yet, that is not even the most important aspect. For it goes without saying that the outer habit of man's life must affect his inner being—and that is far more important. Study once more the historic evolution of mankind and you will find to what a degree men have become the impress of their several occupations during the 5th post-Atlantean age. Man's occupation works its way down into his inner soul. The human beings themselves grow specialised. You must not adopt as your standard the majority of those who are now living in the Anthroposophical Society. For many of these are in the happy position to be able to sever themselves from the whole complex of modern life. In the happy position, did I say? ... I might equally well have said, in the unhappy position. For to a large extent it is happiness only for our subjective, selfish human feeling; not for the World at large. The World will more and more require men to do good work in special spheres. The World itself will require men to specialise. More and more, therefore, this will be the question: What is to happen alongside of the specialising of men? They will specialize; the necessities of World-evolution will see to that, quickly enough. But what must happen in addition?

In a none too distant future this will become one of the most important ‘family questions,’ and people will need an understanding of it if they want to educate their children. They will need to place themselves intelligently into the whole course and trend of human evolution when the question comes before them: How shall I place my child into this human evolution? It will depend on their large-minded understanding of this question. Today, out of a certain sloppiness of thought, it may still be possible to adhere to the old phrases which are a mere relic of former times and will soon reveal their emptiness—pretty phrases, which so many people still admire: ‘Observe the child's predisposition. Let him take up what accords with his native talents.’ This above all will soon be proved—an empty phrase. For in the first place, as we shall presently see, those who are born into the world henceforth will be related to their former incarnations in a far more complicated way than in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The whole system of predispositions will be of a complexity hitherto unknown.

Predispositions were simpler in former times. We shall live and learn, ... and as to those who think themselves peculiarly wise in examining the talents and predispositions of adolescent children and declaring them fit for this or that calling, we shall soon discover that such insight is often no more than the fantastic imaginings of men who think themselves too clever. And apart from that, the life of men will in the none too distant future grow so complicated that the word ‘calling’ will assume quite another meaning. To-day, when we speak of ‘calling,’ or ‘vocation,’ we still often think of something inwardly determined; But in reality most people's ‘calling’ is no longer so. We speak of ‘calling’; we imagine: ‘That to which the man is called by virtue of his inner qualities.’ Well, let us inquire objectively, especially in the towns and cities. How many people will answer, I am in my calling because I recognise that this is the only one which answers to my talents and predispositions from a child. Of the town populations, at any rate, a very small proportion will reply that they are in the very calling which answers to their talents. I think, from your own observations of life, you will scarcely believe that it is otherwise. To-day already, in a high degree, our ‘calling’ is that to which we are called by the objective course of evolution of the World. It will be more and more so in future. Outside, in the outer World, is the organism, the complex, or if you will, the machine,—it matters not how you name it—which makes its demands on man, i.e., which ‘calls’ him.

All this will become more and more intensified. Nevertheless, in this very process, what mankind achieves in vocational work is loosed from the man himself and grows more objective. And precisely inasmuch as it is thus severed from man, it will increasingly become what in the further development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will undergo a similar process to what was undergone for the Earth through Saturn, Sun and Moon.

It is strange. When as a spiritual scientist one speaks of things that touch the life of man so nearly, one cannot generally speak so as to please. Spiritual Science will be less and less exposed to the danger of speaking after the pattern of that ‘wisdom’ which is expressed in the quotation: ‘At most a deed of State with excellent pragmatic maxims, suitable for puppets to declaim.’ On the contrary, Spiritual Science will often be obliged to declare great and fraught with meaning for World-evolution, precisely the things which human beings would not gladly have. Many a person of today—who thinks himself a man of genius because his head is filled with modern, Philistine ideas,—may say of these things, ‘How prosaic and external!’ To a true Spiritual Science the vocational life of man appears in quite a different light. Spiritual Science must say: The vocational life is necessary for the development of relationships which have a cosmic meaning, precisely inasmuch as it is in a certain measure loosed and separated from human interest.

Some will say, perhaps: ‘What a sad perspective for the future! Man is having to enter the treadmill of life more and more; and not even Spiritual Science can give him comfort at this prospect.’ But to draw this conclusion would again be a great mistake. For in the Universe it is so: things work themselves out through a balancing of polar opposites. You need only think how it forces itself on your attention everywhere. Positive and negative electricity produce their effects in the balancing-out of their mutual relation; they are necessary one to another. The male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. In World-evolution the totality evolves out of one-sidednesses.

And this, too, underlies the matter we have just explained. In the vocational work which is severed from the human being, we have to create the first cosmic beginnings of a far-reaching World-evolution. All that happens in World-evolution stands in relation to the spiritual; and in all that we do in trades and callings and professions—whether by manual or by so-called mental work—there lies as it were the starting-point for the incorporation of spiritual beings. Now, during earthly time, the.se beings are still of an elemental kind—we might call them elemental of the fourth degree. But when the Jupiter evolution has arrived, they will be elementals of the third degree, ... and so on. The work we do, precisely in the objective process of our callings, is severed from us and becomes the outer garment, the outer vehicle, for elemental beings who will develop on through cosmic evolution. Yet this will happen only under one condition. On the one hand we must say: We are only beginning to understand the meaning of what is so often maligned as the mere prosaic life. Yet at the same time we must realise that the meaning of it will not be fully unveiled till we understand it as a whole, in the great World-connection. What we create in our daily occupations can indeed gain significance for Vulcan evolution. But to this end another thing is necessary. As positive electricity is needed for negative, and male for female, so, too, an opposite pole is needed, to add to these occupational activities which will more and more be loosed and severed from mankind. Such polarity, depending upon contrasts, existed already in former evolutionary epochs of mankind. It is not altogether new, needless to say; something not unlike it was already there before. But as you look back on former periods of culture—even a few centuries ago—you will find things very different. For with his feelings, even his passions—his whole emotional life, in a word,—man was far more engaged in his daily occupation than he can be to-day. Compare the many joys a man could have in his calling-, even a hundred years ago, with all the unhappy drudgery which many a one to-day already has to undergo if he has nothing else in life beside his calling. Then you will gain an idea of what I mean. Such things are far too little considered nowadays, and for a simple reason: Those who do most of the talking about vocations—about the different kinds and characters and choices of vocation—are generally people for whom it is easy enough to talk: schoolmasters, litterateurs and parsons, people who experience least of all the disadvantages of modern vocational life. To hear people talk in the usual literature of to-day (not excluding that on education) one generally feels, they are like blind people talking about colours. For a man of to-day, who with a certain social background went to public school, and then, maybe, looked around him a little at some University, it is easy enough to¹ feel very clever when he sets himself up as a reformer of mankind and knows how all things should be done. For he has absorbed all manner of ideas. There are many such reformers; but to anyone who sees through life, these people who tell us how things should be done generally appear the most foolish of all. Their foolishness only passes unobserved, because, for the moment, there is still a great respect for those who have undergone such education. The time is yet to come, when it will rather be the prevailing feeling that a litterateur, a journalist, a schoolmaster—trained in the way schoolmasters generally are nowadays—understands least of all of the real facts of life. This, too, must gradually become the prevailing judgment.

The point is now, that we should see more clearly: The vocational life of former times was connected with the emotional life of men, and it is of the very essence of evolution in this respect that the vocational life has grown out of the human life of emotions and will do so more and more in future. Hence, too, the opposite pole, which the vocational life requires, must become different from what it was before. What was it in former times? You have it before you still when you observe with sympathy what has to-day become a more or less outer husk of culture (and will inevitably become so more and more). There are the houses in the village, wherein the several trades and callings are pursued, gathered around the Church. The Church in the centre. Six days of the week are devoted to trade and craft and calling, and Sunday to what the human being shall receive only for his soul. Such were the two poles before: the vocational life and the life in religious thoughts.

It would be the greatest possible mistake to suppose that this other pole can remain to-day as the religious societies and sects imagine. It cannot remain as it now is, for it is altogether adapted to a kind of vocational life which is bound up with the human emotions. All human life would be parched and stunted if an insight into these matters did not now arise. The old religious ideas were to some extent sufficient so long as the elemental spirituality which man created at his calling—for he did create elemental spirituality in the above-described sense—did not sever itself from man. To-day, they are no longer sufficient, and they will be less and less so the farther we go on into the future. What is necessary now is the very thing which is most attacked in certain quarters. There must now enter into human evolution the other pole which will consist in this: Men must be able to form clear and detailed ideas about the Spiritual Worlds.

The existing representatives of religious faiths will often say, ‘There goes Spiritual Science, talking of many Spirits, many Gods. One God is all that matters. Is not one God enough?’ To-day one can still make a certain impression by telling people of the great advantage of reaching out to the one God—especially if one does so at the family tea party, pouring derision on ‘these modern movements,’ and putting the thing forward in a more than usually Philistine and self-sufficient way. Nevertheless, it is essential that the points of view of men grow wider. Humanity must learn to know not only that everything is permeated by one Divine Spirituality (conceived as vaguely as possible), but that Spirituality is everywhere—concrete, detailed Spirituality. The workman who stands at the lathe will have to know: As the sparks fly out, so too are the elemental spirits created, who then pass out into the World-process and have their significance in the World-process. Some who believe themselves unduly clever may reply: ‘That is unwise; the elemental spirits will arise, even if one who has no notion of it is standing at the lathe.’ They will arise, no doubt. But the point is, that they should arise in the right way. The point is not that they must arise at all, but that they should arise in the right way. For there may either arise elemental spirits who disturb the cosmic process, or who serve it.

You will best see what I mean if you consider it in one especial sphere. In all these matters, we are now at the beginning of an evolution which stands directly at our doors. Many a man is beginning already now to divine something of it. If it were translated into reality without passing over at once into spiritual-scientific strivings, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the Earth. For what has chiefly happened during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is this: Man has been loosed, to begin with, from the outer inorganic world which he embodies in his tools. He will be brought together again with what he embodies in his tools. Nowadays, many machines are constructed. It goes without saying, the machines today are objective. There is little of the human element in them as yet. But it will not always be so. The tendency of World-evolution is for a connection to arise between what a man is and what he creates—what he produces. This connection will become more and more intimate. It will emerge to begin with in those spheres on which a closer relationship between man and man is founded—in the treatment of chemical substances for instance, when they are worked up into medicines. People today may still believe that a substance consists of sulphur and oxygen and hydrogen and what-not besides; and that the product of combination will only contain the effects that proceed from the several substances combined. To-day, to a large extent, this is still true; but the tendency of World-evolution is in another direction altogether. Intimate pulsations which are inherent in man's life of will and feeling, will more and more be woven and incorporated in that which he produces. It will no longer be a matter of indifference whether we receive a preparation from one man or another.

Even the coldest and most external technical developments are tending in a very definite direction. He to-day who can divine with his imagination future technical developments, is well aware that in the time to come whole factories will work in an individual way according to the manager. The spirit, the mood and outlook of the man will go into the factory and be transmitted to the way in which the machines work. Thus man will grow together with the objective things. All that we touch will by and by bear the impress of human being. Humanity will learn, however foolish it may yet appear to the clever people. (Did not St. Paul already say, What men hold wise is often foolish before God?) The times are coming when a machine will stand there and remain at rest. A human being will approach it, knowing that he must make one movement of the hand in this way, another in a definite relation to it, and a third again; and through the pulsations in the air which thus arise out of a certain sign, the motor, being attuned to this particular sign, will be set in motion.

Then the development of economic life will assume an aspect such that external patents and the like will be out of the question; for the effect of these things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Moreover, anything that has no relation at all to human nature will be excluded, and a quite definite result will be made possible. Imagine at some future time a really good man, highly evolved in his whole mood and outlook. He will be able to construct machines and to determine signs for them—signs which can only be made by men of a like spirit, men who are also good like himself. While all who are evilly disposed will, if they try to use the sign, create a quite different pulsation and the machine will not work.

It was not for nothing that I told you how certain people can see flames dance under the influence of certain notes. If further researches are made in this direction, the way will presently be found to what I have just indicated. Or, as we might also put it, the way will be found again to those old times when the one alchemist, who only wanted money for his purse, could attain nothing, where, with the very same process, another one who did not want to put money in his purse but desired to enact a sacrament in honour of the Gods and for the healing of Mankind, succeeded.

So long as the product of the daily work of men carried the aura of their emotions—of the joy and gladness which they put into their work—it was inaccessible to the kind of influence which I have just described. But now that the work done by the labour of men at their several vocations can no longer be produced with special enthusiasm, what thus goes out from men will be able to become a motive force—and in like measure. In a certain sense, man is giving back, to the world of machines which proceed from his labour or which serve his labour, its chastity and purity, inasmuch as he can no longer connect it with his emotions. In future it will no longer be possible, so to speak, from the glowing hearth of joyful work at one's vocation to endow the things one makes with one's own human warmth. But on the other hand one will place them into the world more chastely, and thereby also make them more receptive to the motor force, which, as above described—proceeding from man himself—will be destined by man for the several objects. But to give human evolution this direction, detailed knowledge is necessary of the spiritual forces which can be investigated only by Spiritual Science. Only in this way can it come about. For such a thing to happen as we have just described, depends upon a larger number of people in the world finding increasingly the other pole. For in this they will find their way to one another—from man to man—in those interests which, though they go beyond our daily work, our callings, can nevertheless illumine and penetrate them through and through. Life in the spiritual-scientific movement can lay the foundations of a united human life which will lead all the vocations together. Purely external progress in the development of the vocations would soon lead to the dissolution of all bonds of humanity. Men would understand one another less and less; they could unfold less and less of those relations that accord with the true human nature. Increasingly, they would pass one another by, seeking no longer any more than their advantage. They would come into no other relation to one another than that of competition. This must not be allowed to happen, for otherwise the human race would fall into utter decadence. Spiritual Science must be spread in order that this may not be so.

But there is the possibility to describe in the right way what many people—though they may deny it—are striving for unconsciously to-day. You know how many there are nowadays who say, ‘To talk of the spiritual—what antiquated nonsense! We will develop the purely physical sciences in all domains. That is the real advancement of mankind. Once men grow beyond the stage of talking antiquated nonsense about spiritual things, then there will be as it were the Paradise on Earth.’ But it would not be Paradise, it would be Hell on Earth if the human race were dominated by no more than competition and the acquisitive impulse, with this as the balancing and equalising principle. After all, if things are to go on at all, there must be another pole; and if people refuse to look for the spiritual pole, then perforce they must have an Ahrimanic one. When human occupations grow more and more specialised, we might, after all, still have this unifying principle. We could say, ‘The one man is this, the other that, but they all have this much in common; each one desires through his calling to earn, to gain as much as possible. That is what makes all people equal.’ No doubt! But it is purely Ahrimanic principle.

To imagine that the world can manage with a one-sided development, advancing purely on external lines as we have here described it, would be precisely the same in this sphere as if someone were to declare (for let us assume that there was such a queer crank—or shall we say, for politeness, ‘lady-crank’): ‘Men have become worse and worse and worse; they are quite impossible people; they ought to be exterminated. Then only shall we have the right kind of evolution on the physical plane.’ She would be a queer crank, would she not, who imagined this, for nothing at all would be the result if all the men were exterminated. Because it is in the world of the senses, people understand this. In the Spiritual World they fail to understand the corresponding ‘crankiness.’ And yet, for spiritual things it is precisely the same when anyone imagines that external evolution can go forward by itself. It cannot.

Just as the former periods of evolution demanded the abstract religions, so does the evolution of modern time demand the more concrete spiritual knowledge which we are striving after in the spiritual-scientific movement. Born of the occupational work of man which is now severed from the man himself, the elemental spirits will have to be fertilised by the human soul, through what the human soul receives from the impulses that rise to spiritual regions. Not that this is the only task of Spiritual Science. But it is its task in face of the developing and changing life of human callings. Demanded as it is by World-evolution itself upon the Earth, this insight must come into the hearts of men, in like measure as their occupations mechanise the human being. This counter-pole must become more and more active, precisely for the human beings of to-day who are becoming specialised and mechanised. The counter-pole is this: Man must be able to fill his soul with that which brings him near to every other human soul, no matter in what direction specialised.

And this will lead us to far more ... Our time, with the indifference and solitude and separation which it often involves for specialists and workers, must give way to quite another age, when men will work inspired once more by very different impulses. These will truly be no worse than the good old impulses of trade and craft and calling; but the latter cannot ever be renewed. They must be replaced by others. In this respect, we to-day can no longer merely indicate in abstract terms a human ideal which Spiritual Science wishes to unfold. In all detail, we must point to an ideal which will shew what the callings and professions too can become for man when he has the understanding rightly to perceive the signs of the time.

Of all these things, and their significance for human individuality and karma, we shall continue to speak in the next lecture.

On the first anniversary of Rudolf Steiner's death, on 30 March 1926, Marie Steiner-von Sivers, who had not only taken a special position as co-founder and co-leader of the Erkenntniskultischer Arbeitskreis (a working group within the General Anthroposophical Society), but also through her inner competence in the same, had written¹ a memorial service with a symbolic-cultic character was held in the context of the first class of the School of Spiritual Science. On the stage of the carpentry hall at the Goetheanum, where all events in Dornach were held at the time, she had three altars set up, at the eastern altar of which she had always served at the side of Rudolf Steiner. The following drafts of her address express what Rudolf Steiner's life's work meant to her, namely, to have experienced the legend of the temple.

Marie Steiner

We have gathered here in memory of the one who left this earth a year ago, who worked for us here in this place, among us, who gave us guidelines for our work, the service at the altars of wisdom, beauty and strength, as a sign of which we have placed these altars, which symbolize his work for us. We have placed these tools on the altars as a symbol of his creative work. With them he shaped the new forms in the wood. They are his compass and his straightedge, his trowel and his hammer. They are still imbued with the fire of his hands, they speak to us and demand action.

In his memory and in memory of what we have to do, we light these candles:

1. The light that he has kindled in our hearts, may it shine brightly and become wisdom.

2. It may rise in purity to him, as pure as he has sunk it into our souls.

3. It strengthens us in our active work, so that our actions serve his spirit, our spirit grows stronger in its self-transcendence through Christ.

We stand in this room of mourning, remembering the great man who has left us. The three altars stand before us as a sign and seal of his work. The leader who stood at the helm of this turning point for humanity served at these altars continually. He was allowed to bring them out of the depths of the temple, where they had stood since the beginning of mystery religions, and hand them over to humanity. He gave them to us in images and in art, by incorporating them into his mystery dramas, at the stages of the spiritual student's progress. He gave them to us in His Word by placing at the center of His activity the ideals of wisdom, beauty and strength, constantly presenting them to our minds in their individual expression and in their interaction. He allowed the two most important poetical personalities among His disciples to present the legend to the world in words and pictures. You know them from their works.² We can only remember them insofar as they have been given to humanity artistically. And with the hammer blow with which Rudolf Steiner established the connection to eternal spiritual service at the laying of the foundation stone, he is now commemorated here.³ We take up the thread of his work and place ourselves under his protection to serve the powers to which he led us in his service.

Why was Rudolf Steiner allowed to do this, which signifies a turning point for humanity, even within esotericism, a new phase and a new path?

When the great is very close to us, we do not see it, the mountain wall towers above us, it crushes one, it hinders the view of the other. We do not see beyond it, we only feel: this is great.

It takes a long time before we reach the summit of the mountain and take in the full extent of the view; but now and then, during the arduous ascent, a glimpse of the big picture presents itself, and we grasp parts of the enormous context.

Our vision was made easy; we were able to experience it, but perhaps the light was too dazzling for us to see clearly.

We experienced the construction, we saw Rudolf Steiner raise his hammer to work and how his students flocked to serve the work; the temple had risen, noble and radiant, from the power of its spirit and the skill of its hands, and we were allowed to learn and work. But we too, in addition to our weaknesses and imperfections, had among us the three evil companions, who went as far as betrayal and a will to destroy. The seed of hatred bore its fruit. The building was in flames, just as the Sea of Steel was once in flames. Rudolf Steiner embodied the legend; he realized it in physical action; he became the legend. He proclaimed it to humanity through his life.

And Rudolf Steiner threw himself into the searing fire of the center. We were this searing fire for him, we, the children of Cain. He took our karma upon himself so that we would be freer to serve. But our karma was too hard and too heavy and broke his physical strength almost immediately after he had entered into the covenant. His last year of life was a mighty expiration of his spirit...

We are gathered here today because we are aware that we have experienced a moment in world history that was a turning point, not just a turning point. The spirit descended in currents never before imagined through a person who had made himself capable of receiving the spirit in mind, soul, and body. Today we want to do nothing else but let this spirit prevail among us in the words he left us, as a source of life and strength, the words and the music inspired by him in the space surrounded by black, which is the physical color of the spirit, at the three altars whose significance is known to you through the mystery plays, by the light of the three candles that are the chandeliers of these altars.

Our thoughts turn to the one who left us a year ago today, who poured his wisdom into our hearts with inexhaustible, never-ending gentleness and kindness, whose love embraced and carried the souls of us all, whose strength lifted our earth out of its Ahrimanic material snares, in which it threatened to suffocate, and carried it towards the spirit, on the wings of the ego-transcendence he lived and taught. “Christ in me” - that was his life, his work and his word.

In his words he created a structure of indestructible strength, clarity and beauty. May our thoughts, feelings and will strive to keep this word alive among us!

We have laid down on the altars of wisdom, beauty and strength, before which he has served, the tools with which he has worked, which are still imbued with the warming fire of his hands, which have grasped the future. With them he worked into the material until it became a spiritual revelation, thus opening up to us the most hidden laws of nature, which push towards revelation through the beautiful appearance. These are his compass, his measuring rod, his trowel, his hammer, his mallet, with which he created the forms of his sculpture: (3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short).

In his spirit we gather today, asking that he cover our weaknesses and our inadequacies with the splendor of his being. In his name we call upon the archangel, whose service he has consecrated to us, seeking to recognize the guardian who stands before the gate of the temple to the other realm: (3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short). We try to approach this Guardian in the sign of his love, which, emanating full of wisdom, became for us the bestowing virtue of his word, which, being transformed into action, became for us the pointing, active sword of Michael, his emanating life, which, in creating knowledge, led us back to our original state, and, overcoming space and time, became for us the future. We call upon them, the existing, active, ruling powers: He who created them anew: Anthroposophia, Him whom He bids us follow: Michael The all-embracing source that bears the future within itself: Jahveh-Adonai

Life – Love – Logos
Christ in me

Ex deo nascimur / In Christo morimur / Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

(3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short).

• 1. A participant reported a related statement by Rudolf Steiner in the context of the work of the Knowledge Cult as follows: “At the top, as head of the school and as mediator of spiritual realities, was Rudolf Steiner; at his side as comrade and colleague was Marie von Sivers. ... During a higher-level activity, at which only a small number of participants were allowed to be present, we were informed by Rudolf Steiner himself that Marie von Sivers' collaboration was to be taken in a fully legitimate sense - not symbolically as with the rest of us. And in such a way that reference was made to a reality that goes beyond birth and death.” Adolf Arenson in a circular letter to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, October 1926.
• 2. Albert Steffen's drama “Hieram and Solomon” and the poetry of Kurt Piper, see “Further Reading” on page 498.
• 3. What is meant is the laying of the foundation stone for the education of the General Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923. Adolf Arenson reports: “Rudolf Steiner opened the Christmas Conference not with words but with symbolic blows, and in so doing he brought the law of continuity into effect. For everyone who belonged to the institution that Rudolf Steiner describes in the 36th chapter of his 'Life Course' said these blows: “The new that I want to give you, I hereby tie to the existing earlier, true to the law of esotericism. ... It hardly needs to be emphasized that this tying to the earlier includes the possibility of bringing a completely new, even a leaping new, as indeed the flower ties to the formation of leaves in the plant and yet is a completely new one.” Letter from Adolf Arenson to Albert Steffen, December 24, 1926.

From Instruction Class, Hanover, Christmas 1911

The reason why no ceremony takes place during the days from December 24 to January 6, the day of the appearance of Christ, no ceremony takes place at the meetings of our occult brotherhood is that those whom we call the wise masters of the East withdraw to the sanctuary during this time to gather their strength, which they then give to both all of humanity and our occult brotherhood with renewed vigor.

From the Instruction Lesson, Hanover, December 31, 1911

It has already been pointed out that in the days from December 24 to January 6, no occult meetings can take place at which the ritual is used. During the momentous thirteen days which close with the spiritual birth of the Christ, the wise Masters of the East withdraw in order to gather the forces which they pour out upon Humanity during the rest of the year, and which for us are the Wisdom to which we have to conform.

This is the third volume in the series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner published under the title, The Festivals and their Meaning.

In the Councils of the undivided Church from the fourth to the ninth centuries, Christian thinkers wrestled with the theology of the Father and the Son, but the Church has never arrived at a theology of the Holy Spirit. To this Rudolf Steiner makes a profound contribution in these lectures, by linking together the three great Christian Festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. He thereby shows Whitsun as the completion of the great redemptive work of Christ, a completion into which man could not enter in full consciousness until our present age. In doing this he throws light upon the great truths of Reincarnation and Karma in their relation to Christianity, and points to the spiritual unity which can bring together East and West.

These lectures are full of spiritual teaching and inspiration, but in some ways they are all the more difficult to grasp at first reading. They repay a hundred-fold patient and deep meditation.

A. P. S.

Much that I should like to say regarding the spiritual world has to be hinted at pictorially, or rather half pictorially for the pictures must be taken in a real and active sense.

It is necessary to indicate pictorially such things as I desire to bring before your souls today for further meditation, because if one were not to speak symbolically but in ideas, one would have to speak at very great length. Each one of you can himself reach the depths of that of which I shall speak today, if he holds and ponders over it to a certain extent within his soul.

Every year at this season we pass from one division of time to another. This may at first appear simply a matter of convenience; but it is not so. The men who had to separate time into seasons followed by profound instinct certain great laws regulating the course of time. The festival of the passing of one year into another takes place with us in the depths of winter (naturally, I speak of our part of the world) at the time when all plants have suspended their growth, their blossoming and fruit-bearing. Only certain forest trees remain what is called evergreen through winter. The power of the Sim is then at its lowest.

We know that in all events and occurrences that take place before our senses, spiritual events are interwoven. We know that when we walk through the forest, we have not only the trees about us with their green foliage, but that in the background of existence spiritual and psychic beings are everywhere active. We are already familiar with this thought, which the clever people of our time regard as a childish superstition; we realise it as a true and actual fact.

It is absolutely clear to us that behind all the things of sense, whether they be solid or whether they be happenings which our senses perceive—are spiritual activities, and spiritual life.

Now let us, to begin with, consider what people call our lifeless inorganic Earth, the mineral kingdom of our Earth. This which is apparently lifeless substance, the mineral which to the materialist is merely lifeless, is to us not only endowed with life, but with soul and spirit, so that we speak also of a soul-and-spirit part of our so-called lifeless inorganic, purely mineral Earth. True, when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we do not in the first place see in the geological-mineral substance that which may be compared to a man’s muscles and blood, but we see only what may be compared to his bony system, namely, the solid earth; so that when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we have to think of it as connected with the whole Earth, not only with its bony system, but with water, air, ether, etc., corresponding to the muscles, blood, and so on.

The whole Earth has consciousness, a consciousness belonging to the mineral kingdom. We shall not occupy ourselves with the differences in this consciousness of the Earth in special regions during the course of the year, but we shall endeavour to evoke in our souls the conception that the whole Earth has consciousness. Let us now turn from the mineral Earth, and direct our attention to all that springs forth and sprouts on Earth, to the plant world.

Looked at in accordance with Spiritual Science, we must regard the plant world, in the first place, as an independent entity in reference to the Earth. That the whole plant world is an independent entity as regards the Earth only comes clearly before us when we consider the consciousness of these two entities or beings. We can speak of a consciousness of the whole mineral Earth, but we can equally speak of a consciousness of the whole plant world which evolves on the Earth. The laws of this consciousness are certainly entirely different from the laws of human consciousness. In speaking of plant consciousness, we must always speak of it as regards certain districts only, because it changes with different regions of the Earth.

As men we are not aware that there really is a certain parallel between our consciousness and the consciousness of the whole plant world, for we are apt to look on our waking consciousness as our complete consciousness, without taking our sleeping consciousness into consideration. To simplify our subject, we say: In the daytime when awake, our ego and astral body are within our physical body. I have, however, often remarked that this in fact refers to our blood and nervous system only, not to the remaining parts of our system. When the ego and astral body withdraw from our head, for instance, they are so much the stronger within other parts of us.

A parallel thing happens on the Earth, when on one part of it there is summer and on the other winter; this also is merely a change of consciousness. The case is the same with ourselves. We are not aware of this, however, because in man the two kinds of consciousness are not of equal clearness; they are of different strength. Night consciousness is beclouded consciousness, for us practically no consciousness at all; while day consciousness is full consciousness of our other side. In the night our lower nature wakes, while with our higher nature we sleep, and it is exactly the same with the Earth, when on the one hemisphere there is winter, on the other there is summer. On one side the consciousness is awake, on the other side it sleeps and vice versa. As I have just said, and as I have often explained, this only holds good in respect to the plant world. We know that the plant world sleeps in the height of summer when there is growth on every side; while it is outwardly unfolding its physical nature—it is asleep. But it wakes to full consciousness during the time when physically, externally, it is going through no development; then the plant world is awake. Thus we speak of all plant life on Earth as a whole; and this plant life, as a whole, has a consciousness.

When speaking of this consciousness which as a second consciousness intermingles with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, we can really say that during the height of summer in our part of the Earth the plant consciousness is asleep, and in depth of winter it is awake. At this season, however, during the time at which we now are, something further takes place.

Now I beg you to note that these two states of consciousness, that is, the general consciousness belonging to the mineral earth, and the general plant consciousness—are always distinct. They are throughout the whole year two separate beings. But these are not only two distinct Beings, for at one season they unite, so that at the present time of year, the one interpenetrates the other. At the time when one year is passing over into the other, the mineral things and events of the Earth and the whole plant world have but one consciousness, which means that these two consciousnesses interpenetrate each other.

What is the nature of the mineral consciousness of the Earth, the varieties of which (as I have said) we shall not study today as we shall those of the plant consciousness, which we realise wakes during winter time and sleeps in summer? What is the peculiar nature of this mineral consciousness, this consciousness of the great Earth-Being?

The man who is limited in his physical senses, and limited to the understanding that he considers appertains to these physical senses, can at first know nothing of this great Earth-consciousness. Spiritual Science, however, can instruct as to what this Earth-consciousness really thinks—thinks as we think of plants, animals, air, rivers, mountains, etc. Just as with our ordinary waking consciousness, we think of the things round about us, so, in like manner does the Earth think. Let us inquire today: of what does the Earth consciously think?

The Earth thinks with its consciousness the whole firmament of heaven nearest to the Earth. As we look with our eyes on trees and stones, so does the Earth consciously look into space and contemplate all that takes place in the stars. The Earth is a being that meditates on the occurrences of the stars.

Thus fundamentally the mineral consciousness contains the secret of the whole Cosmos. While we men move about on the Earth in a superficial way, thinking merely of the stones against which we knock, or of the many things which our senses reveal to us, the Earth thinks with its consciousness—through which we are passing as we move through space—of the whole Cosmos. She has indeed greater, more all-embracing thoughts than we have. In truth, it is an extraordinarily exalting thought, when we realise: ‘I am not simply passing through the air; I am moving through the thoughts of the Earth.’

Now let us again consider the other consciousness, that of the plants. These are not able to think so much as the Earth can. The thinking consciousness of the plants—not of individual plants, but of the whole united plant-world—is a much more restricted consciousness, it embraces a smaller circle of the Earth throughout the year; but this is not the case at the present season. Plant consciousness is now one with the whole consciousness of the Earth, and because the plant consciousness interpenetrates the earth-consciousness, the plant-world at New Year time, knows the secrets of the stars and applies them. Plants are thus able to unfold again in spring in accordance with the secrets of the cosmos, and can bring forth their blossoms and fruit. In this unfoldment the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained, in the way plants bring forth their leaves, blossoms and fruit.

But during the time the plants are producing their leaves, flowers and fruit, they are not able to meditate upon it. It is only at this present season they can think—now—when the plant consciousness is united with the consciousness of the whole mineral world. This is why it is said in Spiritual Science: About the season of the New Year, two cycles interpenetrate each other.

This is the main secret of all existence—that two cycles penetrate each other; then parting, continue separately their further development; again intermingle, and so on. Only think how marvellous this secret of existence is! Plant-consciousness and mineral-consciousness, two streams of evolution—progress apart through the whole year, then at the time when one year passes over into another, they unite. Again they pass through the year apart, uniting once more at the festival of the New Year. The cyclic advance of history is similar to this.

We turn from this mystic event, through which we are now passing, and which fills us with a deep feeling of holy awe in respect of the passing of one year into the other—we turn to a still deeper mystery.

We know that we are now living in that cycle in which the consciousness-soul is unfolding, that this was preceded by that of the unfolding of the rational or intellectual-soul, which was again preceded by the cycle in which the sentient soul was developed, before which again we go back to the time of development of the sentient body. This takes us back 6000 years before our Christian era, to a time when all human thought was evolved within the cycle of the sentient body—of the so-called astral body.

We have now to advance through the cycle of the spiritual or consciousness-soul, and through that of the Spirit-Self, and further still man has to develop.

The consciousness-soul (since 1923 translated by Dr. Steiner as the spiritual-soul) is principally developed at the present time because man chiefly makes use of his physical body alone as an instrument. On this account—as you know already from many lectures—this present age is the high tide of materialism. A time will come, however, when man will not only make use of his physical body, but will again learn to use his etheric body, as in earlier times he used his astral body, in the cycle of evolution when that body was the main element of consciousness.

We can therefore say: Our condition at one time on Earth was such, that our soul experienced a contact of its consciousness with the consciousness of our astral body. Just as at New Year, plant-consciousness penetrates mineral consciousness, so, thousands of years ago, did our soul intermingle with our astral body. At that time our soul was one, in its consciousness, with the astral body. The time of that type of consciousness was six thousand years before our era. When that consciousness came about man celebrated a New Year on Earth; a mighty New Year!

Just as we regard the New Year as the mingling of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so we must realise that 6,000 years before our era a great, a mighty cosmic New Year of our Earth took place. Our Soul-consciousness then united with—passed through—the astral consciousness of our body.

What was it that then took place?

At that time when our inner soul-consciousness passed through (or intermingled with) the astral consciousness of our body—then our limited human consciousness, the consciousness which we have today, had progressed as far as the present plant-consciousness at New Year. Just as plants gaze abroad into the heavens because their consciousness has been united to the mineral consciousness of theEarth, so did man then see and perceive a wide field of wisdom six thousand years before our era, when his soul was united with his astral body at the time of the cosmic New Year.

From this time originated the knowledge which we have now lost, since the wisdom of the Gnostics has perished. The source of this knowledge must be sought in the earthly and cosmic New Year about 6,000 B.c. This was the knowledge from which Zarathustra gave forth his teaching; the knowledge, whose last great rays still illuminated the Gnostics, but of which only a few fragments remain. It is the winter of the Earth, but the Earth’s New Year to which we here look back.

If we now add four thousand years more to the years we have passed through since the founding of Christianity, we again come to a similar intermingling as that I have just indicated; to the mingling of our soul-consciousness with our astral consciousness, but at a higher stage. Man will once more experience a universal stellar consciousness. For this we endeavour to prepare ourselves through our Spiritual Science, so that there may be men ready to receive it.

We will seek to prepare for this cosmic New Year. If we prepare for it through the keeping of the Christmas Festival, as I indicated in a recent lecture, we are preparing ourselves in the right way. If the birth of spiritual knowledge within us leads to that frame of mind which is in accord with the ‘Christmas Initiation,’ we are preparing ourselves for that new cosmic New Year on which we shall enter twelve thousand years after the previous cosmic New Year.

Twelve months pass by between one union of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, and another. Twelve thousand years pass between one cosmic New Year and another: between one intermingling of the human soul with the Astral World-Soul, and another.

So at this sacred season, we turn from the little New Year to the great cosmic New Year, from the New Year’s Eve of our year, to that for which we are preparing ourselves, by endeavouring—now in this winter tune—to behold the light, which in a normal elemental way flows into man as inhabitant of the Earth, only at the cosmic New Year.

We really only see the world in the true light, when we grasp what is around us, not only as it is presented to our senses,—as materialists do—but when we accept all that is about us in the outer world as a symbol of the great secrets of the universe.

Then when New Year draws near, it seems as if a message from spiritual worlds approaches, and unveils for us the mysteries connected with the birth of the New Year; and declares, ‘Behold, now in the depths of the dark cold winter, the consciousness of the plant world unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be to you a sign that the Earth too has its year—the great cosmic year, of which Zarathustra spoke long ago, explaining how the world passed on from one great New Year’s Eve to another; this must be understood by those who really seek to comprehend the course of human evolution.’

Zarathustra spoke of epochs of twelve thousand years. He meant the great cosmic years of which I have spoken to you today. He represented the course of human evolution as being divided into four divisions within the Earth year. This fact is deeply rooted in spiritual mysteries.

So, from a deeper understanding of our Spiritual Science, let us accept a true Christmas attitude of reverence. Let us develop within our hearts that inner warmth which comes, when in the frosty night of winter we receive the first intimation of the dawning of the Sun-Spirit on the Earth, and with it the mystery of the revolving year. The thirteen days are the days in which the plant-consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If a man is but able to place himself within the plant consciousness, he can dream of—can gain a conception of—the many mysteries which then crowd into his heart, such as did in the dream of Olaf Oesteson,¹ the description and explanation of which entered into and stirred our souls here, this time last year. When we feel such a mood of initiation, we evoke the proper feelings and the perceptions for the aims and objects of our spiritual knowledge and with such warmth of heart we shall make preparations for the new cosmic New Year. Through it we can worthily expect that day which is to usher in a New Year for the world, Thus; when in succeeding incarnations our souls experience the cosmic New Year under quite new conditions on Earth, we shall be able to pass through it as those can for whom the small New Year’s Eve (which recurs every twelve months instead of every twelve thousand years) becomes a symbol of the great New Year’s Eve of the world.

This is the secret of our existence. Everything is in great as in small, and in small as in great. The small, the yearly cycle, can only be understood aright when it becomes for us a symbol of the mighty events of the cosmos—of the vast cycle of thousands of years. The year is an image of the aeons, and the aeons are the realities of those images which we encounter in the course of a year. When we understand this yearly course aright we are filled, in this important night in which a New Year begins, with thoughts of the great cosmic mysteries. Let our endeavour be, so to attune our souls, that they may look forward to the New Year with this conscious thought: ‘I will accept the year as a symbol of the great cosmic year which contains all mysteries, through which pass and repass the Divine Beings who accompany our souls from aeon to aeon, as the lesser Gods follow the secret development of plant and mineral existence throughout the course of an Earth year.

• 1. Editorial Note: The dream of Olaf Oesteson referred to above, appears in the linotyped course of lectures entitled The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death (Lecture 6.)

A lecture delivered in Dornach, on December 31st, 1915. Lecture 17 of 19 from the lecture series: The Festivals of the Seasons (1928), and lecture 6 of 13 from the lecture series: The Spiritual Union of Humanity through the Christ Impulse. Published in German as: Die Geistige Vereinigung der Menschheit Durch Den Christus-Impuls.

Much that I should like to say regarding the spiritual world has to be hinted at pictorially, or rather half pictorially for the pictures must be taken in a real and active sense.

It is necessary to indicate pictorially such things as I desire to bring before your souls to-day for further meditation, because if one were not to speak symbolically but in ideas, one would have to speak at very great length. Each one of you can himself reach the depths of that of which I shall speak to-day, if he holds and ponders over it to a certain extent within his soul.

Every year at this season we pass from one division of time to another. This may at first appear simply a matter of convenience; but it is not so. The men who had to separate time into seasons followed by profound instinct certain great laws regulating the course of time. The festival of the passing of one year into another takes place with us in the depths of winter (naturally, I speak of our part of the world) at the time when all plants have suspended their growth, their blossoming and fruit-bearing. Only certain forest trees remain what is called evergreen through winter. The power of the Sun is then at its lowest.

We know that in all events and occurrences that take place before our senses, spiritual events are interwoven. We know that when we walk through the forest, we have not only the trees about us with their green foliage, but that in the background of existence spiritual and psychic beings are everywhere active. We are already familiar with this thought, which the clever people of our time regard as a childish superstition; we realise it as a true and actual fact.

It is absolutely clear to us that behind all the things of sense, whether they be solid or whether they be happenings which our senses perceive—are spiritual activities, and spiritual life.

Now let us, to begin with, consider what people call our lifeless inorganic Earth, the mineral kingdom of our Earth. This which is apparently lifeless substance, the mineral which to the materialist is merely lifeless, is to us not only endowed with life, but with soul and spirit, so that we speak also of a soul-and-spirit part of our so-called lifeless inorganic, purely mineral Earth. True, when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we do not in the first place see in the geological-mineral substance that which may be compared to a man's muscles and blood, but we see only what may be compared to his bony system, namely, the solid earth ; so that when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we have to think of it as connected with the whole Earth, not only with its bony system, but with water, air, ether, etc., corresponding to the muscles, blood, and so on.

The whole Earth has consciousness, a consciousness belonging to the mineral kingdom. We shall not occupy ourselves with the differences in this consciousness of the Earth in special regions during the course of the year, but we shall endeavour to evoke in our souls the conception that the whole Earth has consciousness. Let us now turn from the mineral Earth, and direct our attention to all that springs forth and sprouts on Earth, to the plant world.

Looked at in accordance with Spiritual Science, we must regard the plant world, in the first place, as an independent entity in reference to the Earth. That the whole plant world is an independent entity as regards the Earth only comes clearly before us when we consider the consciousness of these two entities or beings. We can speak of a consciousness of the whole mineral Earth, but we can equally speak of a consciousness of the whole plant world which evolves on the Earth. The laws of this consciousness are certainly entirely different from the laws of human consciousness. In speaking of plant consciousness, we must always speak of it as regards certain districts only, because it changes with different regions of the Earth.

As men we are not aware that there really is a certain parallel between our consciousness and the consciousness of the whole plant world, for we are apt to look on our waking consciousness as our complete consciousness, without taking our sleeping consciousness into consideration. To simplify our subject, we say: In the daytime when awake, our ego and astral body are within our physical body. I have, however, often remarked that this in fact refers to our blood and nervous system only, not to the remaining parts of our system. When the ego and astral body withdraw from our head, for instance, they are so much the stronger within other parts of us.

A parallel thing happens on the Earth, when on one part of it there is summer and on the other winter; this also is merely a change of consciousness. The case is the same with ourselves. We are not aware of this, however, because in man the two kinds of consciousness are not of equal clearness; they are of different strength. Night consciousness is beclouded consciousness, for us practically no consciousness at all; while day consciousness is full consciousness of our other side. In the night our lower nature wakes, while with our higher nature we sleep, and it is exactly the same with the Earth, when on the one hemisphere there is winter, on the other there is summer. On one side the consciousness is awake, on the other side it sleeps and vice versa. As I have just said, and as I have often explained, this only holds good in respect to the plant world. We know that the plant world sleeps in the height of summer when there is growth on every side; while it is outwardly unfolding its physical nature—it is asleep. But it wakes to full consciousness during the time when physically, externally, it is going through no development; then the plant world is awake. Thus we speak of all plant life on Earth as a whole; and this plant life, as a whole, has a consciousness.

When speaking of this consciousness which as a second consciousness intermingles with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, we can really say that during the height of summer in our part of the Earth the plant consciousness is asleep, and in depth of winter it is awake. At this season, however, during the time at which we now are, something further takes place.

Now I beg you to note that these two states of consciousness, that is, the general consciousness belonging to the mineral earth, and the general plant consciousness—are always distinct. They are throughout the whole year two separate beings. But these are not only two distinct Beings, for at one season they unite, so that at the present time of year, the one interpenetrates the other. At the time when one year is passing over into the other, the mineral things and events of the Earth and the whole plant world have but one consciousness, which means that these two consciousnesses interpenetrate each other.

What is the nature of the mineral consciousness of the Earth, the varieties of which (as I have said) we shall not study to-day as we shall those of the plant consciousness, which we realise wakes during winter time and sleeps in summer? What is the peculiar nature of this mineral consciousness, this consciousness of the great Earth-Being?

The man who is limited in his physical senses, and limited to the understanding that he considers appertains to these physical senses, can at first know nothing of this great Earth-consciousness. Spiritual Science, however, can instruct as to what this Earth-consciousness really thinks—thinks as we think of plants, animals, air, rivers, mountains, etc. Just as with our ordinary waking consciousness, we think of the things round about us, so, in like manner does the Earth think. Let us inquire to-day: of what does the Earth consciously think?

The Earth thinks with its consciousness the whole firmament of heaven nearest to the Earth. As we look with our eyes on trees and stones, so does the Earth consciously look into space and contemplate all that takes place in the stars. The Earth is a being that meditates on the occurrences of the stars.

Thus fundamentally the mineral consciousness contains the secret of the whole Cosmos. While we men move about on the Earth in a superficial way, thinking merely of the stones against which we knock, or of the many things which our senses reveal to us, the Earth thinks with its consciousness—through which we are passing as we move through space—of the whole Cosmos. She has indeed greater, more all-embracing thoughts than we have. In truth, it is an extraordinarily exalting thought, when we realise: ‘I am not simply passing through the air; I am moving through the thoughts of the Earth.’

Now let us again consider the other consciousness, that of the plants. These are not able to think so much as the Earth can. The thinking consciousness of the plants—not of individual plants, but of the whole united plant-world—is a much more restricted consciousness, it embraces a smaller circle of the Earth throughout the year; but this is not the case at the present season. Plant consciousness is now one with the whole consciousness of the Earth, and because the plant consciousness interpenetrates the earth-consciousness, the plant-world at New Year time, knows the secrets of the stars and applies them. Plants are thus able to unfold again in spring in accordance with the secrets of the cosmos, and can bring forth their blossoms and fruit. In this unfoldment the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained, in the way plants bring forth their leaves, blossoms and fruit.

But during the time the plants are producing their leaves, flowers and fruit, they are not able to meditate upon it. It is only at this present season they can think—now—when the plant consciousness is united with the consciousness of the whole mineral world. This is why it is said in Spiritual Science: About the season of the New Year, two cycles interpenetrate each other.

This is the main secret of all existence—that two cycles penetrate each other; then parting, continue separately their further development; again intermingle, and so on. Only think how marvelous this secret of existence is! Plant-consciousness and mineral-consciousness, two streams of evolution—progress apart through the whole year, then at the time when one year passes over into another, they unite. Again they pass through the year apart, uniting once more at the festival of the New Year. The cyclic advance of history is similar to this.

We turn from this mystic event, through which we are now passing, and which fills us with a deep feeling of holy awe in respect of the passing of one year into the other—we turn to a still deeper mystery.

We know that we are now living in that cycle in which the consciousness-soul is unfolding, that this was preceded by that of the unfolding of the rational or intellectual-soul, which was again preceded by the cycle in which the sentient soul was developed, before which again we go back to the time of development of the sentient body. This takes us back 6,000 years before our Christian era, to a time when all human thought was evolved within the cycle of the sentient body—of the so-called astral body.

We have now to advance through the cycle of the spiritual or consciousness-soul, and through that of the Spirit-Self, and further still man has to develop.

The consciousness-soul (since 1923 translated by Dr. Steiner as the spiritual-soul) is principally developed at the present time because man chiefly makes use of his physical body alone as an instrument. On this account—as you know already from many lectures—this present age is the high tide of materialism. A time will come, however, when man will not only make use of his physical body, but will again learn to use his etheric body, as in earlier times he used his astral body, in the cycle of evolution when that body was the main element of consciousness.

We can therefore say: Our condition at one time on Earth was such, that our soul experienced a contact of its consciousness with the consciousness of our astral body. Just as at New Year, plant-consciousness penetrates mineral consciousness, so, thousands of years ago, did our soul intermingle with our astral body. At that time our soul was one, in its consciousness, with the astral body. The time of that type of consciousness was six thousand years before our era. When that consciousness came about man celebrated a New Year on Earth; a mighty New Year!

Just as we regard the New Year as the mingling of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so we must realise that 6,000 years before our era a great, a mighty cosmic New Year of our Earth took place. Our Soul-consciousness then united with—passed through—the astral consciousness of our body.

What was it that then took place?

At that time when our inner soul-consciousness passed through (or intermingled with) the astral consciousness of our body—then our limited human consciousness, the consciousness which we have to-day, had progressed as far as the present plant-consciousness at New Year. Just as plants gaze abroad into the heavens because their consciousness has been united to the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so did man then see and perceive a wide field of wisdom six thousand years before our era, when his soul was united with his astral body at the time of the cosmic New Year.

From this time originated the knowledge which we have now lost, since the wisdom of the Gnostics has perished. The source of this knowledge must be sought in the earthly and cosmic New Year about 6,000 B.C. This was the knowledge from which Zarathustra gave forth his teaching; the knowledge, whose last great rays still illuminated the Gnostics, but of which only a few fragments remain. It is the winter of the Earth, but the Earth's New Year to which we here look back.

If we now add four thousand years more to the years we have passed through since the founding of Christianity, we again come to a similar intermingling as that I have just indicated; to the mingling of our soul-consciousness with our astral consciousness, but at a higher stage. Man will once more experience a universal stellar consciousness. For this we endeavour to prepare ourselves through our Spiritual Science, so that there may be men ready to receive it.

We will seek to prepare for this cosmic New Year. If we prepare for it through the keeping of the Christmas Festival, as I indicated in a recent lecture, we are preparing ourselves in the right way. If the birth of spiritual knowledge within us leads to that frame of mind which is in accord with the ‘Christmas Initiation,’ we are preparing ourselves for that new cosmic New Year on which we shall enter twelve thousand years after the previous cosmic New Year.

Twelve months pass by between one union of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, and another. Twelve thousand years pass between one cosmic New Year and another: between one intermingling of the human soul with the Astral World-Soul, and another.

So at this sacred season, we turn from the little New Year to the great cosmic New Year, from the New Year's Eve of our year, to that for which we are preparing ourselves, by endeavouring—now in this winter time—to behold the light, which in a normal elemental way flows into man as inhabitant of the Earth, only at the cosmic New Year.

We really only see the world in the true light, when we grasp what is around us, not only as it is presented to our senses,—as materialists do—but when we accept all that is about us in the outer world as a symbol of the great secrets of the universe.

Then when New Year draws near, it seems as if a message from spiritual worlds approaches, and unveils for us the mysteries connected with the birth of the New Year; and declares, ‘Behold, now in the depths of the dark cold winter, the consciousness of the plant world unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be to you a sign that the Earth too has its year—the great cosmic year, of which Zarathustra spoke long ago, explaining how the world passed on from one great New Year's Eve to another; this must be understood by those who really seek to comprehend the course of human evolution.’

Zarathustra spoke of epochs of twelve thousand years. He meant the great cosmic years of which I have spoken to you to-day. He represented the course of human evolution as being divided into four divisions within the Earth year. This fact is deeply rooted in spiritual mysteries.

So, from a deeper understanding of our Spiritual Science, let us accept a true Christmas attitude of reverence. Let us develop within our hearts that inner warmth which comes, when in the frosty night of winter we receive the first intimation of the dawning of the Sun-Spirit on the Earth, and with it the mystery of the revolving year. The thirteen days are the days in which the plant-consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If a man is but able to place himself within the plant consciousness, he can dream of—can gain a conception of—the many mysteries which then crowd into his heart, such as did in the dream of Olaf Oesteson, the description and explanation of which entered into and stirred our souls here, this time last year. When we feel such a mood of initiation, we evoke the proper feelings and the perceptions for the aims and objects of our spiritual knowledge and with such warmth of heart we shall make preparations for the new cosmic New Year. Through it we can worthily expect that day which is to usher in a New Year for the world. Thus: when in succeeding incarnations our souls experience the cosmic New Year under quite new conditions on Earth, we shall be able to pass through it as those can for whom the small New Year's Eve (which recurs every twelve months instead of every twelve thousand years) becomes a symbol of the great New Year's Eve of the world.

This is the secret of our existence. Everything is in great as in small, and in small as in great. The small, the yearly cycle, can only be understood aright when it becomes for us a symbol of the mighty events of the cosmos—of the vast cycle of thousands of years. The year is an image of the aeons, and the aeons are the realities of those images which we encounter in the course of a year. When we understand this yearly course aright we are filled, in this important night in which a New Year begins, with thoughts of the great cosmic mysteries. Let our endeavour be, so to attune our souls, that they may look forward to the New Year with this conscious thought: I will accept the year as a symbol of the great cosmic year which contains all mysteries, through which pass and re-pass the Divine Beings who accompany our souls from aeon to aeon, as the lesser Gods follow the secret development of plant and mineral existence throughout the course of an Earth year.

From the time of the Foundation Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society (Dornach, Christmas to New Year, 1923–24) until his death shortly before Easter, 1925, Rudolf Steiner wrote a Letter week by week, addressed to the members of the Society. The Letters were printed in the members' supplement to the Goetheanum Weekly and in the English edition of it, Anthroposophical Movement. The later Letters (forming a self-contained series from autumn 1924 onward) were published in book form in 1956, entitled The Michael Mystery (Vol. II of Letters to Members).

An urgent need has been felt for the earlier Letters in which Rudolf Steiner describes the character of the Society arising out of the Foundation Meeting and gives advice as to its conduct and its relation to the world. To meet this need, the Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung has issued these Letters in a separate volume entitled Das lebendige Wesen der Anthroposophie und seine Pflege: Briefe an die Mitglieder, and has given the Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain permission to publish the translation contained in the following pages (Vol. I of Letters to Members).

RUDOLF STEINER HOUSE
London, N.W.1, 1963