The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Considering the kind of deliberations you are engaged in at the moment, my friends, I must assume that your minds would be less than ready to take in a continuation of yesterday's lecture. For those of you who want to hear it, that lecture will be given tomorrow, but today I would like to speak about something that will relate in some way to things you all must necessarily have in mind at the moment.

First of all, and from a very specific point of view, I would like to address the question of what is really confronting us in the Goesch-Sprengel case. In recent lectures I have often said that it is important to arrive at the appropriate perspective from which to try to resolve any given issue. How, then, can we arrive at the right perspective on this particular matter through objective study of the case?

In order to deal with a case like this objectively, we must first of all remove it from its personal context and insert it into a larger one. If, as I believe, this larger context turns out to be what is most important for our anthroposophical movement, we will find ourselves obliged to study this case for our own edification and for the sake of spiritual science itself. And in fact there is a larger context to the case, as will become apparent if we look at Mr. Goesch's letter of August 19 with an eye for his main motives and arguments.

Since you have important deliberations ahead of you, I will not detain you too long, but will only select a few essential points for your consideration. The first is Goesch's claim that promises have not been kept. If you listened to the letter carefully, you will have noticed that the emphasis in his reproach is not on the alleged making and not keeping of promises. His primary accusation is that I looked for and systematically applied a means of making promises to members and not keeping them, and that once the members noticed that these promises were not being kept, they were put into a state of mind that forced them into a particular relationship to the one who had made and not kept the promises. As a result, forces accumulated in their souls that eventually made them lose their sound judgment.

So the first hypothesis Goesch presents is that systematic attempts were made to stifle the members' good sense, that deliberately making and breaking promises was a means of dulling their normal state of consciousness, resulting in a kind of stupefaction that turned them into zombies. That is the first point his letter addresses.

His second point has to do with one of the means of carrying this out. To put it briefly, through handshakes and friendly conversations and the like, I am supposed to have initiated a kind of contact with members that was suited, because of its very nature and the influence it allowed me to exert, to bringing about the above-mentioned effect on their souls.

A third thing we must keep in mind as a red thread running through Goesch's whole letter is the nature of his relationship to Miss Sprengel. We could add to these three points, but let us deal with them first.

To begin with, how does Goesch manage to construct such a systematic theory, based on his first two points, about how steps were taken to undermine the members' state of consciousness? We need to go into this thoroughly and try to find out where it comes from. In Goesch's case, we are led to his long involvement with Dr. Freud's so-called theory of psychoanalysis.¹ If you study this theory, you will begin to see that it is intimately related to how the pathological picture presented in the letter develops. Certain connections can be drawn between this pathological picture, as it relates to Goesch's first two points, and his involvement with the Freudian psychoanalytic point of view.

Of course, I am not in a position to give you a comprehensive picture of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in brief—my intent is only to present a few points that will help clarify the Goesch-Sprengel case. However, in a certain sense I do feel qualified to talk about psychoanalysis, because in my earlier years I was friends with one of the medical experts involved in its very beginnings.² This person eventually abandoned the theory of psychoanalysis after it degenerated later on in Freud's life. In any case, please do not take what I am going to say now as a comprehensive characterization of Freudian theory; I only want to highlight a few points.

Freudian psychoanalysts start from the assumption that an unconscious inner life exists alongside our conscious soul-activity—that is, in addition to the soul-activity we are conscious of, there is also an unconscious inner life we are usually not aware of. An important component of psychoanalysis is the doctrine that certain experiences people have in the course of their life can make impressions on them, but these impressions disappear from their conscious awareness and work on in their subconscious. According to the psychoanalysts, we do not necessarily become fully conscious of these experiences before they sink down into the unconscious—for example, something can make an impression on a person during childhood without ever coming to full consciousness, and still have such an effect on that person's psyche that it sinks down into the unconscious and goes on working there. Its effects are lasting, and in some cases lead to psychological disturbances later on. I am skipping a lot of links in the chain of reasoning and jumping right to the outcome of the whole process. In other words, we are to imagine in the soul's subconscious depths a kind of island of childhood and youthful experiences gone rampant. Through questioning during psychoanalysis, these subconscious proliferating islands in the soul can be lifted up into consciousness and incorporated into the structure of conscious awareness. In the process, the person in question can be cured of psychological defects in that particular area.

During the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, it was the practice of Dr. Breuer in particular to carry out this questioning with the patient under hypnosis.³ Later on, this practice was discontinued, and now the Freudian school conducts this analysis with the patient in a normal waking state of consciousness. In any case, the underlying assumption is that there are unhealthy, proliferating islands present in the psyche below the level of consciousness.

This psychoanalytic outlook has gradually spread to incorporate and try to explain all kinds of phenomena of ordinary life, particularly with regard to how they appear in people's dreams. As I already explained once in a lecture to our friends in another city, it is at this point that the Freudian school really goes out on a limb in saying that unfulfilled desires play a primary role in dreams.⁴ Freudians say that it is typical for people to experience unfulfilled desires in their dreams, desires that cannot be satisfied in real life. It can sometimes happen—and from the point of view of psychoanalytic theorists, it is significant when it does—that one of these desires present on an unconscious island in the psyche is lifted up in a dream and reveals in disguised form an impulse that had an effect on the person in question during his or her childhood.

Please note the peculiarity of this train of thought. It is assumed that as young boys or girls, people have experiences that sink down into subconsciousness and work on as fantasy experiences, clouding their consciousness. The pattern, then, is this: experiences of waking life are repressed and continue to work on the subconscious, leading to a weakened state of consciousness. This is exactly the same pattern Goesch constructs with regard to promises being given and broken and working on in the subconscious—all with the intention to create the same effect in the subconscious as the “islands” in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. According to Goesch, this was done cunningly and deliberately and resulted in a state of stupefaction analogous to what occurs when experiences of waking life have sunk into subconsciousness and are brought up again in a dream.

Psychoanalytic theory is a very tricky business, and if you dwell on it long enough, it gives rise to certain forms of thought that spread and affect all your thinking. As you can see, this has something to do with why Goesch came up with such a crazy idea.

In addition, as I have said before, the concept of physical contact plays an important part. I am now going to read certain passages from one of Dr. Freud's books, a collection of essays from the Freudian magazine Imago, and I ask you to pay close attention to them.⁵ But I must precede that with something else concerning the Goesch-Sprengel case. Those of you who have known Miss Sprengel for some time will recall that she was always very concerned about protecting herself from other people's influence on her aura—she lived in horror of having to shake hands and things like that. Even before Goesch arrived on the scene, she had already gotten the idea that shaking hands is a criminal act in our esoteric circles. The following incident is absolutely typical: I had business to do in Dr. Schmiedel's laboratory and happened to meet Miss Sprengel there.⁶ I extended my hand to her, which gave her grounds for saying, “That's how he always does it—he does whatever he wants to you and then shakes hands, and then you forget all about it.” There you have the origin of that theory about handshaking. Yesterday you all heard what this theory became in Miss Sprengel's confused mind with the help of Goesch. He contributed his understanding of Freud's theories and combined things systematically with Freudian ideas.

The following passage is from page 29 of the above-mentioned book by Freud:

The principal characteristic of the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in this way is what might be described as the subject's ambivalent attitude (to borrow the apt term coined by Bleuler) towards a single object, or rather towards one act in connection with that object. He is constantly wishing to perform this act (the touching), [and looks on it as his supreme enjoyment, but he must not perform it] and detests it as well. The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled because—there is no other way of putting it—they are localized in the subject's mind in such a manner that they cannot come up against each other. The prohibition is noisily conscious, while the persistent desire to touch is unconscious and the subject knows nothing of it. If it were not for this psychological factor, an ambivalence like this could neither last so long nor lead to such consequences.⁷

This is followed by a long discussion of the role fear of physical contact plays in cases of neurosis:

In our clinical history of a case we have insisted that the imposition of the prohibition in very early childhood is the determining point; a similar importance attaches in the subsequent developments to the mechanism of repression at the same early age. As a result of the repression which has been enforced and which involves a loss of memory—an amnesia—the motives for the prohibition (which is conscious) remain unknown; and all attempts at disposing of it by intellectual processes must fail, since they cannot find any base of attack. The prohibition owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire—that is to say, to an internal necessity inaccessible to conscious inspection. The ease with which the prohibition can be transferred and extended reflects a process which falls in with the unconscious desire and is greatly facilitated by the psychological conditions that prevail in the unconscious. The instinctual desire is constantly shifting in order to escape from the impasse and endeavours to find substitutes—substitute objects and substitute acts—in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt. Any fresh advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh sharpening of the prohibition. The mutual inhibition of the two conflicting forces produces a need for discharge, for reducing the prevailing tension; and to this may be attributed the reason for the performance of obsessive acts. In the case of a neurosis these are clearly compromise actions: from one point of view they are evidences of remorse, efforts at expiation, and so on, while on the other hand they are at the same time substitutive acts to compensate the instinct for what has been prohibited. It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.⁸

Considering the obsessions involved in fear of physical contact, you can well imagine how it would have been if Miss Sprengel, as a person suffering from this fear, had ever been seen by a psychoanalyst who, in line with usual psychoanalytic practice, would have questioned her about her fear of contact and tried to discover what caused it.

A third factor I want to emphasize is the relationship of Miss Sprengel to Mr. Goesch. According to psychoanalytic theory, this relationship would of course be characterized by the presence of repressed erotic thoughts. I mean that quite objectively...⁹

At this point, my friends, we must look a bit more closely at the whole system of psychoanalysis. As I have just outlined for you, psychoanalysis lifts up into consciousness certain “islands” in the unconscious psyche, and it assumes that the majority of these islands are sexual in nature. The psychoanalyst's task, then, is to reach down to the level of these early experiences that have sunk into subconsciousness and lift them up again for purposes of healing. According to Freudian theory, healing is brought about by lifting hidden sexual complexes up from the depths of the subconscious and making the person aware of them again. Whether this method is very successful is a matter of much discussion in books on the subject.

As you can see, psychoanalysts' thinking is often colored by an underlying pervasive sexuality, and this is taken to extremes when psychoanalysis is applied to any and all possible phenomena of human life. For example, Freud and his disciples go so far as to interpret myths and legends psychoanalytically, tracing them to repressed sexuality. Consider, for example, how they interpret the story of Oedipus.¹⁰ In brief, the content of this legend is that Oedipus is led to kill his father and marry his mother. When psychoanalysts ask what this story is based on, they conclude that such things always rest on unconscious, repressed sexual complexes usually involving sexual experiences in earliest childhood. The Freudians are firmly convinced that a child's relationship to his or her father and mother is a sexual one right from birth, so if the child is a boy, he must be unconsciously in love with his mother and thus unconsciously or subconsciously jealous of his father.

At this point, my friends, we might be tempted to say that these psychoanalysts, if they actually believe in their own theory, should apply it to themselves first and foremost, and admit that their own destiny and outlook stem from an excess of repressed sexual processes experienced in childhood. Freud and his disciples should apply this theory to themselves first. They derive the Oedipus legend, for instance, from their assumption that most little boys have an illicit emotional relationship to their mother right from birth, and are thus jealous of their father. Thus, the boys' father becomes their enemy and works on as such in their troubled imagination. Later, however, they realize rationally that this relationship to their mother is not permissible, and so it is repressed and becomes subconscious. The boys then live out their lives without becoming aware of their forbidden relationship to their mother and their adversarial relationship to their father, whom they experience as a rival.

According to psychoanalytic theory, then, what we need to do in cases of defective psyches is to look for psychological complexes, and we will find that if these are lifted up into consciousness, a cure can be effected. It's too bad that I can't present these things in greater detail, but I will try to give you as exact an outline of them as possible. On page 16 of the above-mentioned book, for instance, you can read the following:

There has been little opportunity in the preceding pages for showing how new light can be thrown upon the facts of social psychology by the adoption of a psycho-analytic method of approach: for the horror of incest displayed by savages has long been recognized as such and stands in need of no further interpretation.¹¹

This essay explains why primitive peoples so strictly enforce the ban on marrying one's mother or sister and why relationships of this type are punished. “Incest” is love for a blood-relative, and one of the first essays in this book is entitled “The Horror of Incest.” This fear is explained by assuming the existence of a tendency to incest on the part of each male individual in the form of a forbidden relationship to his mother.

All that I have been able to add to our understanding of it is to emphasize the fact that it is essentially an infantile feature [that is, primitive people retain this for a lifetime, while in civilized children it is repressed into the subconscious] and that it reveals a striking agreement with the mental life of neurotic patients. Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones—his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psycho-sexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them—two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. Thus incestuous fixations of libido continue to play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in his unconscious mental life. We have arrived at the point of regarding a child's relation to his parents, dominated as it is by incestuous longings, as the nuclear complex of neurosis.

Thus, according to psychoanalytic theory, the central complex involved in neurosis is a boy's forbidden sexual attraction for his mother and sister.

This revelation of the importance of incest in neurosis is naturally received with universal skepticism by adults and normal people. Similar expressions of disbelief, for instance, inevitably greet the writings of Otto Rank, which have brought more and more evidence to show the extent to which the interest of creative writers centres round the theme of incest and how the same theme, in countless variations and distortions, provides the subject-matter of poetry. We are driven to believe that this rejection is principally a product of the distaste which human beings feel for their early incestuous wishes, now overtaken by repression. It is therefore of no small importance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes, which are later destined to become unconscious, are still regarded by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe measures of defence must be enforced.¹²

From this point of departure, an atmosphere of sexuality spreads until it pervades the psychoanalysts' whole field of activity. Their whole life is spent working with ideas about sexuality. That is why psychoanalysis has been the biggest contributing factor in making an unbelievable mockery of something quite natural in human life. This has crept into our life gradually, without people noticing it. I can sympathize deeply with an old gentleman by the name of Moritz Benedikt (who spent his life trying to bring morality into medicine) when he says that if you look around, you'll find that the physicians of thirty years ago knew less about certain sexual abnormalities than eighteen-year-old girls in boarding school do today.¹³ This is the truth, and you can really empathize with this man. I mention it in particular because it is really extremely important to regard certain processes in children's lives as simply natural, without having to see them in terms of sexuality right away.

Nowadays, these complicated psychoanalytic theories lead us to label a lot of what children do as sexually deviant, although most of it is totally innocent. In most cases, it would be enough to regard these things as nothing more than childish mischievousness that could be quite adequately treated with a couple of smacks on a certain part of the anatomy. The worst possible way of dealing with it, however, is to talk a lot about these things, especially with the children themselves, and to put all kinds of theoretical ideas in their heads. It is hard enough to talk about these things with grownups with any degree of clarity. Unfortunately for people who are often called upon to provide counseling, parents frequently come with all kinds of complaints, including some really dumb ones, about how their children suffer from sexual deviance. Their only basis for these complaints is that the children scratch themselves. Now, there is no more sexuality involved in scratching yourself anywhere else than there is in scratching your arm. Dr. Freud, however, upholds the idea that any scratching or touching, or even a baby's sucking a pacifier, is a sexual activity. He spreads a mantle of sexuality over all aspects of human life.

It would be good for us to look more closely at Freudian psychoanalysis in order to become aware of the excesses of materialistic science; specifically, of those of psychoanalysis in seeing everything in terms of sexuality. In a book introduced by Dr. Freud, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Ferenczi writes about the case of a five-year-old boy named Arpad.¹⁴ There is no doubt in his mind as to the sources of Arpad's interest in the goings-on in the chicken run:

The continual sexual activity between the cock and hens, the laying of eggs and the hatching out of the young brood gratified his sexual curiosity, the real object of which was human family life. He showed that he had formed his own choice of sexual objects on the model of life in the hen-run, for he said one day to the neighbour's wife: “I'll marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the cook; no, not the cook, I'll marry my mother instead.” ¹⁵

We could wish for a return of the days when it was possible to hear children say things like this without immediately having to resort to such awkward sexual explanations. I can only touch on this subject today, but I will discuss it at greater length sometime in the near future in order to reassure all you fathers and mothers.¹⁶ But of course, Freud's theory, which is spreading widely without people noticing it, is only a symptom of a worldwide tendency. And when parents come with the complaint that their four- or five-year-old sons or daughters are suffering from sexual deviance, in most cases the appropriate response is, “The only deviant thing in this case is your way of thinking about it!” In most instances, that is really what's wrong.

My intention in telling you all this has been to point out the kind of atmosphere Freudian psychoanalysis is swimming in. I am well aware that the Freudians would take issue with this brief characterization. But we are fully justified in saying that psychoanalysis as a whole is positively dripping with this psychosexual stuff, as its professional literature reveals.

Suppose the assumption that psychosexual islands exist in the human subconscious actually proves to be true in the case of a certain individual. A Freudian theorist might subject that person to questioning and be able to add a new case history to the annals of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In the case concerning us, Goesch might have undertaken this line of questioning and made some discoveries among those psychosexual islands that would have served to verify Freud's theories. But to do that, Goesch would have needed to be stronger in his own soul. As it was, however, he succumbed to a certain type of relationship to his new lady friend. The material in our possession supplies ample evidence of this relationship and will allow anyone who applies it in the right way to describe their relationship with clinical, objective precision.

Since what can be learned from a specific case is often of greater significance than the actual case itself, let me point out that this case can lead us to the same conclusions I presented in my essay, published in the Vienna Clinical Review in 1900, entitled “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem.” ¹⁷ Notwithstanding all the contributions Nietzsche's genius made to the world, it was necessary to point out that Nietzsche would be misunderstood if the psychopathological factor in him were not taken into account. It is important for our Society that psychopathological elements not gain the upper hand, that they be eradicated from our minds and seen in the right light so that psychopaths are not looked upon as some kind of higher beings. That is why it is also important to see the current case in the right light and assess what is actually involved from the right standpoint.

It is already too late for me to describe now at length how the storm developed. When I was in Vienna in May of this year, one of our members wrote me a letter I had to tear up on returning here, since taking letters across the border is no longer allowed. This letter contained accusations very similar to those raised by Goesch under the influence of Miss Sprengel and showing a similar involvement in Freudian psychoanalysis. They came from the same quarter; the same wind was blowing in both sets of accusations. In fact, if I could have read you some sentences from that letter, they would have sounded remarkably like what Miss Sprengel inspired in Goesch.

What, then, was actually going on in the Goesch-Sprengel case? Goesch could not really function as a psychoanalyst, because to do that his relationship to Miss Sprengel would have had to be an objective one like that of a doctor to a patient. Her influence on him was too overwhelming, however, and thus his involvement in the examination was not fully conscious and objective. In Freudian terms, everything at work in the psyche of his friend, the “keeper of the seal,” came out, but since it sank down into Goesch's unconscious, it was masked by the whole theory that came to light in his letter.

The Goesch-Sprengel case grew out of one of the greatest mistakes and worst materialistic theories of our time, and we can only deal with it by realizing that both people involved threw a mantle of secrecy over their human, all-too-human relationships. In essence, this consisted of shrouding their relationship in Freudian psychoanalytic theories, as the documents very clearly reveal.

When we attempt to help people who come to us in such a confused psychological state, they are often fawning, enthusiastic supporters to begin with, but later on their adulation changes into enmity. That, too, can be explained in psychoanalytic terms. However, our most urgent concern at the moment is our relationship to the rest of the world. Just as we are now experiencing hostility coming from the direction of psychoanalysis, steeped as it is in sexuality, we can expect to encounter at any moment new opposition from all kinds of aberrations resulting from other all-too-human impulses.

This shows us that we must study such cases; they should be of great interest to us precisely because our Society represents a spiritual movement. I could speak at much greater length on this subject, but I must stop for today because you need to get on with your deliberations. I simply wanted to point out the first tentative steps we must take in seeing where the dangers for our movement lie and how urgent it is that we all do as much as we can to help the world out there learn that we are not chicken-livered. We know how to stand up for ourselves. When things come up in disguise as they did in this letter, we must rip off the mask and expose where they come from. Their origins lie much deeper than we usually think; they originate in the materialistic outlook of our times, which has not only become the dominant view in science but has contaminated our life as a whole. Combating it is our movement's very reason for existence, but we must keep our eyes wide open and see what is going on in the world. We must recognize what the people coming to us have learned out in the world and what they bring with them when they come to us.

• 1. Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939. Psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 2. Joseph Breuer, 1842–1925. Rudolf Steiner met Breuer in the home of the Specht family, where Steiner was a tutor from 1884–1890. See Steiner's The Course of My Life, GA 28, Chapter XIII, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986). See also Karl Konig, “Die Schicksale Sigmund Freuds and Joseph Breuers” (“The Destiny of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer”), Stuttgart 1962.
• 3. In Joseph Breuer's therapy, hysteric patients were put under hypnosis and their symptoms traced back to the point when they first appeared; as a rule, on recreating this condition, the symptoms intensified, but usually disappeared afterward. In their Studies on Hysteria, (Leipzig and Vienna, 1895) Breuer and Freud described this form of therapy on the basis of five individual cases.
• 4. Berlin, November 4, 1910, included in Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, GA 115, (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1971). Also Munich, November 18, 1911, in Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz, GA 130, 2nd ed., rev., (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1984).
• 5. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, tr. James Strachey, copyright 1950 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). In the magazine Imago, vols. I and II (1912 and 1913), these articles appeared under the title, “Some Correspondences in the Inner Life of Savages and Neurotics.”
• 6. Dr. Oskar Schmiedel, 1887–1959, a chemist, was head of the laboratory producing the plant pigments needed in building the first Goetheanum.
• 7. Freud, op.cit., p. 29.
• 8. Ibid., p. 30.
• 9. Apparently, the next few lines dealt with the connection between the Goesch-Sprengel case and psychoanalysis, but the stenographer only caught the words, “It is important how the connection is drawn… with disguised drives like these… especially between two personalities of this sort...”
• 10. Sigmund Freud dealt with the Oedipus complex for the first time in The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. James Strachey, Chapter V, Section D, (New York: Avon, 1965).
• 11. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 16.
• 12. Ibid., p. 17.
• 13. Moritz Benedikt, 1835–1920, physician and criminal anthropologist. The exact quotation reads, “Nowadays we find that students at the best finishing schools are more informed on the topic of sexual perversions than we young doctors used to be, and I often wish beating could be instituted as a punishment for the 'liberated' women teachers who encourage this kind of knowledge.” Aus Meinem Leben. Erinnerungen and Erörterungen, Vienna, 1906, vol. II, p. 162.
• 14. Sandor Ferenczi, 1873–1933, a favorite pupil of Freud's who later went his own way in psychoanalysis.
• 15. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 131. Ferenczi's report appeared in English as “A Little Chanticleer” in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1916, p. 270.
• 16. It has not been possible to determine whether or not this actually happened.
• 17. “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem,” in Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom, GA 5, (Englewood, NJ: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1960).

Yesterday I inserted a talk on psychoanalysis into this lecture series, since that subject is of concern to all of us at the moment because of the case at hand. You will have noticed that I first characterized the psychoanalytic view as distinguishing between consciousness and the unconscious in our inner life. I then went on to describe, if only briefly, how the psychoanalytic point of view as a whole is swimming in sexuality, and you could see that with this second aspect, an extremely unfortunate (you might even say “terrible”) element has entered our culture. This points to something characteristic of current intellectual trends in general.

There can be no doubt that in distinguishing an unconscious that exists alongside the conscious mind, psychoanalysis has made a legitimate contribution to our culture. We can look at it like this: These people are on the right track in thinking that the human soul goes beyond what our ordinary consciousness encompasses. However, these same people have also taken their materialism to extremes. It has done more than engulf their thinking, which is what happened in the case of what is now erroneously known as monism. The materialism of the psychoanalysts, however, also pulls the lower human drives into their theory and incorporates them into it. As a result, sexual drives, the most subjective element possible, become the motivating impulse in scientific activity.

We must look particularly closely at such modern cultural phenomena, because they show us that something independent of human individuals is compelling even the crassest materialists among us to recognize a higher spiritual element than the one we are immediately aware of. After all, the followers of Freud are deeply rooted in materialism, in their intellect as well as their instincts; yet the objective world compels even them to investigate something beyond the scope of ordinary consciousness. That is the objective side of the matter.

On the other hand, the subjective aspect is that these people are so tangled up in materialism that their lowest and most subjective drives are immediately drawn into the business of formulating their outlook on life. That is part and parcel of materialism just as much as the left hand belongs to the right hand or the left eye to the right eye. And tumbling right down into the very lowest human drives is the inevitable consequence of getting stuck in materialism if people really let themselves go.

However, my friends, we can really understand this way of looking at the world only if we can get to the bottom of many a riddle of the world order. The dangerous thing about philosophies like psychoanalysis is that people are on the right track, but drag their impure instincts into what is true. It is much less harmful when impure instincts are incorporated into something completely erroneous than it is when they are incorporated into a partial truth. And the truth in the psychoanalytic view lies in its recognition of the fact that so much of what is at work in human life is unconscious, truly unconscious. That is where psychoanalysts are on the right track and have come upon many things that are true and correct.

Let us follow up how psychoanalysts stumble onto the right track. In the book I told you about yesterday, the head of the psychoanalytic school of thought attempts to explain certain customs among primitive people on the basis of certain psychoanalytic theories. He does so in accordance with connections he assumes to exist between early childhood and neurotic conditions later in life.

We saw yesterday how the element of sexuality plays into these theories. In his book Totem and Taboo, in the essay “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,” Freud compares some of the views and ideas of primitive people with certain infantile characteristics of civilized human beings that manifest in neuroses, in certain types of nervous or psychological disorders.¹ From what we discussed yesterday, you will recall that psychoanalysts explain many things as the result of impulses that affect people in the early years of their life and then retreat to islands in these people's psyche where they work on in the unconscious. This means that infantile psychological activity is still going on in civilized adults. According to this view, neurotics, or at least a certain type of neurotics, are walking around at age forty with psyches in which earliest childhood experiences, infantile experiences, are still especially influential.

Freud then compares certain primitive beliefs with the experience of neurosis. For example, he says:

A Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief's breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die. ²

Freud does not compare this fear of blowing on a flame because of what might happen to someone eating out of the pot warmed by it with the habits of the person we have been speaking about for the past few days—after all, he did not know her and her fear of others affecting her aura. However, he does compare it to the behavior of someone else who came to him as a patient. He says:

My patient's husband purchased a household article of some kind and brought it home with him. She insisted that it should be removed or it would make the room she lived in “impossible”.³

That is what the patient tells the psychoanalyst. A spiritual scientist using healthy understanding to contemplate a patient like this would have to consider the problem from many different angles. Psychoanalysts, too, might or might not be able to follow the clues in a case like this. And a false mystic might come up with all kinds of profound ideas about magical influences at work on this person or proceeding from this very refined personality who has reached such an advanced stage of evolution that she cannot tolerate having certain objects in the same room with her!

The psychoanalyst says of his patient:

She had heard that the article had been bought in a shop situated in, let us say, “Smith” Street.

He finds out that she has heard that the item in question was bought in a store on Smith Street—increasing mystification! He continues:

“Smith,” however, was the married name of a woman friend of hers who lived in a distant town and whom she had known in her youth under her maiden name. This friend of hers was at the moment “impossible” or taboo.

That is, it was something she did not want to come into contact with.

Consequently the article that had been purchased here in Vienna was as taboo as the friend herself with whom she must not come into contact.

As the psychoanalyst in question has found out, the patient had had a friend with whom she had once gotten into trouble. The friend's name was Smith. This fact survives on an island in her psyche. Nothing of it is present in her ordinary waking consciousness, but although she is unaware of the connection, it remains in her unconscious. Only the name provides the connecting link inasmuch as the friend whom she hated in her youth—a hatred the patient was not conscious of—is called Smith and the article in question was bought on Smith Street. The similarity of the names provides the connection; that is how the subconscious works up into the realm of consciousness.

People with a strong mystical bent make much of names that sound alike. They make such associations very readily and are led to all kinds of mystical conclusions without ever becoming fully aware of the connection. For example, it could happen that a person who once played the role of Persephone might come to believe that she was an actual reincarnation of Persephone because she thinks she once heard someone she didn't know call out the name Persephone as she went past. It could well be, however, that she simply overheard someone saying he saw a woman telephoning, and that she understood “Persephone” from that sequence of sounds. The person in question misheard “Persephone” when what was actually said was “telephoning,” and that is enough for her to go on spinning her mystical threads. This is all strictly hypothetical, of course, but it does correspond to how such things can actually happen.

I could give you many other examples from the essays of Dr. Freud and his followers that would show you that the philosophy of psychoanalysis is in fact seeking the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. However, as I described yesterday, as a result of certain tendencies of our times, all it finds down there in the unconscious is sexuality. This is an extremely important point, and we must take a very close look at it.

The day before yesterday, I told you about Swedenborg and his clairvoyance, for in his own way, Swedenborg was an extremely distinguished and advanced clairvoyant. I explained that he was characteristically unable to cross the threshold into a different state of consciousness, to say “I am being observed” instead of “I am observing.” Swedenborg always wanted to observe everything himself. He observed his Imaginations. He himself was not being observed from the sphere of the Angeloi, but was observing that sphere with the same kind of consciousness he used on the physical plane. Let's take a good look at this once more so as to be clear about the right way to ascend from the physical plane to a higher plane of existence. We must be very clear that on the physical plane, we perceive various objects which are mirrored by means of our physical body and thus become our concepts. That's how we arrive at the important insight that we are looking at objects, and this is the basis of our consciousness.

As soon as we ascend to a higher state of consciousness, however, all this changes fundamentally. There we are received with our I by beings of a higher order, and then we become aware of being perceived, of being looked at by them.

Swedenborg presents a third state of consciousness in which a whole world of objects not present on the physical plane is perceived by him exactly as he perceived objects on the physical plane, although in a more refined state. Thus Swedenborg perceives spiritual objects presented to him in the form of Imaginations just as if the spiritual world were nothing more than a finer version of the physical world. He looks at the spiritual world in the same way we look at the physical world in everyday life. What is the cause of this?

We have already traced the process Swedenborg went through. He discovered certain spiritual beings who made it clear to him that they came from Mars. These beings were incomprehensible to him because they repressed all expressions of emotion and expressed themselves only in thought-gestures. As I told you on Sunday, he realized that he could not understand these beings because they had acquired the ability to conceal their soul life. If Swedenborg had been able to see with the kind of consciousness available to the Angeloi (which is what would have happened if he had really ascended to the spiritual world—that is, if he had also carried his consciousness up into the spiritual world), he would have been able to understand the nature of these Mars beings even though they concealed all their emotions. As it was, however, the content of the Mars beings' soul appeared to Swedenborg as a cold world of thoughts. This is all very strange.

Just think how terribly afraid most people here on the physical plane are of the cold and abstract world of reason. You hear all kinds of derogatory comments about this cold and abstract world of thoughts, and people do everything possible to try to avoid it, to avoid thinking in pure thoughts. Someone who expects people to ascend to pure thought is held to be out of touch with and hostile to real life. That's how people on the physical plane feel about the abstract world of thoughts.

This point of view is very widespread. I will give you an example; present company is always excepted, of course, so I am sure there will be no hurt feelings. For a number years now, a great many people have been reading my The Philosophy of Freedom, which is a work of pure thought.⁴ It first appeared in the 1890s. It would be interesting to find out how many of the people in our movement who are now reading The Philosophy of Freedom would have read it on its own merits, without knowing anything about me and our movement, if it had fallen into their hands back in the early 1890s. How many people would have read it back then and how many would have said, “I can't get through this tangled web of thoughts; it just doesn't make any sense!”? You can just imagine, then, how many people are reading this work of pure thought for strictly personal reasons. (Present company excepted, of course.) The only ones who are reading it for other than personal reasons are the ones who would have read it even if they had never met me in person. We have to admit to this quite soberly; it shows how horrified we on the physical plane are of so-called abstraction.

In spite of being such a great scholar, when Swedenborg encountered the beings I described, this particular class of Mars beings, on the astral plane, he was incapable of understanding the pure thoughts, free of any emotion, that were active in their souls. Transferred to the physical plane, this is the same as if someone would say about The Philosophy of Freedom, “It's all Greek to me; no sensible person can read that kind of language,” meaning that it seems totally incomprehensible. In the same way, Swedenborg found these Mars beings incomprehensible on the astral plane.

It is important, however, that we at least have the good will and make the effort to advance to the kind of thinking that is free of emotion—to begin with, free of the emotions we know so well in ordinary life. If the content of The Philosophy of Freedom appeals to people because their feelings incline them to a more spiritual way of looking at things, they have not yet achieved pure thinking. Only those people who take it in because of the thoughts' logical sequence and the way they support each other are relating to the book in the right way.

Swedenborg, on the other hand, in spite of being such a great scholar, could not conceive of being drawn to a world of pure thoughts free of emotional motives. We must try to understand, my friends—and the means of doing so are available in our anthroposophical literature—to what extent in everyday life our choice of truths is dictated by emotional impulses, by impulses provided for us on the physical plane through our karma or upbringing. We are only free of subjectivity when we have really moved on to a realm of thinking in which thoughts sustain each other and no longer have any subjective content.

After that, however, there is still one more thing we must accomplish. When we have really reached the stage of thinking in pure thoughts, when a sequence of pure thoughts is present in our soul, then our personal mind or subjective I is no longer involved. This accounts for the severity we experience when we reach this stage of pure thinking. It is no longer possible to bend things to fit into the mold of how we subjectively would like to have them. Take a train of thought like that of The Philosophy of Freedom. It is impossible to construct it in any other way. It cannot be arbitrarily tampered with; you have to let it grow inside you like a living organism. Then your I is really uninvolved; it is thinking itself that is doing the thinking.

However, your thinking only becomes mature if what it has been emptied of—your own I—is replaced with something else. In place of the contents of your personal mind, the mind-content of spirits belonging to higher hierarchies must fill this emotion-free thinking. When you have come so far as to be able to gradually rid your emotion-filled thinking of its subjective content so that it contains only pure concepts, then divine content, the content that comes from above, can flow in.

Swedenborg never reached this stage. In spite of being a great scholar, he could not extricate what he was thinking from his personal emotions. When he ascended to the astral plane, beings such as the Mars dwellers who could think in pure thought were completely alien to his thinking, confined as it still was to his own personality, and they were therefore incomprehensible to him. As far as he was concerned, their gestures could not be understood at all. But why was Swedenborg barred from entering the world of higher consciousness? Why did he carry a mode of perception appropriate to the physical plane up into the spiritual world, to which he really did gain access? We need not investigate why certain spirits were able to keep their thoughts free of subjective emotional content, but why was Swedenborg unable to understand their words and gestures?

The answers to all these questions will become apparent if we first ask what was actually going on in Swedenborg's case and what he took with him onto the astral plane. It seems he was not completely able to extricate his spiritual nature from his physical person, for if he had been able to do so, he would have seen his I as an object in the realm of higher consciousness. His I would have become like a remembered object, something like the broken pots in a comparison I used some time ago. He was unable to wrest himself sufficiently free of himself. However, as you know from what I have already said about him, it was characteristic of Swedenborg's clairvoyance that he did not just see illusions. He did not just see maya—he could actually recognize objective facts; for instance, he knew he was dealing with beings from Mars and could see what they were like. That was all correct, but he was seeing the spiritual world in its maya aspect, through a veil of illusion, so to speak. He was in fact looking at real beings from Mars, but could not understand that they were actual spiritual beings.

Now, my friends, let me ask you to be really, really clever for a moment, and clever in a way that people who want to develop their clairvoyance usually are not. Obviously, Swedenborg did not perceive these beings from Mars with his ordinary senses, with his ordinary sense of sight. After all, he was seeing them in the spiritual world. In other words, he could not see them with his sense of sight or hear them with his sense of hearing or even understand them with his ordinary capacity for thought. As I have explained to you, this capacity for thought was actually a gift of the ancient Moon stage, that is, something that developed before the Mars forces came into play...⁵ [gap in the stenographic record]. Among all the powers of cognition known to human beings, there was nothing that could have enabled him to understand these beings.

Thus we are confronted with the strange fact that Swedenborg undoubtedly recognized the beings he saw, but did not recognize them by means of any higher forces. He recognized them by means of some ability he should not have had because he was lacking the necessary consciousness—ordinary powers of consciousness on the physical plane are inadequate to explain what he was seeing. But in that case, how was he actually seeing? Now, Swedenborg had spent his life not only as a great scholar but also as a very pure person, and so a certain energy was transformed within him. All people on the physical plane have this energy, which is somewhat similar to clairvoyant ability. On the physical plane, however, it is used for a different purpose. What was this energy that enabled Swedenborg to see as he did?

Swedenborg was seeing by means of a force that perceives outer appearances without touching them in any way and without making use of the eyes. What kind of a force is that? On earth, on the physical plane, it is the force that comes to expression in sexual activity, the mysterious force that pulls people together in earthly love, a force different from all other powers of perception. Swedenborg had stored up this force, and when he reached a certain age it was transformed in him, although it remained sexual energy in some respects. He used this sexual energy to see spiritual worlds. That is, transformed sexual energy is actually the basis of Swedenborg's clairvoyance.

You can conclude from all this that human beings during their evolution on earth are provided with a force that expresses itself as sexuality during earthly life, but that will be transformed once it is no longer bound to the physical body. On the other hand, you can also come to the conclusion that the forces leading to clairvoyant vision are very intimately related to forces involved in what are now the lowest drives in human nature, and that one of these realms can be attracted by the other, so to speak.

My friends, it follows that clairvoyance is not something to be toyed with. Of course, what I have just said does not apply to spiritual science as such, but it does apply to all kinds of clairvoyance people grab for in passing without working to acquire it legitimately. We cannot take seriously enough the fact that clairvoyance is not to be developed by simply applying a transformation of our usual mode of perception on the physical plane to higher planes of existence. These higher planes require that we work toward a new mode of perception applicable to the spiritual world, a mode of perception that has nothing to do with sexual energy, since that is physical and exists only for the physical plane. Applying the same mode of perception to higher worlds as is applied on the physical plane, that is, the assumption that people can still perceive in the same way as they do on the physical plane, is what makes people relate clairvoyance and sexual energies.

There are several ways of avoiding this, and we are now at a crucial point in human evolution where these things must be understood. What I have just told you is ancient knowledge, and in olden times people knew how to protect themselves. They knew that people approaching the spiritual world had to recognize both their own weakness and the fact that strength of character, inner discipline, and doing away with any unrestrained emotional impulses are necessary for ascending into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Ancient initiates were aware of human weakness and took steps to prevent any possibility of mixing the two spheres.

How did they do it? Simply by keeping people away from the opposite sex whenever truly spiritual matters were being spoken of. That is, the female sex was not allowed to participate in gatherings in which spiritual scientific matters were discussed. That is why in the past women were excluded from all spiritual-scientific gatherings. This measure prevented the men from mixing the two spheres in any way, because they were bound by strictest oath not to discuss what went on in the lodge outside the lodge itself. Women, then, could have no connection to spiritual science other than the white gloves, which were a significant symbol of this whole state of affairs.⁶

Now these times are long gone, and spiritual scientific movements such as ours should attempt to do away with such constraints. However, the spiritual realm must still be kept totally free of the other sphere I mentioned; these two realms are not to be mixed.

What we have seen recently is a case of the worst possible mingling of spheres, a case in which sexual drives were at work but were interpreted as something quite different. They were interpreted as all kinds of mystical things, but in reality they were sexual drives. It is important to face this fact squarely and to understand it from the inside, out of the inner nature of the cosmic order. Only our recognition of the very great dignity and solemnity of spiritual life can guard us against egotism in spiritual activity. Once egotistical mysticism enters, nothing can save us from mixing the two above-mentioned spheres in the worst possible way.

Thus we saw how in Swedenborg's case, repressed sexuality filled his Imaginations that would otherwise have remained empty, but only to a certain extent. When he came into contact with beings who were able to eliminate all emotions from their gestures, he was no longer able to fill that sphere, which was a strictly human one and came about because his sexuality extended to include his Imaginations. Swedenborg, then, is a good example of what to avoid in approaching the spiritual world in modern times. Aspirations that resemble Swedenborg's in any way put people striving for clairvoyance in danger of arousing the sphere of sexuality and having the two spheres mingle.

My friends, we must be able to speak of these things as a matter of course in spiritual scientific contexts. It would be very unfortunate if we were unable to mention them objectively and scientifically, because serious seekers also need to know the dangers they face in their search. That is also why it is so easy for an impure fantasy to misinterpret pure spiritual striving.

We stand at an extremely significant point in our spiritual scientific communications, and what I wanted to do today was sketch the lines converging in this point. Because I want to be very thorough in speaking to you about these things, I will continue to present my reflections on this question tomorrow. We will meet again at the same time, or at whatever time seems best—we can decide that before we leave here today.

• 1. Freud, Totem and Taboo. See Lecture Four, note 5.
• 2. Ibid., p. 28.
• 3. Ibid., p. 28.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom: A Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, GA 4, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988).
• 5. In a lecture given in Dornach, August 8, 1915. See Lecture Three, note 8.
• 6. It is a Masonic custom to give the neophyte two pairs of white gloves at the occasion of his admission. One is for himself, the other for the woman he reveres most highly.

Let us continue with the theme we have been considering for the past few days and begin by asking the question, “How old is love?” There is no doubt in my mind that the great majority of people with their rather superficial way of looking at things would immediately respond that love is as old as the human race, of course. However, anyone who recognizes cultural history as being imbued with spiritual impulses, and who therefore tries to deal with such issues concretely instead of in vague generalities, would answer quite differently. Love, my friends, is seven hundred years old at the most!

Nowhere in ancient Greek and Roman prose or poetry will you find anything resembling our modern idea of love. And if you read Plutarch, for instance, you will find the two concepts of Venus and Amor very clearly differentiated.¹ Love as the subject of so much lyrical eloquence in literature, and especially in poetry, is no more than six or seven hundred years old. Our modern notion of love—what love means to us today and how that is instilled in people—has played a part in the human heart and mind only for the past six or seven centuries. Before that, people did not have the same idea of love; they did not speak about it in any even remotely similar way.

This should not come as a surprise to you, not even on a theoretical or epistemological level. The objection that human beings have always made a practice of loving does not hold good; that would be like saying that if the Earth revolves around the Sun as the Copernican view claims, then it must have been doing so even during Roman, Greek, and Egyptian time—in fact, as long as it has been in existence. Of course that's true, but the people of those times didn't talk about the Copernican system.

Similarly, it is also not valid to object that what is expressed in the idea of love must have existed before the concept itself was there. Of course, the facts and phenomena of loving have always been an identifiable facet of human life, but people have not always talked about them. We have come a long way in the past six or seven hundred years in that respect; in fact, we have come so far that love occupies a central position in many people's view of life. And not only that, we now have a scientific theory, the theory of psychoanalysis, which is positively swimming in the most vulgar concepts of love, as I have shown. This is an evolutionary tendency that anthroposophists in particular are called upon to resist and to transform by fostering a spiritual-scientific philosophy of life.

Many of you may be aware that I described these same things quite precisely from a historical perspective in some earlier lectures, so I would be surprised if you were all taken aback by my statement that our idea of love is only six or seven hundred years old.² In any case, the idea of love has gradually crept into all kinds of philosophical concepts during the past few hundred years, as is revoltingly evident in psychoanalysis. It would take a long time to get to the bottom of all this, but I hope these more or less aphoristic remarks will give you some clues.

As an example, let's consider a contemporary thinker who is totally immersed in modern cultural concepts—in other words, someone who cannot overcome his supposed insight that outer sensory-physical reality is all we can reasonably talk about. I have already introduced Fritz Mauthner to you as a very sincere representative of this type of person.³ Mauthner is a linguistic critic and the author of a philosophical dictionary. This puts him in a very strange position in that it makes him aware of the fact that the word “mysticism” has existed down through the ages—as a linguistic critic, he naturally wants to know what stands behind both the word itself and actual mystical aspirations.

My friends, just consider how much reading material we have to struggle through to understand that particular relationship of the human soul to super-earthly worlds that deserves the name “mysticism.” Consider, too, how very seriously we have to take any explanations, such as those in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, if we want to understand the inner attitude needed in order to face the spiritual world as a mystic—that is, as a soul at one with the spiritual pulse and flow of higher worlds.⁴ We can only really say what mysticism is in the modern sense of the word when we have engaged in serious reflection such as that in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. In other words, we have to at least study that book thoroughly and attentively a couple of times.

When someone like Fritz Mauthner gets his hands on a book like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, it is patent nonsense to him—just so many words. Mauthner is an honest man, after all. He would be telling the truth if, having read Swedenborg, he were to say that he doesn't understand a thing when Swedenborg talks about inhabitants of Mars who can conceal their innermost impulses. He might also say that he finds nothing to relate to in a book like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds; perhaps angels might be able to understand it, but he cannot.

This is an utterly plausible opinion, and I am convinced it is what Fritz Mauthner would come to as an honest person. And in fact, if he is honest and sticks to the truth, coming to this conclusion is inevitable because the concept of mysticism eludes him entirely; there's nothing to it as far as he is concerned. For him, everything in Theosophy or Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is all just words, words, words.⁵ If he himself experiences a kind of Faustian striving, he might express it by saying, “[I will] contemplate all seminal forces in the outer physical world and be done with peddling empty words.” ⁶ And in his own way, he is quite right.

However, Mauthner is not only honest, he is also thorough, and so he wonders if it is actually true that human souls have never experienced anything like mysticism. After all, people have always talked about it. What was it, then, that induced them to speak about mysticism?

When I was a very young man, I knew an outstanding theologian, now dead, who was also very well educated in philosophy.⁷ He always said, and rightly so, that behind every error there is something true and real we must look for. No idea is so crazy that we need not look for the reality behind it. This is also Mauthner's rationale in conceding that there must be something to mysticism after all. Obviously, there are still strange characters around who write books like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and talk about our mystical relationship to spiritual worlds, but to him it is all nonsense. However, there has to be something in human nature that produces the emotions these crazy, mixed-up people call mysticism. There must be something behind it.

If you try to find how Mauthner discovers what underlies mysticism, the most you can say after having read the entry on mysticism in his dictionary is that he keeps going around in circles.⁸ Everything in this article revolves around words and definitions of words. But since I was interested in finding out how Mauthner, in his own way, attempts to get at what is behind mysticism, I looked it up in his dictionary to see what could be found there ... [gap in the stenographic record]

So I looked up not only his entry on mysticism but also the one on love. I found the article on love to be one of his best, and very well written. It's actually very nice. Mauthner first mentions Spinoza's definition of love and Schopenhauer's brief and heavy-handed definition, and then he explains that it is necessary to distinguish between mere eroticism, which is strictly physical and confined to sexuality, and real love on a soul level. Mauthner admits all that, and even goes on to say something as elevated as this:

I believe that people who are one-sided geniuses in thinking have seldom, if ever, had any understanding of love in its highest degree, of feelings of love taken to pathological extremes. They have not experienced it personally and have only tried to categorize the descriptions of poets.⁹

That is, the philosophers did not know much about love except what they looked up in books of poetry.

I believe that love in its ultimate degree has been experienced and described only by artists (approximately since the time of Petrarch), and that it entered common parlance through the power of imitation or fashion and captured the imagination of readers for six hundred years, and is now in the process of being replaced by another fashion. Although the ultimate degree of love is as rare as a great artistic creation or the kind of religious union with God that St. Francis may have experienced, still the whole world babbles on about religion, art, and love. What they mean by all this are mere substitutes for emotions that perhaps one person in a million has actually experienced.

So there!

The ultimate degree of love, whose existence I do not deny, is really something of a miracle—and people have also tried to explain miracles as pathological phenomena. In the most unlikely event that both sexual partners experience the highest degree of love, a miracle takes place in defiance of all the laws of nature: each one lifts the other and both float above the earth. Archimedes' principle is, or appears to be, superseded. Whether in happiness or in death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled.

There you have it. For someone like Mauthner, steeped in modern materialistic philosophy, the emotion of love is the only way human beings can experience the feelings “deranged” mystics experience in their relationship to spiritual things. “Whether in happiness or in death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled” is a remarkably honest sentence coming from someone who has lost all connection to the spiritual world. Mauthner continues:

For the purposes of this little investigation, I have deliberately overlooked many other meanings of the word “love.” At this juncture, however, I must still point out that union with God is experienced by mysticism as the pleasure of love at its most passionate and most spiritual, and that Spinoza made use of his first definition of love (in Book III and Book V of his Ethics) to proclaim the love for God, the amor erga Deum, as the highest bliss known to human beings. The longing to give expression to the inexpressible is intrinsic to mysticism, and this has led to considerable misuse of the concept of love. There is something of this vivid mysticism not only in Spinoza's pantheistic extravagance, but also in Schopenhauer's metaphysical cynicism. It is also what Cousin meant when he said that we love the infinite and imagine we love finite things.

The well-known feeling that leads us to call our sexual partners “lovers” runs through so-called love in all its various degrees. And we describe our very subjective experience through the unwarranted use of the corresponding verb “to love.” The attempt to find an objective noun, namely, the word “love” to describe this experience met with such success that people have persuaded themselves that the experience itself is as common as the word “love” has become.

As you can see, when the modern materialistic world tries to formulate a concept of mysticism out of its own fundamental impulses, it is forced to conclude that what mystics dream of can only be found in the emotion of love in the real world; that is, everything spiritual is dragged down into a refined version of eroticism.

It is typical, for instance, that Mauthner brings up the particular way in which a woman friend of Nietzsche's, the author Lou Andreas-Salomé,¹⁰ describes Nietzsche's intellect as a type of refined eroticism.¹¹ It is interesting, too, how Mauthner reacts to her portrayal of Nietzsche. He says:

Recently, after so many attempts by men, a woman, Friedrich Nietzsche's friend Lou Andreas-Salome, has also tried to formulate a philosophy of love in her excellent book on Nietzsche, which won her the hatred of the entire Nietzsche clan. She is very subtle in her expositions, but bold enough to refuse to accept fidelity as an attribute of love, and she forges a link between the artist's fantasy and that of lovers (“Eroticism,” p. 25). She too, however, intellectualizes the act to such an extent that there seems to be no conceptual distinction between sensuality and the intellectual phenomena accompanying it.

In other words, then, from the way men and women express themselves, we see that nowadays, even in our thinking, we have to replace our relationship to the spiritual world with the eroticism throbbing in our souls—a more or less refined eroticism, depending on the character of the individual in question.

This all has to do with the fundamental materialistic tendency of our times, which also leads to untruthfulness when people are not honest enough to admit that all they know about mysticism is the aspect that is identical to eroticism. Untruthfulness emerges when these people talk about eroticism but conceal it behind a veil of mystical concepts. Materialists who freely admit that they see nothing but eroticism in all of mysticism are actually much more honest than people who take eroticism as their starting point but hide it behind mystical formulas as they clamber up to the very highest worlds. Sometimes you can almost see the ladders they are using to scramble up to the very highest planes of existence in order to have a mystical cover-up for something that is actually nothing more than eroticism. On the one hand, then, we have the theoretical linking of mysticism to eroticism, and on the other hand the tendency of our modern times to sink down into eroticism and drag all kinds of murky, misunderstood mysticism into it.

Some time ago I challenged you to work on eradicating the mystical eccentricities that come about through the kind of mingling of spheres I described, so that people who are well able to recognize the noble character of spirituality will once again be able to rise to the perspective needed to speak about spirituality where spirituality is actually present, without clothing subjective emotions in spiritual forms. In making this appeal, I hoped to create some degree of clarity in these matters within the Anthroposophical Society, so that clear thinking might prevail.¹² Time alone will tell whether we will actually be able to accomplish this.

In former times (and in fact until quite recently, as I pointed out yesterday), a much more radical means was used to safeguard the basic requirements of any kind of spiritual scientific society. It was a simple matter of excluding one entire sex, half of humanity, so that the other half would be spared the dangers inherent in mixing elevated spiritual concepts with thoughts of natural human activity on the physical plane. Thinking about spiritual matters belongs to the spiritual world. We must come to the healthy realization that it is much worse to talk about certain aspects of natural human interaction in mystical formulas that do not belong to this natural level than it is to call these things honestly by name and admit that this aspect belongs to the physical plane and must remain there.

Schopenhauer, in his singularly heavy-handed fashion, characterized love as follows: “The sum total of the current generation's love affairs are thus the human race's ‘earnest meditatio composition is generationis fu fume, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes’ ”—the earnest meditation of the human race as a whole on the composition of generations to come, on which in turn countless generations depend.¹³ Well, that's Schopenhauer's opinion, not mine! It is a terrible thing to see people deny the rightful place of such urges and disguise them by saying, for example, that they are obliged to do what they do so that an extremely important individuality can incarnate. That is really an abomination in the eyes of someone trying to practice mysticism in all earnestness and dignity.

We must also take into account the fact that mysticism is not intended as an excuse for laziness on our part. That is what it becomes, however, when healthy concepts are replaced by unhealthy ones in the name of mysticism. Here on the physical plane, people are supposed to make their mark through good will and work—real hard work. If they prefer to gain recognition under false pretenses rather than on the merits of their work, and demand special treatment by virtue of being the reincarnation of somebody or other, then they are using mysticism as an excuse. They want to be recognized as someone special without doing a thing. This is a very trivial and vulgarized way of looking at the matter.

If we are making every effort, as indeed we must nowadays, to foster spiritual science openly in the presence of both sexes, the old compulsory bans must be replaced by a serious and dignified attitude on the part of both men and women as they seek to acquire knowledge of the higher worlds. We must succeed in eliminating from this search all the fantasies bound up with our lower human drives. Only then will we be able to prevent the proliferation of errors originating in the illusions of individuals prone to mystical laziness. Mysticism, my friends, does not ask us to become lazier than the people out there who care nothing about it. If anything, it requires us to be more diligent than they are. And mystical morality cannot mean sinking below the moral level of other human beings; rather we must advance beyond it. If we do not make a serious effort to eradicate anything resembling “Sprengelism,” as I would like to call it, from our Society, we will make no progress.

How I will continue with this series of lectures depends on the course of your meeting today.¹⁴ Let us first see how far you get in this meeting, and then I will announce when we will continue.

• 1. Plutarch, c.46–after 119 A.D. Greek biographer and writer. In his work “On Isis and Osiris,” Plutarch makes the distinction between the two on the basis of the origin of Venus and Amor. He uses the Greek “Eros” for “Amor.”
• 2. For instance, in a lecture given in Berlin on May 14, 1912, Lecture 6 in Earthly and Cosmic Man, GA 133, (London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 1948).
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, linguistic philosopher whose most important works were Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 volumes, (Stuttgart and Berlin: 1901–1902) and Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 2 volumes, (Munich and Leipzig, 1910).
• 4. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, see Lecture Three, note 6.
• 5. Theosophy, see Lecture Two, note 10.
• 6. The reference is to a line from Goethe's Faust: “Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen und to nicht mehr in Worten kramen,” “[I] may contemplate all seminal forces — and be done with peddling empty words.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Stuart Atkins, (Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1984), Part One, Scene I, 11. 384-385.
• 7. In all probability, the reference is to Laurenz Manner (1848–1911), a Catholic theologian and professor of philosophy Rudolf Steiner met in Vienna in the salon of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. See The Course of My Life, GA 28, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986) and Vom Menschenrätsel (“On the Riddle of the Human Being”), GA 20, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [Not published in English — Translator].
• 8. In German, “his pigtail hangs behind him.” The reference is to a poem by Adalbert von Chamisso (1781–1838).
• 9. The quotations on the following pages are from Mauthner's Wörterbuch der Philosophie, see note 3 above.
• 10. Lou Andreas-Salome, 1861–1937, German writer. Daughter of a German general in the service of the Russians, wife of Orientalist F. C. Andreas, a friend of Nietzsche and Rilke, with connections to Freud and psychoanalysis. She wrote novels, short stories, and nonfiction.
• 11. Lou Andreas-Salome, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, (“Friedrich Nietzsche in His Writings”), 1894.
• 12. See Address of August 21, 1915, in Part Two of this volume, p. 141.
• 13. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, (Indian Hills, Colorado: Falcon's Wing Press, 1958), Vol. II, Addenda to Book 4, Chapter 44, “Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This passage is also quoted in Mauthner's Wörterbuch der Philosophie in the entry on “Love.”
• 14. No stenographic record was kept of this meeting, since Rudolf Steiner did not participate in it.

These lectures and documents from the summer and fall of 1915 were a response to a crisis in the Anthroposophical Society, a crisis Rudolf Steiner wanted the membership to be aware of.

In part, the crisis was caused by Alice Sprengel, a long-time student of Rudolf Steiner, and her reaction apparently provoked by the marriage of her spiritual teacher to Marie von Sivers. Her expectations, the exact nature of which is not quite clear, were connected to the important role she felt herself playing in the anthroposophical movement. Faced with the close working relationship and then the marriage of Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers in the winter of 1914, Alice Sprengel not only sent personal letters to both but also brought her disappointment and sense of abandonment to the attention of other members of the Anthroposophical Society.

She also had a close relationship to Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch, a couple whose interest in Rudolf Steiner's work was matched by an equally strong fascination with the then emerging psychoanalytical school of Freud. Influenced by Alice Sprengel and his own inner uncertainties, Heinrich Goesch accused Rudolf Steiner both privately and publicly of manipulating the membership of the Anthroposophical Society into a dependent status. As supposed mechanisms of such manipulation he mentioned Steiner's repeated failure to keep appointments and physical contact with members through shaking hands upon meeting.

Rudolf Steiner was understandably upset by both sets of accusations and even more so by the gossiping and dissension they caused among members of the Anthroposophical Society. He used these difficulties as an opportunity to address four important questions that are as relevant today as they were in 1915. The first, primarily discussed in Lectures One and Two, concerns the nature of the Anthroposophical Society and the responsibilities its members have to accept if they want to be true to spiritual science. The very clear, pragmatic manner in which these two lectures discuss this important issue makes them a valuable companion to the recently published The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, 1923/24.¹ The need for the members to move from a consumer orientation regarding spiritual teaching to a feeling of responsibility for it, the unique nature of the Anthroposophical Society as an earthly home for spiritual revelation, and the harm that irresponsible statements and actions can cause the Society are just a few of the important points covered. Steiner also takes a stand against the incessant gossiping and the mutual criticism among members as well as against their attempts to justify sexual infidelities by pointing to an incontrovertible "karma." Rudolf Steiner here urgently appeals to the members' sense of truth and exactitude as the basis for a healing and nurturing of the Anthroposophical Society.

The second question addressed, particularly in Lectures Three and Five, concerns the nature and conditions of spiritual seership. Steiner uses a discussion of Swedenborg's inability to understand the thoughts of certain spirit beings to make two fundamental points about spiritual cognition. The first is the difference between perception in the physical world and true spiritual seership. In the physical world we perceive objects outside of ourselves and take something of them into us through mental images. In the spiritual world "we no longer perceive but experience that we are being perceived, that the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies are observing us. This experience of being perceived and observed by the Angeloi and Archangeloi and other spiritual hierarchies is a total reversal of our former relationship to the physical world.”²

According to Steiner, Swedenborg did not achieve this reversal of perspective; therefore, his clairvoyance was limited, and he did not attain to full imaginative cognition.

Steiner links this difference in perspectives to that between clairvoyance achieved through the redirection of sexual energies and clairvoyance resulting from pure thinking. The latter leads to the experience that the transformed thinking activity of the human being, a thinking devoid of personal likes and dislikes, allows thoughts to appear as objective entities within the human soul. It thereby properly prepares the individual for spiritual seership. The transformation of sexual energies, on the other hand, keeps the individual tied to the physical and allows only a partial clairvoyance. Steiner therefore contends that a spiritual science and seership appropriate to our time rests not on a transformation of our instincts but on a conscious separation of the instinctual life from that of the mind and spirit.

The third issue discussed by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures is the nature of psychoanalysis as developed by Freud. While acknowledging the importance of the unconscious and the subconscious, Steiner is particularly critical of the theory of infantile sexuality. It should be noted that Steiner gave these lectures in 1915 and that both Adler and Jung broke with Freud over Freud's insistence on infantile sexuality as a primary interpretive framework for understanding psychological disturbances.³

Freudian psychology is discussed in Lectures Four and Five of this volume. They are an important supplement to the recently published lectures of Rudolf Steiner entitled Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology.⁴ Of particular significance is Rudolf Steiner's treatment of the three main physiological functions of the human being—the nerve sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic system—in their historical and spiritual evolution. His insistence that the metabolic system and the instinctual sexual life are the least spiritual aspects of the human being supports both his criticism of Freud and his basic view of spiritual development.

In reading both these lectures and those contained in Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology, one can easily be led to reject much of the development of psychology in the twentieth century. Indeed the anti-psychological orientation of many students of Rudolf Steiner's work is quite pronounced. My own perspective is different. First, I see the development of modern psychology and psychiatry as co-existent with the end of what Rudolf Steiner refers to as “the Kali Yuga,” or dark age, in 1899. This means that however inadequate the evolution of psychological theories and practices has been in some respects, it has on the whole been a new and deepening exploration of the human soul and spirit. Here, I am in particular thinking of Jung in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections or of Viktor Frankl's logo-therapy or Assagioli's work. It seems to me that while there is much in modern psychology that is trivial and dangerous, there is also much that is worthwhile and helpful.

Students of Rudolf Steiner's work have the possibility to ask questions of appropriateness and relevance regarding different psychological schools, as David Black has done in “On the Nature of Psychology” in Towards.⁵ To see biophysical, behavioral, intrapsychic, and phenomenological schools of thought as addressing different levels of the human being, and to ask what spiritual science has to contribute to the evolving body of psychological and spiritual insight in the last decade of the twentieth century, is a more honest and, I believe, more helpful approach than to extend Steiner's early opposition to Freud and Jung into an unreflecting anti-psychological stance. Soul work and spirit work are intimately connected. The task of developing a more spiritual psychology is a vital task for the coming decades.

In Lecture Six, Steiner addresses the relation between love, mysticism, and spirituality. Particularly significant is his contention that the prevailing materialism of the time made it impossible for most people to conceive of a spiritual striving that did not have some erotic or sexual basis, albeit a very refined one. While Rudolf Steiner does acknowledge that this is sometimes the case, he again asserts the importance of spiritual science as a path of spiritual development for Western humanity in our time because of its reliance on the transformation of the individual's thinking.

As this volume also contains all of the correspondence regarding the difficulties in the Anthroposophical Society in 1915, readers will easily see the direct connection between the personal accusations leveled against Steiner and the lecture themes presented. The questions raised are basic ones for any modern spiritual movement that wants to contribute to individual freedom and a renewal of society. These lectures can lead members of the Anthroposophical Society to ponder their responsibilities toward the content of spiritual science, toward Rudolf Steiner, and toward their brothers and sisters in their striving. For outside observers these lectures constitute an insightful record of the social and psychological difficulties of a spiritual movement relying primarily on the insights and teachings of one individual.

However, the questions of love, sexuality, morality, and spiritual development are of immediate interest and of deep personal significance for all readers on their inner journey.

CHRISTOPHER SCHAEFER, PH.D.
Spring Valley, New York
February 1991

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, 1923/24 (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1990).
• 2. See Lecture Three in this volume, pp. 43-44.
• 3. See I. Progoff, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973).
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1990).
• 5. Towards, 1 no. 7 (Winter 1980/81): 29-34.

In 1913 on the hill in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, construction had begun on the building then known as the Johannesbau and later to be called the Goetheanum, the central headquarters of the anthroposophical movement. Members of the Anthroposophical Society from all parts of the world had been called upon to work on the building, and they were joined by a growing number of others who moved to Dornach, either permanently or temporarily, on their own initiative. Thus a unique center of anthroposophical activity developed in Dornach, a center that was, understandably enough, burdened with the shortcomings and problems unavoidable in such a group.

In the summer of 1914, these difficulties escalated when World War I broke out, since people from many different nations, including those at war, had to work together and get along with each other. Isolation from the rest of the world and, last but not least, both local and more widespread opposition to the building and the people it attracted, further complicated the situation. In spite of all obstacles, however, the building continued to grow under the artistic leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who was well-loved as a teacher and felt by all to be a bulwark of constancy. But in the summer of 1915 all this changed as a result of incidents that threatened to test the Dornach group, and thus the Anthroposophical Society as a whole, to the breaking point.

Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas of 1914 had provoked not only general gossip, but also some bizarre mystical behavior on the part of a member named Alice Sprengel¹ Heinrich Goesch (see below) and his wife Gertrud seized upon her strange ideas and made use of them in personal attacks on Rudolf Steiner. Since this was done publicly in the context of the Society, Rudolf Steiner asked that the Society itself resolve the case. This resulted in weeks of debate, at the end of which all three were expelled from the Society. Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not take part either in the debates or in the decision to rescind their membership.

The documents that follow reconstruct the events of the case in the sequence in which they occurred.

Alice Sprengel (b. 1871 in Scotland, d. 1949 in Bern, Switzerland) had joined the Theosophical Society in Munich in the summer of 1902, at a time when Rudolf Steiner had not yet become General Secretary for Germany. She joined the German Section a few years later. In a notice issued by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in the fall of 1915 informing members about the case, Miss Sprengel is described as having undergone unusual suffering in her childhood. At the time of her entry into the Society, she still impressed people as being very dejected. In addition, she was unemployed at that time and outwardly in very unfortunate circumstances. For that reason, efforts were made to help her.

Marie Steiner, then Marie von Sivers, sponsored her involvement in the Munich drama festival in 1907 and arranged for her to be financially supported by members in Munich. In order to help her find a means of supporting herself in line with her artistic abilities, Rudolf Steiner advised her on making symbolic jewelry and the like for members of the Society. It was also made possible for her to make the move to Dornach in 1914. She, however, interpreted this generous assistance to mean that she had a significant mission to fulfill within the Society. Having been given the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas fed her delusions with regard to her mission, as did the fact that toward the end of the year 1911, in conjunction with the project to construct a building to house the mystery dramas, Rudolf Steiner had made an attempt to found a “Society for Theosophical Art and Style” in which she had been nominated as “keeper of the seal” because of her work as an artist. She imagined having lived through important incarnations and even believed herself to be the inspirer of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual teachings. In addition, having been asked to play Theodora gave rise to the delusion that she had received a symbolic promise of marriage from Rudolf Steiner, and she then suffered a breakdown as a result of Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas 1914. Her letters to Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner, reproduced below, clearly reveal that she was deeply upset.

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner
(undated; received December 25, 1914. Cf. p. 159.)

“Seven years now have passed,” ² Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, “I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.”

You saw the struggles and doubts this experience occasioned in me; you knew that in the end my conviction was unshakable—yes, so it is. And you waited for my soul to open and for me to speak about this. Yet I remained silent, because my heart was broken. Long before I learned of theosophy, but also much more recently, I had had many experiences that made me say, “I willingly accept whatever suffering life brings me, no matter how hard it may be. After all, I have been shown by the spirit that it cannot be different.” But this is something that seems to go beyond the original plan of destiny; I lack the strength to bear it, and so it kills something in me, destroys forces I should once have possessed. These experiences were mostly instances of people deliberately abusing my confidence, and all in the name of love. But I had the feeling that this was not only my own fault; it seemed as if the will of destiny was inflicting more on me than I could bear.

I had some vague idea of why that might be so. Once, some years ago, I heard a voice within me saying, “There are beings in the spiritual world whose work requires that human beings sustain hope, but they have no interest in seeing these hopes fulfilled—on the contrary.” At that point I was not fully aware of what we were later to hear about the mystery of premature death, of goals not achieved, and so forth.

Then, however, I bore within me a wish and a hope that seemed like a proclamation from the spiritual world. This wish and this hope had made it possible for me to bear the unbearable; they worked in me with such tremendous force that they carried me along with them. My soul was in such a condition, however, that it could neither relinquish them nor tolerate their fulfillment, or, to put it better, it could not live up to what their fulfillment would have demanded of it. Thus I could not come to clarity on what the above-mentioned experience meant for me as an earthly human being. Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.

I can no longer remain silent; it speaks in me and forces me to speak. Years ago I begged you for advice, asked for enlightenment, and your words gave me hope and comfort. I am grateful for that, but today I would no longer be able to bear it. Why did you say to me recently that I looked well, that I should persevere? Did you think I was already aware of the step you are taking now, and that I had already “gotten over it”? I was as far from that as ever.

In conclusion, I ask that you let Miss von Sivers read this letter.

Alice Sprengel

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner

Dear Dr. Steiner,

This will probably be my last letter to you; I will never turn to you again, neither in speaking nor in writing. I only want to tell you that I see no way out for myself; I am at my wits' end. As the weeks gone by have showed me, it is inconceivable that time will alleviate or wipe out anything that has happened; it will only bring to light what is hidden. Until now I have more or less managed to conceal how I feel, but I will not be able to do so indefinitely. I feel a melancholy settling in on me; being together with others and feeling their attentiveness is a torment to me, but I also cannot tolerate being alone for any length of time. I feel that everything that was to develop in me and flow into our movement through me has been buried alive.

My life stretches ahead of me, but it is devoid of any breath of air that makes life possible. And yet, in the darkest hour of my existence, I feel condemned to live—but my soul will be dead. Desolation and numbness will alternate with bouts of pain. I cannot imagine how the tragedy will end. It is likely, though, that I will show some signs of sorrow in weeks to come, and it may well be that I will say and do things that will surprise me as much as anyone else. I do not have the feeling that my words will arouse any echo in you. I feel as if I were talking to a picture. Since that time early on in those seven years when I stood bodily in front of you and you appeared to me as the embodiment of the figure that had been revealed to my inner vision, you have become unreal to me. Then, your voice sounded as sweet and comforting as my own hopes. You restored my soul with mysterious hints and promises that were so often contradicted in the course of events. And when my soul wanted to unfold under that radiant gaze of yours in which I could read that you knew what had happened to me, something looked at me out of your eyes, crying “This is a temptation.”

The most terrible thing was to have what stood before me in visible human form become unreal to me. And yet, I had the feeling that there was something real behind all this. I do not know what power makes your essential being a reality for me. You know that I have struggled for my faith and will continue to do so as long as there is a glimmer of life in me. You also know how I have pleaded with that Being whose light and teachings you must bring to those who suffer the terrible fate of being human, pleaded that whatever guilt may flow on my account may not disturb you in your mission, and I have the feeling that I have been heard. Nevertheless, the shadow of what has happened to me will fall across your path, just as it will darken my future earthly lives. That shadow will also fall across the continued existence of our movement and upon the destiny of our building. If the mystery dramas are ever performed again, you will have to have another Theodora, and since I will never be able to come to terms with what has happened, the very doors of the temple are closed to me in future. I wonder if, under these circumstances, there will ever again… I do not need to finish the sentence.

I sense that, on an occult level, this is a terrible state of affairs. Is there no way out?

Only a miracle can help in this case.

I am well aware that deliverance is possible, and if it were not to come, it would be terrible, and not only for me.

Let me tell you a story by way of conclusion, the story of the “soeur gardienne.” ³

During the preparations for the plays during the summer of 1913, I noticed that you were not satisfied with me, and when it was all over I felt like a sick person who knows the doctor has given up on her. That feeling never left me from then on, and I could tell you of many instances, especially in recent months, when I felt a deathly chill come over me although your words actually sounded encouraging. The feeling grew stronger whenever I encountered anyone who knew what lay ahead. Why do I feel as if someone had slapped me in the face? Don't they all look as if they were part of a plot? That's what came to mind on many occasions, but I was relatively cheerful then and put it out of my mind. But all this is just a digression.

Two summers ago, shortly before the rehearsals began, I read La Soeur Gardienne. I had always assumed that Miss von Sivers would play the title role. On reading it, however, I began to doubt that the role would suit her; in fact, it seemed to me that she would not even want to play that part. And then I noticed how the figure came alive within me—it spoke, it moved in me. It was my role. If only I were allowed to play it! I saw what it would mean to me, and it was too beautiful to be true. Then invisible eyes looked at me, and I heard, “They will not give you that part, so resign yourself.” In my experience, that voice had always been correct. In view of the existing situation, I said to myself, “Dr. Steiner knows as well as I do that I had this experience; he must have good reasons for arranging things this way in spite of it—and as far as Miss von Sivers is concerned, I must have been mistaken—the whole thing must simply be another one of the incomprehensible disappointments that run like a red thread through my life.”

My soul collapsed; I behaved as calmly as I could, but that did not seem to be good enough. Your behavior as well as Miss von Sivers' was totally incomprehensible to me. They were looking everywhere for someone, anyone, to take the title role, and no one seemed to think of me; anyone else seemed more desirable. And yet people were making comments about how strange it was that I had nothing to do in that play. I held back, because at one point I was really afraid I would have to play a different role. Performances have been more or less the only occasions in my life where I could breathe freely, so to speak, where I could give of myself. But that was only true when I played parts that lived in me, like Theodora and Persephone. But when a role didn't sit well with me, it increased the pressure I was living under for quite some time. That is why I was not as unconcerned about these things as others might be; for me it was a matter of life and death. In the midst of all this tension something befell me that I had already experienced countless times before in many different situations and against which I have always been defenseless. My soul crumples as soon as it happens. Once again, “it” looked at me and said, “This is a lesson for you!” (or sometimes it said “a test” or “an ordeal”).

I felt the effects in my soul of countless experiences, repeated daily, hourly, going back to my earliest childhood. I do not know why my surroundings have always been tempted to participate wrongfully in my inner life. Only here and only very recently have I been able to ward this off, but it has forced me into complete isolation. What my foster parents, teachers, playmates, friends, and even strangers used to do to see what kind of a face I would make or to guess at how I would react! And much more than that. As I said, these experiences were so frequent that I could not deal with them; they suffocated me. Mostly I took it all calmly, thinking they didn't know any better. Now, however, in the situation I described, these semi-conscious memories played a trick on me—and I was overcome by anger. And then this summer, a year later, I had to relive the whole thing. And it occurred to me that I should have told you about what went before it.

As I said, those words “This is a lesson for you” always made me stiffen and freeze. When I look back on my life, it seems as if a devilish wisdom had foreseen all the possibilities life would bring to me in these last few years, and as if this intelligence had done its utmost to make me unfit for them. I could watch it at work, and yet was powerless to do anything. Much could be said about why that happened. But nothing in my own soul or in any single soul could ever help me over this abyss. Only the spark leaping from soul to soul, the spark that is so weak now, so very weak, can make the miracle happen now…

February 5

I have just read over what I wrote, and now I wonder, is it really all right for everything to happen as I described? That is how it would have to happen if everything stays as it is now. But don't we all three feel how destiny stands between us? Can it really be that there is one among us who does not know what has to happen next? That will bring many things to light; the course of events to come depends on what had been one person's secret. This is truly a test, but not only for me. What was hidden shall be revealed.

I still have one thing to say to you, my teacher and guide: even though the tempter looks out of your eyes, there have been times when I experienced with a shudder that what was revealed to me also meant something to you, something that has not been given its due. However, this must happen and will happen—you know that well, and so does

The Keeper of the Seal

Excerpt from a letter from Alice Sprengel to Marie Steiner
(undated; received on August 21, 1915. Cf. p. 139 and p. 160.)

I know that people who have “occult experiences” are a calamity as far as the people in positions of responsibility in our movement are concerned, and understandably so, but still, that is what our movement is there for—to come to grips with things like that.

The relationship between you and Dr. Steiner is not the point right now; no, it is the relationship between you and myself. However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in its actual course of events, you understand, but in its nature and severity. That is to say, for years I had seen something developing between my teacher and me, something to which we can indeed apply what we have heard in the last few days, though not for the first time. It has a will of its own and laws of its own and cannot be exorcised with any clever magic word. As I said, I had sufficient self-knowledge to know what had to come if nothing happened to prevent it.

Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography. I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it. The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not “intend” anything of the sort; nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing. I do not understand…

In meetings on August 25 and 26, 1915, between the Vorstand and the members of the Society, meetings Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not attend, the decision was made to no longer recognize Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and Alice Sprengel as members of the Society. As a result of these meetings, the following resolution was sent to Marie Steiner:

Dornach
August 27, 1915

Dear Madam:

The Vorstand has presented you with the unanimous request of the assembled members that you be so kind as to retain the office you currently hold within the Anthroposophical Society.

As members, we wish to heartily confirm this oral communication with our signatures.

With deepest respect and thanks for the blessings bestowed on the Society through your work, we are

Devotedly yours,
(ca. 300 signatures)

The series of seven lectures included in this volume on the conditions necessary for the survival of the Anthroposophical Society began on September 10. On September 11, on the basis of discussions among members that had taken place in the meantime—discussions in which Rudolf and Marie Steiner had not taken part—a meeting of the Vorstand was held. It was decided to produce a thorough documentation of the Goesch/Sprengel case for the membership and to postpone the implementation of their expulsion until this document had been completed. On the next day (September 12), a members' meeting was held in place of a General Assembly, since members from other countries were unable to attend due to the war. No transcript exists of this meeting, which was intended to confirm the resolutions of the Vorstand; from the few brief notes available, it seems that Rudolf Steiner did take part in this meeting.

In the course of the days that followed, the document that had been resolved upon was written up; it ran to twenty typed pages. It recounted explicitly the contents of the letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and included character descriptions of the three people in question as well as a statement that Rudolf and Marie Steiner had not been involved in the decision to expel them from the Society. All significant portions of this document have been taken into account in preparing the documentation included in this volume; in some cases the present reproduction of relevant documents is more complete. It is to be assumed, although it has not been proved, that this document was enclosed with the following letter sent to Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and Alice Sprengel by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society on September 23:

Due to the fact that you have taken a position that does not lie within the goals and premises of the Anthroposophical Society, the Vorstand of said Society is compelled to revoke your membership.

Michael Bauer for the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society Dornach, September 23, 1915

On the following day, September 24, 1915, the women's meeting that had been proposed on September 17 took place. Its purpose was to talk about the position of women in ancient and modern esoteric movements, on the basis of what Rudolf Steiner had presented in his lecture on September 15. Marie Steiner had been asked to chair the meeting. According to handwritten notes she supplied, she spoke as follows:

Address at the Women's Meeting Dornach, September 24, 1915

A number of female members who proposed today's meeting asked me to take the chair. In spite of the fact that I have scarcely had time to collect myself in the past few weeks, I will be glad to fill this role if that is also the wish of the rest of those present.

Not many written contributions were received beforehand. We will go through them in the order in which they were received. I will begin by reading the proposal that led to our gathering today, and will then say a few words.

[Reads the proposal to call this women's meeting]

The basic thought expressed in this proposal is the one that occupies me the most, too: We are a number of women who have been granted something that has been denied the female sex until now, something that shall serve to regenerate humankind—its loftiest spiritual possession. How can we show ourselves to be worthy of it? It is a good thing to take this opportunity to be together to look at the full seriousness of our situation and our task, and to look at where we stand within the women's movement in general.

Out there, women are fighting for equal rights, for the opportunity for free development alongside men. This struggle has been fraught with untold difficulties, and many of us once exhausted our best energies in it, some of us doing battle with mounting material obstacles, others unable to free themselves before collapsing under the weight of conventions and prejudices and the tyranny of traditional attitudes.

All of a sudden, in the midst of this struggle, when it seemed that only certain individuals or future generations would be able to reap the fruits of all our exertions in the present, a door opened into the light and we were given a field of activity that surpassed all our expectations. It pointed out the way to our true goals, raising us up above the level of the unavoidable aberrations of a decadent and stagnating culture whose time is past. Now we could escape the danger of drowning in our desire to imitate, “monkey see, monkey do,” what was going on in this male culture, paying the price of our eternally feminine soul and spirit in our running after outer cultural forms shaped by men.

We had been able to contribute to the stimulation and inspiration of this culture simply by virtue of the fact that we were not its servants, its executive organs. Turned back on ourselves, left to our own devices, we could develop attributes of inwardness, depth, warmth, softness, and reserve that were a necessary counterbalance to what the men were having to achieve. We could tame, enthuse, comfort, support, heal, carry, sustain, and enliven within and without—no small task, to be sure. The men, meanwhile, were conquering the outer world.

Now they had conquered it; it was theirs. They measured its breadths, dissected its parts, became its master. Their intelligence was their downfall. Laughing in scorn, they shoved aside the old gods and the sources of their strength.

Then we, too, began to take notice, because the ground under our feet was beginning to shake. The old gods dead? Outer life the only thing that mattered? Our soul's vital wellspring, which had allowed us to feel instinctively the symbolic nature of all transitory life, mere illusion? Then let us out, too! Then we too must be allowed to break the bonds, to understand and work out of our own initiative and our own conviction. Let us, too, measure ourselves against the standards of this outer world! The life in us demanded its due, and we stormed onto the battlefield.

Two things we met there. On the one hand, the hard, immobile forms created by men. To conquer them, we had to subject ourselves to an iron discipline. Some of us succeeded. Not all of us were satisfied with that.

The second thing we found was outward freedom. There we stood, young and breathing deeply, in the breaking waves of life, the old oppressive chains far behind us. We had to discover our own standards, our own incorruptible guidelines, within ourselves.

Not all of us were able to do that. Many women felt as if they had been caught up in a whirlwind, and the untamed aspect of their nature broke through. Study, hard work, and the dry routine of professional life did not suffice for long; many in the droves of women that followed found them a burden. Freedom to express ourselves, freedom of experience were what we demanded—equal rights with men when it came to the pleasures of life, too.

The wave of materialism crested and broke and swept us women away with it. As our secure sense of the reality of a spiritual world died away, our instinctive life broke through with elemental force, distorted by the aberrations of our intelligence.

The theories of a Laura Marholm ¹ were adhered to by the extremists of a group of female poets represented by people like Marie Madeleine,² Dolorosa,³ Margarete Beutler,⁴ and so on. I am sure every country on the European continent experienced a similar phenomenon.

Literature offered proof that even the wildest erotic fantasies of men failed to unearth such excesses as we witnessed in the products of women's overheated imaginations. We shuddered to watch as women like these, driven by vanity and thirsting for glory, but poor in spirit and in knowledge, forced the products of their goaded sensuality into the long-since fixed forms of our language. They declaimed the results themselves in literary clubs; the men they had asked to do so on their behalf had responded that they would be ashamed.

The outlook was dim—desiccation and desolation on one hand, brutalization and licentiousness on the other. Where was the redeemer who would speak the word of life to help humanity on its further way?

Then a wonderful thing happened: In this age of decadent culture, moral decline, dulled thinking, and crass egotism, teachings appeared from seclusion, teachings that could formerly only be given to a few but could now become the common property of all humankind, teachings that would help humanity find its way out of spiritual desolation into the experience of the spirit. And women were allowed to take part in this work; here, if they so chose and if they made themselves worthy of it, was their new field of activity.

They approached this with a natural inclination toward the ideal, a greater mobility of thinking, and thus a high degree of receptivity. What they were lacking was discipline in thinking, the exactitude and precision, certainty of knowledge and the respect for this certainty, and the sense of reality that men in their professional activity had been forced to maintain. To put it crudely, their weaknesses were gossip, vanity, wishy-washiness, and the tendency to drag everything down to a sentimental and personal level. Their strong points were enthusiasm and readiness to make sacrifices. If women proved able to outgrow their natural level of existence as members of their species, these last two attributes would allow them to breathe life into a rigidifying culture. If they proved able to forget the personal aspects and become objective, they would be able to help build the future and be the equals of men in terms of rights, responsibilities, and significance in the new culture coming about.

Have we been able to meet these two conditions? Has our personal nature, our natural species-nature, stepped back into second place and become objective? I fear we have failed, on the whole.
Only when we bring our failings into the realm of consciousness and develop the will to understand, only then will we be able to overcome these failings and transform destructive forces into productive ones.

The task before us, the field of activity that lies open to us, is greater than any our most far-reaching wishes anticipated. But we cannot allow ourselves to lose the ground under our feet. We must not simply go into raptures, we must understand and work. For the first time since esoteric knowledge was granted to humankind, we women are allowed to receive this knowledge together with men and inaugurate a new era through this work in common.

Let me repeat, however, that in order for this new era in the history of humankind to reach its full potential, women will have to surmount their narrowly personal nature and the level of existence natural to our species. We must keep our spirituality pure and untouched by our desires, drives, and unclean thoughts.

It has been frightening to see that we are not necessarily able to do this. We women have been constantly mixing lower things in with the higher and cloaking sensuality with spirituality to make it seem like something it is not. Again and again, the three evil forces of vanity, eroticism, and falsehood have appeared in intimate connection with each other.

The reason for us being here is that these things have happened among us; we must try to confront our failings head on. We are faced with the question of whether we will be found to be unfit and unready. Will we throw away our chance at what could re-enliven humanity?

What will we do if we are granted a grace period, time to think things over? What can we do so that men and women can work together free of distraction?

These are the questions we have to ask ourselves. Each one of us should contribute to answering them.

In response to the position taken by the Vorstand, expressions of confidence in Rudolf and Marie Steiner flowed in from many branches of the Society in the time that followed. Even Heinrich Goesch's brothers Paul and Fritz and Fritz's wife, all three of whom were members of the Society, dissociated themselves from their brother's actions. In September 1915, Paul Goesch signed a resolution of the members of the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society expressing their “most profound disapproval of and pained indignation at the unheard-of behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Goesch.”

How far Rudolf and Marie Steiner stood above this case is demonstrated by the fact that Marie Steiner still made it possible for Alice Sprengel to receive financial assistance after being expelled from the Society and leaving Dornach, as proven by this letter to a Miss Julia Wernicke,⁵ who had maintained contact with Miss Sprengel:

Dornach
September 29, 1915

Dear Miss Wernicke:

Miss Waller showed me a letter she had received from you in which it was requested that she act on behalf of Miss Sprengel in collecting the money several members allegedly still owe her.⁶ Since you yourself had to assume that not many people would be interested in this situation, which Miss Sprengel brought upon herself through her own excesses, and since Miss Waller has declared that she wants nothing to do with it, ordinary human compassion forces me to assume responsibility for the payment of this debt. I must ask that you not mention my name, however: first of all, that would be unpleasant for Miss Sprengel, and second of all I do not want to encourage any rumors about my having tried to accommodate Miss Sprengel in any way.

Acting on the basis of a letter from Mrs. von Strauss, I take the liberty of covering her debt.⁷ When you send the money to Miss Sprengel, please tell her it is to cover that debt, but that you are not in a position to reveal names.

Yours faithfully,
Marie Steiner

With that, the 1915 case was brought to a temporary close. Although his relationship with Alice Sprengel ended shortly thereafter, Heinrich Goesch remained an unfair adversary, spreading spiteful untruths wherever he could. As late as 1923, he appeared in public in Berlin as a “non-anthroposophical expert on anthroposophy” and again spoke out against Rudolf Steiner. This will be documented in the volume on the history of the Society covering the year 1923.

• 1. Laura Marholm, pseudonym of Laura Hansson, née Mohr, 1854–1928, Swedish author whose books were published in German.
• 2. Marie Madeleine, pseudonym of M. M. von Puttkamer, 1881–? Caused a sensation with books published around the turn of the century because of her advocacy of free love.
• 3. Dolorosa, pseudonym of Maria Eichhorn, 1879–? poet and novelist.
• 4. Margarete Beutler, M. Friedrich-Freska, née Beutler, 1884–1949. Under the pseudonym Margit Friedrich, she wrote lyric poetry and stories on social themes.
• 5. Julia Wernicke, Member of the Anthroposophical Society, no further details known.
• 6. Mieta (Pyle-)Waller, 1883–1954. Since about 1907, a friend and close artistic colleague of Marie Steiner-von Sivers and Rudolf Steiner.
• 7. Mrs. von Strauss, Member of the Anthroposophical Society, no further details known.

You will have realised from lectures given recently that in our times a materialistic view of the world, a materialistic way of thinking, is not the outcome of man's arbitrary volition but of a certain historical necessity.

Those who have some understanding of the spiritual process of human evolution know that, fundamentally speaking, in all earlier centuries and millennia man participated in spiritual life to a greater extent than has been the case during the last four or five hundred years. We know with what widespread phenomena this is connected. At the very beginning of Earth-evolution, the heritage of the Old Moon clairvoyance was working in mankind. We can envisage that in the earliest ages of Earth-evolution this faculty of ancient clairvoyance was very potent, very active, with the result that the range of man's spiritual vision in those times was exceedingly wide and comprehensive. This ancient clairvoyance then gradually diminished until times were reached when the great majority of human beings had lost the faculty of looking into the spiritual world, and the Mystery of Golgotha came in substitution. But a certain vestige of the old faculties of soul remained, and evidence of this is to be found, for example, in the nature-knowledge which was in existence until the fourteenth and fifteenth, and indeed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This nature-knowledge was very different in character from modern natural science. It was a nature-knowledge able to some extent still to rely, not upon clear, Imaginative clairvoyance but nevertheless upon vestiges of the Inspirations and Intuitions which were then applied and elaborated by the so-called alchemists. If an alchemist of those times was honourable in his aims and not out for egotistic gain, he still worked, in a certain respect, with the old Inspirations and Intuitions. While he was engaged in his outer activities, vestiges of the old clairvoyance were still astir within him, although no longer accompanied by any reliable knowledge. But the number of people in whom these vestiges of ancient clairvoyance survived, steadily decreased. I have often said that these vestiges can very easily be drawn out of the human soul today in states of atavistic, visionary clairvoyance. We have shown in many different ways how this atavistic clairvoyance can manifest in our own time.

From all this you will realise that the nearer we come to our own period in evolution, the more we have to do with a decline of old soul-forces and a growth of tendencies in the human soul towards observation of the outer, material world. After slow and gradual preparation, this reached its peak in the nineteenth century, actually in the middle of that century. Little as this is realised today by those who do not concern themselves with such matters, it will be clear to men of the future that the materialistic tendencies of the second half of the nineteenth century had reached their peak in the middle of the century; it was then that these tendencies developed their greatest strength. But the consequence of every tendency is that certain talents develop and the really impressive greatness of the methods evolved by materialistic science stems from these tendencies of the soul to hold fast to the outer, material world of sense.

Now we must think of this phase in the evolution of humanity as being accompanied by another phenomenon. If we carry ourselves back in imagination to the primeval ages of humanity's spiritual development, we shall find that in respect of spiritual knowledge, men were in a comparatively fortunate position. Most human beings, in fact all of them, knew of the spiritual world through direct vision. Just as men of the modern age perceive minerals, plants and animals and are aware of tones and colours, so were the men of old aware of the spiritual world; it was concrete reality to them. So that in those olden times, when full waking consciousness of the outer, material world was dimmed during sleep or dream, there was really nobody who would not have been connected with the dead who had been near him during life. In the waking state a man could have intercourse with the living; during sleep or dream, with the dead. Teaching about the immortality of the soul would have been as superfluous in those primeval times as it would be nowadays to set out to prove that plants exist. Just imagine what would happen at the present time if anyone set out to prove that plants exist! Exactly the same attitude would have been adopted in primeval times if anyone had thought it necessary to prove that the soul also lives after death.

Humanity gradually lost this faculty of living in communion with the spiritual world. There were, of course, always individuals who used whatever opportunity was still available to develop seership. But even that became more and more difficult. How did men in olden times develop a particular gift of seership? If with insight today we study the philosophy of Plato, or what exists of that of Heraclitus, we must realise—and this applies especially to the still earlier Greek philosophies—that they are altogether different from later philosophies. Read the first chapter of my book Riddles of Philosophy, where I have shown how these ancient philosophers, Thales and Parmenides, Anaximenes and Heraclitus, are still influenced by their particular temperaments. This has not hitherto been pointed out; the first mention of it is in my book. Inevitably, therefore, some time must elapse before it is accepted—but that does not matter. Of Plato, we can still feel: this philosophy still lays hold of the whole man. When we come to Aristotle however, the feeling is that we have to do with an academic, learned philosophy. Therefore to understand Plato requires more insight than a modern philosopher usually has at his command. For the same reason there is a gulf between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is already a scholar in the modern sense. Plato is the last philosopher in the old Greek sense; he is a philosopher whose concepts are still imbued to some extent with life. As long as a philosophy of this kind exists, the link with the spiritual world is not broken, and indeed it continued for a long time, actually into the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages did not develop philosophy to further stages but simply took over Aristotelian philosophy; and up to a certain point of time this was all to the good. Platonic philosophy too was taken over in the same way.

Now in days of antiquity, as long as at least the aptitude for clairvoyance of a certain kind was present, something very significant took place when men allowed this philosophy to work upon them. Today, philosophy works only upon the head, only upon the thinking. The reason why so many people avoid philosophy is because they do not like thinking. And especially because philosophy offers nothing in the way of sensationalism they have no desire to study it. Ancient philosophy, however, when received into the human soul, was still able, because of its greater life-giving power, to quicken still existing gifts of seership. Platonic philosophy, nay, even Aristotelian philosophy, still had this effect. Being less abstract than the philosophies of modern times, they were still able to quicken faculties of seership inherent in the human soul. And so it came to pass that in men who devoted themselves to philosophy, faculties that were otherwise sinking below the surface were quickened to life. That is how seers came into existence. But because what had now to be learnt about the physical world—and this also applies to philosophy—was of importance for the physical plane alone, and became increasingly important, man alienated himself more and more from the remnants of the old clairvoyance. He could no longer penetrate to the inner depths of existence and it was increasingly difficult to become a seer. Nor will this again be possible until the new methods indicated as a beginning in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved? are accepted by mankind as plausible.

We have heard that a period of materialism reached its peak—one could also say, its deepest point—in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is certain that conditions will become more and more difficult but the threads of connection with the earlier impulses in the evolution of humanity must nevertheless not be broken. The following diagram indicates how seership has developed:

Here (yellow) seership is still present in full flower; it vanishes more and more completely until the lowest point is reached in the middle of the nineteenth century, and then there is again an ascent. But understanding of the spiritual world is not the same as seership. Just as in regard to the world, science is not the same thing as mere sensory perception, clairvoyance itself is a different matter from understanding what is seen. In the earliest epochs men were content, for the most part, with vision; they did not get to the point of thinking to any great extent about what was seen, for their seership sufficed. But now, thinking too came to the fore. The line a–b, therefore, indicates seership, vision; line c–d indicates thought or reflection about the spiritual worlds.

In ancient times man was occupied with his visions and thinking lay, as it were, in the subconscious region of the soul. The seers of old did not think, did not reflect; everything came to them directly through their vision. Thinking first began to affect seership about three or four thousand years B.C. There was a golden age in the old Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean and also in very ancient Greek culture when thinking, still youthful and fresh, was wedded with vision in the human soul. In those times, thinking was not the laboured process it is in our day. Men had certain great, all-embracing notions, and, in addition, they had vision (e in diagram) . Something of the kind, although already in a weaker form, was present to a marked degree in the seers who founded the Samothracian Mysteries and there gave the monumental teaching of the four gods: Axieros, Axiokersos, Axiokersa and Kadmillos. In this great teaching which once had its home in the island of Samos, certain lofty concepts were imparted to those who were initiated in the Mysteries and they were able to unite with these concepts the still surviving fruits of ancient seership. It may be possible on some other occasion to speak of these things too in greater detail.¹

But then seership gradually sank below the threshold of consciousness and to call it up from the depths of the soul became more and more difficult. It was, of course, possible to retain some of the concepts, even to develop them further; and so finally a time came when there were initiates who were not necessarily seers—mark well, initiates who were not necessarily seers.

In different places where there were assemblies of these initiates, they simply adopted what was in part preserved from olden times, of which it could be affirmed that ancient seers revealed it—or what could be drawn forth from men who still possessed the faculties of atavistic clairvoyance. Conviction came partly through historical traditions, partly through experiments. Men convinced themselves that what their intellects thought was true. But as time went on the number of individuals in these assemblies who were still able to see into the spiritual world, steadily diminished, while the number of those who had theories about the spiritual world and expressed them in symbols and the like, steadily increased.

And now think of what inevitably resulted from this about the middle of the nineteenth century, when the materialistic tendencies of men had reached their deepest point. Naturally, there were people who knew that there is a spiritual world and also knew what is to be found in the spiritual world, but they had never seen that world. Indeed, the most outstanding savants in the nineteenth century were men who, although they had seen nothing whatever of the spiritual world, knew that it exists, could reflect about it, could even discover new truths with the help of certain methods and a certain symbolism that had been preserved in ancient tradition. To take one example only.—Nothing special is to be gained by looking at a drawing of a human being. But if a human form is drawn with a lion's head, or another with a bull's head, those who have learnt how these things are to be interpreted can glean a great deal from symbolical presentations of this kind—similarly, if a bull is depicted with the head of a man or a lion with the head of a man. Such symbols were in frequent use, and there were earnest assemblies in which the language of symbols could be learnt. I shall say no more about the matter than this, for the schools of Initiation guarded these symbols very strictly, communicating them to nobody who had not pledged himself to keep silence about them. To be a genuine knower a man needed only to have mastered this symbolic language—that is to say, a certain symbolic script.

And so the situation in the middle of the nineteenth century was that mankind in general, especially civilised mankind, possessed the faculty of spiritual vision deep down in the subconsciousness, yet had materialistic tendencies. There were, however, a great many people who knew that there is a spiritual world, who knew that just as we are surrounded by air, so we are surrounded by a spiritual world. But at the same time these men were burdened with a certain feeling of responsibility. They had no recourse to any actual faculties whereby the existence of a spiritual world could have been demonstrated, yet they were not willing to see the world outside succumbing altogether to materialism. And so in the nineteenth century a difficult situation confronted those who were initiated, a situation in face of which the question forced itself upon them: Ought we to continue to keep within restricted circles the knowledge that has come over to us from ancient times and merely look on while the whole of mankind, together with culture and philosophy, sinks down into materialism? Dare we simply look on while this is taking place? They dared not do so, especially those who were in real earnest about these things.

And so it came about that in the middle of the nineteenth century the words “esotericist” and “exotericist” which were used by the initiates among themselves, acquired a meaning deviating from what it had previously been. The occultists divided into exotericists and esotericists. If for purposes of analogy, expressions connected with modern parliaments are adopted—although naturally they are unsuitable here—the exotericists could be compared with the left-wing parties and the esotericists with the right-wing parties. The esotericists were those who wanted to continue to abide firmly by the principle of allowing nothing of what was sacred, traditional knowledge, nothing that might enable thinking men to gain insight into the symbolic language, to reach the public. The esotericists were, so to speak, the Conservatives among the occultists. Who, then—we may ask—were the exotericists ? They were and are those who want to make public some part of the esoteric knowledge. Fundamentally, the exotericists were not different from the esotericists, except that the former were inclined to follow the promptings of their feeling of responsibility, and to make part of the esoteric knowledge public.

There was widespread discussion at that time of which the outside world knows nothing but which was particularly heated in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed the clashes and discussions between the esotericists and the exotericists were far more heated than those between the Conservatives and Liberals in modern parliaments. The esotericists took the stand that only to those who had pledged themselves to strictest silence and were willing to belong to some particular society should anything be told concerning the spiritual world or any knowledge of it communicated. The exotericists said: If this principle is followed, people who do not attach themselves to some such society or league will sink altogether into materialism.

And now the exotericists proposed a way. I can tell you this today: the way proposed by the exotericists at that time is the way we ourselves are taking. Their proposal was that a certain part of the esoteric knowledge should be popularised. You see, too, how we ourselves have worked with the help of popular writings, in order that men may gradually be led to knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

In the middle of the nineteenth century things had not reached the point at which anyone would have ventured to admit that this was their conviction. In such circles there is, of course, no voting, and to say the following is to speak in metaphor. Nevertheless it can be stated that at the first ballot the esotericists won the day and the exotericists were obliged to submit. The society or league was not opposed, because of the good old precept of holding together. Not until more modern times has the point been reached when members are expelled or resign. Such things used not to happen because people understood that they must hold together in brotherhood. So the exotericists could do no other than submit. But their responsibility to the whole of mankind weighed upon them. They felt themselves, so to speak, to be guardians of evolution. This weighed upon them, with the result that the first ballot—if I may again use this word—was not adhered to, and—once again I will use a word which as it is drawn from ordinary parlance must be taken metaphorically—a kind of compromise was reached. This led to the following situation.

It was said, and this was also admitted by the esotericists: it is urgently necessary for humanity in general to realise that the surrounding world is not devoid of the spiritual, does not consist only of matter nor is subject to purely material laws; humanity must come to know that just as we are surrounded by matter, so too we are surrounded by the spiritual, and that man is not only that being who confronts us when we look at him in the material sense, but also has within him something that is of the nature of spirit and soul. The possibility of knowing this must be saved for humanity. On this, agreement was reached—and that was the compromise.

But the esotericists of the nineteenth century were not prepared to surrender the esoteric knowledge, and a different method had therefore to be countenanced. How it came into being is a complicated story. Particularly on occasions of the founding of Groups I have often spoken of what happened then. The esotericists said: We do not wish the esoteric knowledge to be made public, but we realise that the materialism of the age must be tackled.—In a certain respect the esotericists were basing themselves on a well-founded principle, for when we see repeatedly the kind of attitude that is adopted today towards esoteric knowledge we can understand and sympathise with those who said at that time that they would not hear of it being made public. We must realise, however, that over and over again it can be seen that open communication of esoteric knowledge leads to calamity, and that those who get hold of such knowledge are themselves the cause of obstacles and hindrances in the way of its propagation. In recent weeks we have often spoken of the fact that far too little heed is paid to these obstacles and hindrances. Most unfortunate experiences are encountered when it is a matter of making esoteric knowledge public. Help rendered with the best will in the world to individuals—even there the most elementary matters lead to calamity! You would find it hard to believe how often it happens that advice is given to some individual—but it does not please him. When the outer world says that an occultist who works as we work here, exercises great authority—that is just a catchword. As long as the advice given is acceptable, the occultist, as a rule, is not grumbled at; but when the advice is not liked, it is not accepted. People even browbeat one by declaring: “If you do not give me different advice, I simply cannot get on.” This may come to the point of actual threats, yet it had simply been a matter of advising the person in question for his good. But as he wants something different, he says: “I have waited long enough; now tell me exactly what I ought to do.” He was told this long ago, but it went against the grain. Finally things come to the point where those who were once the most credulous believers in authority become the bitterest enemies. They expect to get the advice they themselves want and when it is not to their liking they become bitter enemies. In our own time, therefore, experience teaches us that we cannot simply condemn the esotericists who refused to have anything to do with popularising the esoteric truths.

And so in the middle of the nineteenth century this popularising did not take place; an attempt was, however, made to deal in some way with the materialistic tendencies of the age. It is difficult to express what has to be said and I can only put it in words which, as such, were never actually uttered but none the less give a true picture. At that time the esotericists said: What can be done about this humanity? We may talk at length about the esoteric teaching but people will simply laugh at us and at you. At most you will win over a few credulous people, a few credulous women, but you will not win over those who cling to the strictly scientific attitude, and you will be forced to reckon with the tendencies of the age.

The consequence was that endeavours were made to find a method by means of which attention could be drawn to the spiritual world, and indeed in exactly the same way as in the material world attention is called to the fact that in a criminal the occipital lobe does not or does not entirely cover the corresponding part of his brain.—And so it came about that mediumship was deliberately brought on the scene. In a sense, the mediums were the agents of those who wished, by this means, to convince men of the existence of a spiritual world, because through the mediums people could see with physical eyes that which originates in the spiritual world; the mediums produced phenomena that could be demonstrated on the physical plane. Mediumship was a means of demonstrating to humanity that there is a spiritual world. The exotericists and the esotericists had united in supporting mediumship, in order to deal with the tendency of the times.

Think only of men such as Zöllner, Wallace, du Prel, Crookes, Butlerow, Rochas, Oliver Lodge, Flammarion, Morselli, Schiaparelli, Ochorowicz, James, and others—how did they become convinced of the existence of a spiritual world? It was because they had witnessed manifestations from the spiritual world. But everything that can be done by the spiritual world and by the initiates must, to begin with, be in the nature of attempts in the world of men. The maturity of humanity must always be tested. This support of mediumship, of spiritualism, was therefore also, in a certain sense, an attempt. All that the exotericists and esotericists who had agreed to the compromise could say was: What will come of it remains to be seen.—And what did, in fact, come of it?

Most of the mediums gave accounts of a world in which the dead are living. Just read the literature on the subject! For those who were initiated, the result was distressing in the utmost degree, the very worst there could possibly have been. For you see, there were two possibilities. One was this.—Mediums were used and they made certain communications. They were only able to relate what they communicated to the ordinary environment—in the material elements of which spirit is, of course, present. It was expected, however, that the mediums would bring to light all kinds of hidden laws of nature, hidden laws of elemental nature. But what actually happened was inevitable, and for the following reason.—

Man, as we know, consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. From the time of going to sleep to waking, therefore, the real man is in his ego and astral body; but then he is at the same time in the realm of the dead. The medium sitting there, however, is not an ego and an astral body. The ego-consciousness and also the astral consciousness have been suppressed and as a result the physical and etheric bodies become particularly active. In this condition the medium may come into contact with a hypnotist, or an inspirer—that is to say, with some other human being. The ego of another human being, or also the environment, can then have an effect upon the medium. It is impossible for the medium to enter the realm of the dead because the very members of his being which belong to that realm have been made inoperative. The mediums went astray; they gave accounts allegedly of the realm of the dead. And so it was obvious that this attempt had achieved nothing except to promulgate a great fallacy. One fine day, therefore, it had to be admitted that a path had been followed which was leading men into fallacy—to purely Luciferic teachings bound up with purely Ahrimanic observations. Fallacy from which nothing good could result had been spread abroad. This was realised as time went on.

You see, therefore, how an attempt was made to deal with the materialistic tendencies of the age and yet to bring home to men's consciousness that there is a spiritual world around us. To begin with, this path led to fallacy, as we have heard. But you can gather from this how necessary it is to take the other path, namely, actually to begin to make public part of the esoteric knowledge. This is the path that must be taken even if it brings one calamity after another. The very fact that we pursue Spiritual Science is, so to say, an acknowledgment of the need to carry into effect the principle of the exotericists in the middle of the nineteenth century. And the aim of the Spiritual Science we wish to cultivate is nothing else than to carry this principle into effect, to carry it into effect honourably and sincerely.

From all this it will be clear to you that materialism is something about which we cannot merely speculate; we must understand the necessity of its appearance, especially of the peak—or lowest point—it reached about the middle of the nineteenth century. The whole trend had of course begun a long time before then—certainly three, four or five centuries before. Man's leanings to the spiritual passed more and more into his subconsciousness, and this state of things reached its climax in the middle of the nineteenth century. But that too was necessary, in order that the purely materialistic talents of men might develop unhindered by occult faculties. A materialistic philosopher such as Kant, a materialistic philosopher from the standpoint of the Idealists of the nineteenth century—you can easily read about this in my book Riddles of Philosophy—could not have appeared if the occult faculties had not drawn into the background. Certain faculties develop in man when others withdraw, but while the one kind of faculties and talents develops outwardly, the other kind takes its own inner path. These three, four or five centuries were not, therefore, a total loss for the spiritual evolution of mankind. The spiritual forces have continued to develop below the threshold of consciousness, and if you think about what I have indicated in connection with von Wrangell's pamphlet² on the subject of what he there calls the “dreamlike”, you will be able to recognise the existence of occult faculties which are merely waiting to unfold. They are present in abundance in the souls of men; it is only a matter of drawing them out in the right way.

It was necessary to say these things by way of introduction, and tomorrow we will pass on to the question of the relation between the Living and the Dead, bearing in mind that in one respect the wrong path resulting from the compromise between the exotericists and the esotericists has actually been instructive. To understand the nature of this compromise we must study the questions of birth and death and then show what effect the materialistic methods have had in this connection.

• 1. See Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, Lecture XII. Fourteen lectures given in Dornach, 23rd November to 21st December, 1923. (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973)
• 2. Published in Leipzig in 1914, with the title, Wissenschaft and Theosophie.

On this occasion I should like to be allowed to include certain personal references among matters of objective history, because what must be added to the subject dealt with in the lecture yesterday is necessary for our study today and after careful consideration I believe it is right to include more details.

I want, first of all, to speak of a particular experience connected with our Movement. You know that outwardly we began by linking ourselves—but outwardly only—with the Theosophical Society and that we founded the so-called German Section of that Society in the autumn of 1902, in Berlin. In the course of the year 1904 we were visited in various towns of Germany by prominent members of the Theosophical Society, and the episode from which I want to start occurred during one of these visits. The first edition of my book Theosophy had just been published—in the spring of 1904—and the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis was appearing. In that periodical I had published articles dealing with the problem of Atlantis and the character of the Atlantean epoch. These articles were afterwards published as a separate volume entitled Unsere atlantischen Vorfahren (Our Atlantean Forefathers).¹ The articles contained a number of communications about the Atlantean world and the earlier, so-called Lemurian epoch. Several articles of this kind had therefore already appeared, and just at the time when the members of the Theosophical Society were visiting us a number of the periodical containing important communications was ready, and had been sent to subscribers. A member highly respected in the Theosophical Society had read these articles dealing with Atlantis, and asked me a question. And it is this question which I want to mention as a noteworthy experience in connection with what was said in the lecture yesterday.

This member of the Theosophical Society, who at the time of its founding by Blavatsky had taken part in most vital proceedings, a member, therefore, who had shared to the full in the activities of the Society, put the question: “By what means was this information about the world of Atlantis obtained?”—The question was very significant because until then this member was acquainted only with the methods by which such information was obtained in the Theosophical Society, namely, by means of a certain kind of mediumistic investigation. Information already published in the Theosophical Society at that time was based upon investigations connected in a certain respect with mediumship. That is to say, someone was put into a kind of mediumistic state—it could not be called a trance but was a mediumistic state—and conditions were established which made it possible for the person, although not in the state of ordinary consciousness, to communicate certain information; about matters beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness. That is how the communications had been made at that time and the member of the Theosophical Society in question who thought that information about prehistoric events could be gained only in this way, enquired what personality we had among us whom we could use as a medium for such investigations.

As I had naturally refused to adopt this method of research and had insisted from the outset upon strictly individual investigation, and as what I had discovered at that time was the result entirely of my own, personal research, the questioner did not understand me at all, did not understand that it was quite a different matter from anything that had been done hitherto in the Theosophical Society. The path I had appointed for myself, however, was this: To reject all earlier ways of investigation and—admittedly by means of super-sensible perception—to investigate by making use only of what can be revealed to the one who is himself the investigator.

In accordance with the position I have to take in the spiritual Movement, no other course is possible for me than to carry into strict effect those methods of investigation which are suitable for the modern world and for modern humanity. There is a very significant difference, you see, between the methods of investigation practised in Spiritual Science and those that were practised in the Theosophical Society. All communications received by that Society from the spiritual world—including for example, those given in Scott-Elliot's book on Atlantis—came entirely in the way described, because that alone was considered authoritative and objective. In this connection, the introduction of our spiritual-scientific direction of work was, from the very beginning something entirely new in the Theosophical Society. It took thorough account of modern scientific methods which needed to be elaborated and developed to make ascent to the spiritual realms possible.

This discussion was significant. It took place in the year 1904, and showed how great the difference was between what is pursued in Spiritual Science and what was being pursued by the rest of the Theosophical Society; it showed that what we have in Spiritual Science was unknown in the Theosophical Society at that time and that the Theosophical Society was continuing the methods which had been adopted as a compromise between the exotericists and the esotericists. Such was the inevitable result of the developments I described in the lecture yesterday. I said that seership gradually died away and that there remained only a few isolated seers in whom mediumistic states could be induced and from whom some information might be obtained. In this way, “Occult Orders”, as they were called, came into being, Orders in which there were, it is true, many who had been initiated, but no seers. Among the prevailing materialism these Orders were faced with the necessity of having to cultivate and elaborate methods which had long been in vogue, and instruments for research had to be sought among persons in whom mediumistic faculties—that is to say, atavistic clairvoyance—could still be developed and produce some result. In these circles there were far-reaching teachings and, in addition, symbols. Those, however, who wished to engage in actual research were obliged to rely on the help of persons possessed of atavistic clairvoyance. These methods were then continued in a certain way in the Theosophical Society, and the compromise of which I spoke yesterday really amounted to nothing else than that in the Lodges and Orders experiments were made whereby spiritual influences might be projected into the world. The desire was to demonstrate that influences from the spiritual world are exercised upon man.

Procedures adopted in esoteric schools had therefore been brought into action. This attempt was a fiasco, for whereas it had been expected that through the mediums genuine spiritual laws prevailing in the surrounding world would be brought to light, the only result was that nearly all the mediums fell into the error of supposing that everything emanated from the dead, and they embellished it into communications alleged to have been made to them by the dead. This led to a very definite consequence.—If the older members among you will think back to the earliest period of the Theosophical Society and study the literature produced under its aegis, you will find that the astral world—that is to say, the life immediately after death—was described in books by Mrs. Besant which merely reproduced what is contained in Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine or was to be read in books by Leadbeater. This was also the origin of everything that was given out concerning man's life between death and a new birth.

If you compare what is said in my book Theosophy about the Soul-world and the Spirit-world—to begin with, people were always trying to refute it but I think that today a sufficient number are able to think objectively on the subject—you will find very considerable differences, precisely because in regard to these domains too the methods of investigation were different. For all the methods of research employed in the Theosophical Society, even including those used for investigating the life of the dead, originated from the procedures of which I have spoken.

So you see, what the Theosophical Society had to offer the world to begin with was in a certain respect a continuation of the attempt made by the occultists previously. In what other respect this was not the case we shall hear in a moment. Taken as a whole, however, it was a continuation of the attempt which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, had been the outcome of the compromise made between the exotericists and the esotericists, except that later on things were made rather more esoteric by the Theosophical Society. Whereas the previous attempt had been to present the mediums to the world, the members of the Theosophical Society preferred to work in their inner circle only and to give out merely the results. That was an important difference, for there people were going back to a method of investigation established as a universal custom by the various Orders before the middle of the nineteenth century. I bring this forward because I must sharply emphasise the fact that with the advent of our Spiritual Science an entirely new method, one which takes full account of the work and attitude of modern science, was introduced into the occult Movement.

Now as I told you, the compromise reached between the exotericists and the esotericists to convince the materialistic world through mediums of all types that a spiritual world exists, had been a fiasco, a fiasco inasmuch as the mediums always spoke of a world which under the existing conditions simply could not be accessible to them, namely, the world of the dead. The mediums spoke of inspirations alleged to have been received from a world in which the dead are living. The situation was that the attempt made by the exotericists and the esotericists had not achieved the result they had really desired.

How had such a state of affairs come about? What was the outcome of the remarkable attempt that had been made as a result of the compromise? The outcome was that initiates of a certain kind had wrested the power from the hands of those who had made the compromise. The initiates of the extreme left-wing had taken possession of the proceedings which had been countenanced in the way described. They acquired great influence, because what was obtained through the mediums did not spring from the realm of the dead at all, but from the realm of the living—from initiates who had put themselves either in distant or close rapport with the mediums. Because everything was brought about through these initiates and through the mediums, it was coloured by the theories of those who wished to get the mediums under their control. The desire of those among the exotericists and esotericists who had made the compromise was to bring home to men that there is indeed a spiritual world. That is what they wanted to impress. But when those who thought themselves capable of holding the guiding reins let them slip, the occultists of the extreme left-wing took possession of them and endeavoured by means of the mediums—if I may use this tautology—to communicate their theories and their views to the world.

For those who had made the compromise for the good of humanity, the position was disastrous, because they felt more and more strongly that false teachings about the super-sensible were being brought into the world.—Such was the position in the development of occultism in the forties, fifties and even in the sixties of the nineteenth century.

As long as deliberation still continued in the circles of honest occultists, the situation was sinister. For the further the occultists inclined to the left, the less were they concerned to promote that which alone is justifiable, namely, the universal-human. In occultism a man belongs to the “left” when he tries to achieve some ultimate goal with the help of what he knows in the way of occult teaching. A man belongs to the “right” in occultism when he desires that goal purely for its own sake. The middle party were in favour of making exoteric the esoteric knowledge needed in our time to promote the interests of humanity universal. But those who belong to the extreme “left” are those who combine special aims of their own with what they promulgate as occult teaching. A man is on the “left” to the extent to which he pursues special aims, leads people to the spiritual world, gives them all kinds of demonstrations of it, and instils into them in an illicit way, promptings that simply help to bring these special aims to fulfilment. The leading circle of modern initiates was faced with this situation. It was realised that the control had fallen into the hands of people who were pursuing their own special aims.—Such was the state of affairs confronting the esotericists and the exotericists who had made the compromise referred to.

Then it was “heard”—the expression may not be quite exact but absolutely exact words cannot be found because one is dependent on external language and intercourse among occultists is different from anything that external language is capable of describing—it was “heard” that an event of importance for the further continuation of spiritual development on the Earth must be at hand. I can describe this event only in the following way.—In the research carried on by the individual Orders, they had preferred for a long time to make less use of female mediums. In the strict Orders, where it was desired to take the right standpoint, no female mediums were ever used for obtaining revelations from the spiritual worlds.

Now the female organism is adapted by nature to preserve atavistic clairvoyance longer than the male organism. Whereas male mediums were becoming almost unknown, female mediums were still to be found and a great number were used while the compromise still held. But now there came into the occultists' field of observation a personality who possessed mediumistic faculties in the very highest degree. This was Madame H. P. Blavatsky, a personality very specially adapted through certain subconscious parts of her organism to draw a great deal, a very great deal, from the spiritual world. And now think of what possibilities this opened up for the world! At one of the most crucial points in the development of occultism, a personality appeared who through the peculiar nature of her organism was able to draw many, many things from the spiritual world by means of her subconscious faculties.

An occultist who at that time was alert to the signs of the times could not but say to himself: Now, at the right moment, a personality has appeared who through her peculiar organic constitution can produce the very strongest evidence of ancient, traditional teaching existing among us in the form of symbols only. It was emphatically the case that here was a personality who simply because of her organic make-up afforded the possibility of again demonstrating many things which for a long time had been known only through tradition. This was the fact confronting the occultists just after the fiasco which had led to a veritable impasse. Let us be quite clear on the point: Blavatsky was regarded as a personality from whom, as out of an electrically-charged Leyden jar, the electric sparks—occult truths—could be produced.

It would lead too far if I were to tell you of all the intermediate links, but certain matters of importance must be mentioned. A really crucial moment had arrived which I can indicate in the following way; although expressed somewhat symbolically, it is in strict accordance with the facts.—The occultists of the right-wing, who in conjunction with the middle party had agreed to the compromise, could say to themselves: It may well be that something very significant can be forthcoming from this personality. But those belonging to the left-wing could also say with assurance: It is possible to achieve something extremely effective in the world with the help of this personality!—And now a veritable battle was waged around her, on the one side with the honest purpose of having much of what the initiates knew, substantiated; on the other side, for the sake of far-reaching, special aims.

I have often referred to the early periods in the life of H. P. Blavatsky, and have shown that, to begin with, attempts were made to get a great deal of knowledge from her. But in a comparatively short time the situation rapidly changed, owing to the fact that she soon came into the sphere of those who belonged, as it were, to the left. And although H. P. Blavatsky was very well aware of what she herself was able to see—for she was especially significant in that she was not simply a passive medium, but had a colossal memory for everything that revealed itself to her from the higher worlds—nevertheless she was inevitably under the influence of certain personalities when she wanted to evoke manifestations from the spiritual world. And so she always made reference to what ought really to have been left aside—she always referred to the “Mahatmas”. They may be there in the background but this is not a factor when it is a question of furthering the interests of humanity.

And so it was not long before H. P. Blavatsky was having to face a decision. A hint came to her from a quarter belonging to the side of the left that she was a personality of key importance. She knew very well what it was that she saw, but she was not aware of how significant she was as a personality. This was first disclosed to her by the left-wing. But she was fundamentally honest by nature and after this hint had been given her from a quarter of which, at the beginning, she could hardly have approved, because of her fundamental honesty, she tried on her side to reach a kind of compromise with an occult Brotherhood in Europe. Something very fine might have resulted from this, because through her great gift of mediumship she would have been able to furnish confirmations of really phenomenal importance in connection with what was known to the initiates from theories and symbolism. But she was not only thoroughly honest, she was also what is called in German a “Frechdachs”—a “cheeky creature”. And that she certainly was! She had in her nature a certain trait that is particularly common in those inclined to mediumship, namely, a lack of consistency in external behaviour. Thus there were moments when she could be very audacious and in one of these fits of audacity she imposed on the occult Brotherhood which had decided to make the experiment with her, terms which could not be fulfilled. But as she knew that a great deal could be achieved through her instrumentality, she decided to take up the matter with other Brotherhoods. And so she approached an American Brotherhood. This American Brotherhood was one where the majority had always wavered between the right and the left, but at all events had the prospect of discovering things of tremendous significance concerning the spiritual worlds.

Now this was the period when intense interest was being taken in H. P. Blavatsky by other Brothers of the left. Already at that time these left-wing Brothers had their own special interests. At the moment I do not propose to speak about these interests. If it were necessary, I could do so at some future time. For the present it is enough to say that they were Brothers who had their special interests, above all, interests of a strongly political character; they envisaged the possibility of achieving something of a political nature in America by means of persons who had first been put through an occult preparation. The consequence was that at a moment when H. P. Blavatsky had already acquired an untold amount of occult knowledge through having worked with the American Lodge, she had to be expelled from it, because it was discovered that there was something political in the background. So things couldn't continue.

The situation was now extremely difficult, tremendously difficult. For what had been undertaken in order to call the world's attention to the existence of a spiritual world, had in a certain respect to be withdrawn by the serious occultists because it had been a fiasco. It was necessary to show that no reliance could be placed on what was being presented by Spiritualism, in spite of the fact that it had many adherents. It was only materialistic, it was sheer dilettantism. The only scholarly persons who concerned themselves with it were those who wanted to get information in an external, materialistic way about a spiritual world. In addition, H. P. Blavatsky had made it clear to the American Lodge on her departure that she had no intention whatever of withholding from the world what she knew. And she knew a great deal, for she was able to remember afterwards what had been conveyed through her. She had any amount of audacity!

Good advice is costly, as the saying goes. What was to be done? And now something happened to which I have referred on various occasions, for parts of what I am saying today in this connection I have said in other places. Something that is called in occultism “Occult imprisonment” was brought about.² H. P. Blavatsky was put into occult imprisonment. Through acts of a kind that can be performed only by certain Brothers—and are performed, moreover, only by Brotherhoods who allow themselves to engage in illicit arts—through certain acts and machinations they succeeded in compelling H. P. Blavatsky to live for a time in a world in which all her occult knowledge was driven inwards. Think of it in this way.—The occult knowledge was in her aura; as the result of certain processes that were set in operation, it came about that for a long time everything in this aura was thrown back into her soul. That is to say, all the occult knowledge she possessed was to be imprisoned; she was to be isolated as far as the outer world and her occultism were concerned.

This happened at the time when H. P. Blavatsky might have become really dangerous through the spreading of teachings which are among the most interesting of all within the horizon of the Occult Movement. Certain Indian occultists now came to know of the affair, occultists who on their part tended strongly towards the left, and whose prime interest it was to turn the occultism which could be given to the world through H. P. Blavatsky in a direction where it could influence the world in line with their special aims. Through the efforts of these Indian occultists who were versed in the appropriate practices, she was released from this imprisonment within her aura; she was free once again and could now use her spiritual faculties in the right way.

From this you can get an idea of what had taken place in this soul, and of what combination of factors all that came into the world through H. P. Blavatsky, was composed. But because certain Indian occultists had gained the merit of freeing her from her imprisonment, they had her in their power in a certain respect. And there was simply no possibility of preventing them from using her to send out into the world that part of occultism which suited their purposes. And so something very remarkable was “arranged”—if I may use a clumsy word. What was arranged can be expressed approximately as follows.—The Indian occultists wanted to assert their own special aims in opposition to those of the others, and for this purpose they made use of H. P. Blavatsky. She was given instructions to place herself under a certain influence, for in her case the mediumistic state had always to be induced from outside—and this also made it possible to bring all kinds of things into the world through her.

About this time she came to be associated with a person who from the beginning had really no directly theosophical interests but a splendid talent for organisation, namely, Colonel Olcott. I cannot say for certain, but I surmise that there had already been some kind of association at the time when Blavatsky belonged to the American Lodge. Then, under the mask, as it were, of an earlier individuality, there appeared in the field of Blavatsky's spiritual vision a personality who was essentially the vehicle of what it was desired from India to launch into the world. Some of you may know that in his book People from the Other World, Colonel Olcott has written a great deal about this individuality who now appeared in H. P. B.'s field of vision under the mask of an earlier individuality designated as Mahatma Kut-Humi. You know, perhaps, that Colonel Olcott has written a very great deal about this Mahatma Kut-Humi, among other things that in the year 1874 this Mahatma Kut-Humi had declared what individuality was living in him. He had indicated that this individuality was John King by name, a powerful sea-pirate of the seventeenth century. This is to be read in Olcott's book People from the Other World.

In the Mahatma Kut-Humi, therefore, we have to do with the spirit of a bold sea-pirate of the seventeenth century who then, in the nineteenth century, was involved in significant manifestations made with the help of H. P. Blavatsky and others too. He brought tea-cups from some distance away, he let all kinds of records be produced from the coffin of H. P. B.'s father,³ and so forth. From Colonel Olcott's account, therefore, it must be assumed that these were deeds of the bold pirate of the seventeenth century.

Now Colonel Olcott speaks in a remarkable way about this John King. He says that perhaps here one had to do, not with the spirit of this pirate but possibly with the creation of an Order which, while depending for its results upon unseen agents, has its existence among physical men. According to this account, Kut-Humi might have been a member of an Order which engaged in practices such as I have described and the results of which were to be communicated to the world through H. P. Blavatsky but bound up with all kinds of special interests. These were that a specifically Indian teaching should be spread in the world.

This was approximately the situation in the seventies of the nineteenth century. We therefore have evidence of very significant happenings which must be seen in a single framework when we are considering the whole course of events in the Occult Movement. It was this same John King who, by means of “precipitation”, produced Sinnett's books, the first one, Letters about the Occult World and, especially, Esoteric Buddhism.

This book Esoteric Buddhism came into my hands very shortly after publication—a few weeks in fact—and I could see from it that efforts were being made, especially from a certain quarter, to give an entirely materialistic form to the spiritual teachings. If you were to study Esoteric Buddhism with the insight you have acquired in the course of time, you would be astonished at the materialistic forms in which facts are there presented. It is materialism in its very worst forms. The spiritual world is presented in an entirely materialistic way. No one who gets hold of this book can shake himself free from materialism. The subject-matter is very subtle but in Sinnett's book one cannot get away from materialism, however lofty the heights to which it purports to carry one. And so those who were now H. P. B.'s spiritual “bread-givers”—forgive the materialistic analogy—not only had special aims connected with Indian interests, but they also made trenchant concessions to the materialistic spirit of the age. And the influence which Sinnett's book had upon very large numbers of people shows how correctly they had speculated.⁴ I have met scientists who were delighted with this book because everything fitted in with their stock-intrade and yet they were able to conceive of the existence of a spiritual world. The book satisfied all the demands of materialism and yet made it possible to meet the need for a spiritual world and to acknowledge its existence.

Now you know that in the further development of these happenings, H. P. Blavatsky wrote The Secret Doctrine in the eighties of the nineteenth century, and in 1891 she died. The Secret Doctrine is written in the same style as Esoteric Buddhism, except that it puts right certain gross errors which any occultist could at once have corrected. I have often spoken about the peculiar features of Blavatsky's book and need not go into the matter again now. Then, on the basis of what had come about in this way, the Theosophical Society was founded and, fundamentally speaking, retained its Indian trend. Although no longer with the intensity that had prevailed under the influence of John King, the Indian trend persisted. What I have now described to you was, as it were, a new path which made great concessions to the materialism of the age, but was nevertheless intended to show humanity that a spiritual world as well as the outer, material world must be taken into account.

Many details would have to be added to what I have now said, but time is too short. I will go on at once to show you how our spiritual-scientific Movement took its place in the Movement which was already in existence.

You know that we founded the German Section of the Theosophical Society in October, 1902. In the winters of both 1900 and 1901 I had already given lectures in Berlin which may be called “theosophical” lectures, for they were held in the circle and at the invitation of the Berlin Theosophists. The first lectures were those which ultimately became the book entitled, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens (translated into English with the title, Mysticism and Modern Thought). These lectures were given to a circle of Members of the Theosophical Society, of which I myself was not then a member. It must be borne in mind at the outset that one had to do with teaching that was already widespread and had led numbers of people to turn their minds to the spiritual world. Thus all over the world there were people who to a certain extent were prepared and who wanted to know something about the spiritual world. Of the things I have told you today they knew nothing, had not the slightest inkling of them. But they had a genuine longing for the spiritual world, and for that reason had attached themselves to the Movement in which this longing could be satisfied. And so in this Movement there were to be found persons whose hearts were longing for knowledge of the spiritual world.

You know that in a grotesque and ludicrous way I was taxed with having made a sudden turn-about from an entirely different world-view which had been presented in my book Welt- and Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.⁵ The first part had appeared in February 1900, and the second part in the following October. I was taxed with having suddenly changed sides and having gone over to Theosophy. Now I have often told you that not only had Sinnett's book, for example, come into my hands immediately after its publication, but that I had also had close associations with the young Theosophical Society in Vienna. It is right that you should understand what the circumstances were at the time, and I want also to give you a very brief; objective view of the antecedents of the German Section. There were people in the Theosophical Society who longed to know of the spiritual world, and I had given lectures in their circle. These were the lectures on Mysticism and the Mystics which I gave in a small room in the house of Count Brockdorff. At that time I was not myself a member. The preface to the printed volume containing these lectures is dated September 1901. In the summer of 1901 I had collected the lectures given the previous winter, into the book published in September 1901 under the title Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichin Geistlebens.⁶

I will read the first lines of the preface to this book:

“What is stated in this work formed the content of lectures given by me last winter in the Theosophical Library in Berlin. I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak on mysticism to an audience seriously interested in the subject. Ten years earlier I should not have ventured to comply with such a request. Not that the world of ideas which I am now bringing to expression was not already within me. This world of ideas is presented in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published by Emil Felber, Berlin, 1894.—But to express this world of ideas as I am doing today and so to make it the basis of study as in this present book, requires something quite different from a mere firm conviction of its intellectual truth. It requires intimate communion with this world of ideas such as can be achieved only after many years. Only now, after this intimate communion has been vouchsafed to me, do I venture to speak in the way that will be apparent in this book.”

Now you can conceive why I had allowed the contents of lectures given in very different circles to find a place in an occult movement. In the first edition of the book Welt-and Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, the following is contained in the chapter about Schelling I quote from the first edition, which was dedicated to Ernst Haeckel and was published in February, 1900. I will read a few passages from the book of which people have said that it sprang from a world-view quite different from that presented in the book on Mysticism.—

“Now there are two possible ways of describing a being which is at the same time Spirit and Nature. The one is: I exhibit the laws of nature which are active in Reality. Or, I show how the spirit acts in order to come to these natural laws. One and the same thing guides me in both cases. The one shows me conformity to law as it is active in nature; the other shows me what the spirit does in order to represent to itself this same conformity to law. In the one case I pursue natural science, in the other spiritual science. How these two are connected, Schelling describes in an interesting way. He says: ‘The necessary tendency of all natural science is to ascend from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else underlies the endeavour to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualisation of all natural laws into laws of observation and thought. Phenomena (the material) must completely vanish, and laws alone (the formal )remain. Hence it happens that the more conformity to law is brought into nature herself the more the veils vanish, phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear altogether. Optical phenomena are nothing more than a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and the light itself is already an ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism all traces of matter are lost, and in those of gravity, which even the natural scientist is only able to accept as a direct spiritual operation—an effect at a distance—nothing remains but its laws, whose transactions are in the vastness of the mechanism of the celestial movements. The perfect theory of nature would be that by virtue of which nature as a whole is resolved into an intelligence. The lifeless and unconscious products of nature are only nature's abortive attempts to reflect herself; so-called lifeless nature is, however, an unripe intelligence, hence in its phenomena the intelligent character still peeps through, but without consciousness. Nature only reaches her highest aim—to become herself wholly object—in her highest and final reflection, which is none other than Man, or more generally, what we call Reason, through which nature first completely returns into herself, and by which it becomes manifest that she, nature, is originally identical with what is known in us as intelligence and consciousness.’ ”

And referring further to Schelling, I say a little later:

“To Schelling, with his progressive thought, the study of the world was the study of God, or Theosophy. He already stood completely on this ground when, in 1809, he brought out his Philosophic Enquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom and allied Matters. All questions concerning conceptions of the world now come to him in a new light. If all things are divine, how comes it that there is evil in the world, since God can only be perfect Goodness? If the soul of man is in God, how comes it that she follows her own self-seeking interests? And if it is God who acts in me, how can I, who therefore in no wise act as an independent being, yet be called free?”

This view of the world is not put aside.—And I say further:

“With such views, Schelling proved himself to be the boldest, most courageous of those philosophers who allowed themselves to be stimulated by Kant into adopting an idealistic view of the world. Under the influence of this stimulus, man has relinquished philosophising about things lying beyond what the human senses alone and the thought concerning such observations, utter. Men try to rest content with what lies within the field of observation and thought. But whereas Kant drew from this the inevitable conclusion that man can know nothing of things ‘beyond’, his successors declared: As observation and thought indicate nothing divine in that ‘beyond’, they are themselves the divine. Among those who declared this, Schelling was the most forceful. Fichte gathered everything into selfhood; Schelling extended selfhood over everything. He did not, like Fichte, wish to show that selfhood is everything, but, on the contrary, that everything is selfhood. And Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ego's content of ideas to be divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only made the human Reason divine, but the content of human life a divine, personal entity. One calls an explanation of the world Anthropomorphism which, starting from man, imagines that underlying the whole course of the world there is a being who guides that course as man guides his own actions. Those, too, who postulate a general cosmic Intelligence as the basis of events, they too explain the world in the anthropomorphic sense. For this cosmic Intelligence is none other than the human Reason which has been made general and universal. When Goethe says: ‘Man never realises how anthropomorphic he is’, his mind is engrossed with the thought that concealed anthropomorphisms are contained in the simplest utterances we make about nature. When we say, ‘a body rolls further because another has struck it’, we form such an idea from out of our ego. We strike a body and it rolls on. If we see that a ball moves towards another and this other rolls on further, we think of the striking of the second by the first as analogous to the striking effect which we ourselves exercise. Ernst Haeckel spoke the anthropomorphic dogma: ‘divine world-creation and divine world-government resemble the mechanical productions of an ingenious technician or engineer and the State-administration of a wise ruler. The Lord God as Creator, Sustainer and Ruler of the Cosmos is here conceived as thoroughly human in his thinking and acting.’ Schelling had the courage to lead anthropomorphism to its ultimate consequences. He declared man and his whole life-content to be divine; and as not only the rational belongs to this life-content, but also the irrational, he was able also to explain the existence of irrationality in the world. To this end he had to extend the rational views of the reasoning mind by adding another, whose origin does not lie in thinking. This—in his opinion—higher view, he calls ‘Positive Philosophy’. ‘This’, he says, ‘is the really free philosophy; anyone who does not desire it may leave it alone; I leave everyone free; I say only that if anyone desires, for instance, to ascertain the actual course of things, to have a free world-creation and so forth, he can succeed only along the path of a philosophy such as this. If rationalistic philosophy satisfies him and he desires nothing further, let him content himself with that, but he must give up trying to find in rationalistic philosophy what unfortunately it cannot have within it, namely, the real God and the reality underlying the course of things, and a free relationship of God to the world.’ Negative philosophy will ‘remain pre-eminently the philosophy for the schools, Positive philosophy, the philosophy for life. Only through both together will there come the consecration that man may expect from philosophy. It is well known that the Eleusinian Initiates distinguished the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries; the Lesser were a preparation for the Greater. ... Positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of Negative philosophy when this is rightly understood. It may therefore be said: In Negative philosophy the Lesser Mysteries are celebrated, in Positive philosophy the Greater.’

This chapter of my book closed with the passage:

“If the inner life is declared to be divine, it seems inconsistent to confine ourselves to one part of it. Schelling did not fall into this inconsistency. When he said that to explain nature is to create nature, he indicated the direction of his own view of life. If the reflective study of nature is a repetition of her creation, the basic character of his creation must correspond to that of human action; it must be an act of free spiritual activity, not one like a geometrical necessity. But we cannot recognise a free creation through laws of Reason; it must reveal itself through different means.”

I was writing a history of world-views held in the nineteenth century. I could not go any further than this, for what prevailed at the time in advancing evolution were purely dilettante attempts which had no influence upon the progress of philosophical research. Such matters could not form part of this book. But Theosophy, in so far as it is carried into earnest thinking—that you find in the chapter on Schelling.

The second part of the book, which deals, firstly, with Hegel, is dated October, two. It was then that I had just begun to give the lectures referred to, and in September, 1901, the book on Mysticism had already been published. Truly it is not for the sake of emphasising personal matters but in order to help you to make an unprejudiced judgment that I should like to refer you to a criticism of the book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert which appeared on 15th December, 1901 in the journal of the German Freethinkers' Alliance, The Free-Thinker. Here, after an introduction and a remark to the effect that there had been no readable presentation of the development of thought in the nineteenth century, it continues:

“Especially in the domain of philosophy in which disputes can be carried on in appropriate words, many sins are committed in popular writings. The ‘Watchers of Zion’ and organisations of every kind, with their learned cliques to which unfortunately so many university tutors belong, are much to blame.”

Quotation of the folllowing extract is made only in order to point out the good-will with which the book was received at the time:

“So much the more must we welcome the fact that Dr. Rudolf Steiner, an author well known as a modern thinker and protagonist, has undertaken the task of giving the German public an objective presentation of the spiritual conflicts waged in Germany in the nineteenth century concerning views and conceptions of the world.”

Then, after an extract from the book, a remarkable statement follows and I must read it to you in full. The writer of this review regrets the absence of something in the book, and expresses this in the following words:

“Although the spiritualism of Du Prel and the anchoretic original Christianity of Tolstoi are useless for cultural activity based on the thought of evolution, yet symptomatically they have a value not to be overlooked. The same may be said of Neo-Buddhism (Theosophy), which has developed a terminology of its own, a sort of mystic jargon. A psychology of the modern belief in spirits by a man of the mental calibre of Steiner would be decidedly welcome. The language of his book is easy to comprehend. None of the yard-long passages of the academic philosopher disturbs the enjoyment of the reader.”

This was written in November 1901, shortly after I had begun to give the theosophical lectures in Berlin. It can truly be said that there was then a demand, a public demand, that I should speak about the aim and purpose of Theosophy. It was not a matter of arbitrary choice but, as the saying goes, a clear call of karma.

In the winter of 1900-1901, I gave the lectures on Mysticism, and in that of 1901-1902 those dealing with the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries in rather greater detail. These lectures were subsequently printed in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁷ (published in the summer of 1902).

The greater part of Mysticism and Modern Thought was at once translated into English, still before I was a member of the Theosophical Society. I could tell you a great deal of importance, but time does not permit of it now; it may be told another time. One thing, however, I must add.

You see clearly that nowhere in the course of things was there any kind of sudden jump; one thing led to the other quite naturally. At the beginning of the course of lectures on the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries—again held in Count Brockdorff's library—and indeed also at the time of the second series I had some opportunity of hearing about matters which were not so very serious at that time, but which eventually led to things which have been spoken of here as “mystical eccentricities”.

So in the year 1901-1902, I spoke on the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries and these lectures were attended by the present Frau Dr. Steiner. She had also heard the lecture I had given in the Theosophical Society during the winter of 1900 on Gustav Theodor Fechner. It was a special lecture, not forming part of the other series. Frau Dr. Steiner had therefore already been present at some of the lectures I gave during that time. It would be interesting to relate a few details here—but these may be omitted; they merely add a little colour to the incident. If necessary, they can be told on another occasion.

After having been away for a time, Frau Dr. Steiner returned to Berlin from Russia in the autumn, and with an acquaintance of Countess Brockdorff was present at the second course of lectures given in the winter of 1901–1902. After one of the lectures on the Greek Mysteries, this acquaintance came to me and said—well, something of the kind just alluded to! This lady subsequently became a more and more fanatical adherent of the Theosophical Society and was later given a high position in the Order founded to wait for the Second Coming of Christ. At the time of which I am speaking, she came to me after the lecture on the Greek Mysteries and, adopting the air of a really profound initiate of the Theosophical Society about to give evidence of her initiation, said: “You have spoken of Mysteries; but they are still in existence. There are still secret societies. Are you aware of that?”

After a subsequent lecture on the same subject, she came to me again and said: “One sees that you still remember quite well what you were taught when you were in the Greek Mysteries!” That is something which, carried a little farther, borders on the chapter deserving the title of “mystical eccentricities”.

In the autumn of 1901, this lady organised a tea-party. Frau Dr. Steiner always speaks of it as the “chrysanthemum tea” because there were so many of these flowers in the room. The invitation came from this acquaintance of Countess Brockdorff and I often thought that she wanted—well, I don't quite know what it was! The day chosen for the founding of the Theosophical Society was one of special importance for this lady. She may have wanted to enlist me as a co-worker on her own lines, for she put out feelers and was often very persistent—but nothing of any account came of it. I should like, however, just to relate a conversation that took place in the autumn of 1901 between the present Frau Dr. Steiner and myself on the occasion of that “chrysanthemum tea”, when she asked whether it was not urgently necessary to call to life a spiritual-scientific Movement in Europe. In the course of the conversation I said in unambiguous terms: “Certainly it is necessary to call such a Movement to life. But I will ally myself only with a Movement that is connected exclusively with Western occultism and cultivates its development.” And I also said that such a Movement must link on to Plato, to Goethe, and so forth. I indicated the whole programme which was then actually carried out.

In this programme there was no place for unhealthy activities, but naturally a few people with such tendencies came; they were people who were influenced by the Movement of which I have spoken. But from the conversation quoted at the beginning of this lecture, which I had with a member of the English Theosophical Society, you will see that a complete rejection of everything in the nature of mediumship and atavism was implicit in this programme.

The path we have been following for long years was adopted with full consciousness. Although elements of mediumistic and atavistic clairvoyance have not been absent, there has been no deviation from this path, and it has led to our present position.

I had, of course, to rely on finding within the Theosophical Movement people who desired and were able to recognise thoroughly healthy methods of work. The invariable procedure of those who did not desire a Movement in which a healthy and strict sense of scientific responsibility prevails, has been to misrepresent the aim we have been pursuing, in order to suit their own ends. The very history of our Movement affords abundant evidence that there has been no drawing back from penetrating into the highest spiritual worlds, to the extent to which they can now, by grace, be revealed to mankind; but that on the other hand, whatever cannot be attained along a healthy path, through the right methods for entering the spiritual worlds, has been strictly rejected. Those who recognise this and who follow the history of the Movement do not need to take it as a mere assurance, for it is evident from the whole nature of the work that has been going on for years. We have been able to go very, very much further in genuine investigation of the spiritual world than has ever been possible to the Theosophical Society. But we take the sure, not the unsure, paths. This may be said candidly and freely.

I have always refused to have anything to do with forms of antiquated occultism, with any Brotherhoods or Communities of that kind in the domain of esotericism. And it was only under the guarantee of complete independence that I worked for a time in a certain connection with the Theosophical Society and its esoteric procedures, but never in the direction towards which it was heading. Already by the year 1907 everything really esoteric had completely vanished from the Theosophical Society, and later happenings are sufficiently well known to you. It has also happened that Occult Brotherhoods made proposals to me of one kind or another. A certain highly-respected Occult Brotherhood suggested to me that I should participate in the spreading of a kind of occultism calling itself ‘Rosicrucian’, but I left the proposal unanswered, although it came from a much-respected Occult Movement. I say this in order to show that we ourselves are following an independent path, suited to the needs of the present age, and that unhealthy elements are inevitably regarded by us as being undesirable in the extreme.

• 1. Dr. Steiner's articles in Lucifer-Gnosis are collected in the book entitled Aus der Akasha-Kronik. The book was published in English translation by Rudolf Steiner Publications Inc., New York, 1959, with the title Cosmic Memory.
• 2. See inter alia: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, lecture 7 and lecture 10; Earthly and Cosmic Man, lecture 1; Earthly and Cosmic Man, lecture 1; The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, lecture 4; Things of the present and past in the Spirit of Man, lecture 5. (The last two lecture-courses are not yet printed but are available in translation as typescripts.) See also Notes at end of Lecture Five.
• 3. Note by translator. Presumably by means of the process known in spiritualism as “precipitation”.
• 4. See notes at the end of Lecture Five.
• 5. The content of this book is included in Die Rätsel der Philosophie.
• 6. Translated with the title, Mysticism and Modern Thought. (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., London and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1925.)
• 7. Second English edition (revised) 1972. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London)

Because other matters have still to be discussed, I will add only a brief episode today to the subjects of which we have been hearing during the last few days. Still more specific details will have to be given tomorrow in connection with the Occult Movement in the nineteenth century and its relation to civilisation and culture. I must, however, insert into the course of our studies a subject that is very important. You will remember certain things I have said in connection with von Wrangell's brochure, Science and Theosophy, and when I repeat them you will realise that from the point of view of Spiritual Science great significance must be attached to the advent of materialism and the materialistic world-conception in the nineteenth century; simply to adopt an attitude of criticism would be quite wrong.

A critical attitude is always the easiest when something confronts one. It is therefore essential to realise that the current in the evolution of humanity which may be called the materialistic view of the world arose in the nineteenth century quite inevitably. It has already been amply characterised, but two aspects may be described which will make its whole significance doubly clear to us.

In the form in which it appeared in the nineteenth century, as an actual view of the world, materialism had never hitherto existed. True, there had been individual materialistic philosophers such as Democritus and others—you can read about them in my book Riddles of Philosophy—who were, so to speak, the forerunners of theoretical materialism. But if we compare the view of the world they actually held with what comes to expression in the materialism of the nineteenth century, it will be quite evident that materialism had never previously existed in that form. Least of all could it have existed, let us say, in the Middle Ages, or in the centuries immediately preceding the dawn of modern thought, because in those days the souls of men were still too closely connected with the impulses of the spiritual world. To conceive that the whole universe is nothing more than a sum-total of self-moving atoms in space and that these atoms, conglomerating into molecules, give rise to all the phenomena of life and of the spirit—such a conception was reserved for the nineteenth century.

Now it can be said that there is, and always will be, something that can be detected like a scarlet thread, even in the most baleful conceptions of the world. And if we follow this scarlet thread which runs through the evolution of humanity, we shall be bound to recognise at very least the inconsistency of the materialistic view of the world. This scarlet thread consists in the simple fact that human beings think. Without thinking, man could not possibly arrive even at a materialistic view of the world. After all, he has thought out such a view, only he has forgotten to practise this one particle of self-knowledge: You yourself think, and the atoms cannot think! If only this one particle of self-knowledge is practised, there is something to hold to; and by holding to it one will always find that it is not compatible with materialism.

But to discover the truth of this, materialism must be recognised as what it really is. As long as man had, as it were, a counterfeit idea of materialism, an idea in which spiritual impulses were still included, he could hold fast to the fragment of spirit he still sought to find in the phenomena of nature, and so forth. Not until he had cast out all spirit through the spirit—for thinking is possible only for the spirit—not until through the spirit he had cast out spirit from the structure of the universe could the materialistic view of the world confront him in all its barrenness. It was necessary that at some time man should be faced with the whole barrenness of materialism. But what is also essential here is to reflect about thinking. That is absolutely indispensable. As soon as we do so, we shall realise that the barren vista presented by materialism had necessarily to appear at some point in evolution in order that men might become aware of what actually confronts them there.

That is one aspect of the matter, but it cannot be rightly understood unless its other aspect is presented. Materialistic picture of the world—space—in space atoms, which are in movement—and this is the All. Fundamentally, it is an outer consequence, a mirage of one side of space and the atoms moving within it, that is to say, those minute particles of which, as we have shown in earlier lectures, genuine thinking will not admit the existence. But ever and again men come to these atoms. How are they found? How does man come to assume their existence?

Nobody can ever have seen atoms, for they are conjectures, inventions of the mind. Apart from the reality, therefore, there must be some instigation which prompts man to think out an atomistic world. Something must instigate the proclivity in him to think out an atomistic world—nature herself most assuredly does not lead him to form an atomistic picture of her! With a trained physicist—and I am not speaking hypothetically here for I have actually discussed such matters with physicists—with a trained physicist one can speak about these things because he has knowledge of external physics. He could never have hit upon atomism! He would have to say—as indeed was the conclusion reached by shrewder physicists in the eighties of last century: Atomism is an assumption, a working hypothesis which affords a basis for calculation; but let us be quite clear that we are not dealing with any reality.—Thoughtful physicists would prefer to keep to what they perceive with the senses, but again and again, like a cat falling on its feet, they come back to atomism.

Mention has often been made of these things since I gave the lectures on the Theosophy of the Rosicrucian in Munich,¹ and if you have studied what has been elaborated through the years, you will know that the rudiments of the physical body were imparted to man on Old Saturn, that he then passed through the Old Sun and Old Moon evolutions, and then, during the Old Moon period received into his organism, into what existed of his physical organism at that time, his nerve-system.

It would, however, be quite erroneous to imagine that during the Old Moon epoch the nerve-system was similar to what presents itself today to an anatomist or physiologist. In the Old Moon epoch the nerve-system was present as archetype only, as Imagination. It did not become physical, or better said, mineral in the chemical sense, until the Earth-period. The whole ramified nerve-system we now have in our body, is a product of the Earth. During the Earth's development, mineral matter was incorporated into the imaginative archetypes of our nerve-system, as well as into the other archetypes. That is how our present nerve-system came into being.

The materialist says: With this nerve-system I think, or I perceive. We know that this is nonsense. To get a correct idea of the process, let us picture the course of some nerve in the organism (see diagram). But now let us follow different nerves which run through the organism and send out ramifications, like branches. A nerve has, as it were, a stem from which branches spread out; these branches come into the neighbourhood of others and then still another filament continues on its way. (The diagram is, of course, only a very rough sketch.)

Now how does man's life of soul take its course within this nerve-system? That is the question of primary importance. We can form no true conception here if we consider the day-waking consciousness only; but if a man thinks of the moment when, together with his ego and astral body, he slips out of the body and therefore also out of the nerve-system, and especially of the moment when he slips into the body again on waking, he will have a peculiar experience. During sleep, in his ego and astral body he has been outside his nerves; he slips into the nerves again and is actually within them during his waking life; in the act of waking he feels himself streaming, as it were, from outside into the nerves.

The process of waking is much more complicated than can be conveyed in a diagram.—Through the day, together with his soul, man is within his body, filling it to the uttermost limits of the nerves. It is not as though the physical body were filled with a kind of undifferentiated mist; the organs and various organic structures are pervaded individually. As he passes into the different organs, man also slips into the sensory nerve-filaments, right to the very outermost ramifications of the nerves.

Let us try to picture it vividly.—Again I will make a sketch but can draw it only as a kind of mirrored reflection. I can draw it only from the outside, whereas in reality it ought to be drawn from within. Suppose here (diagram, p. 56) is the astral body and here the sensory “antennae” extending from it.—What I am drawing is all astral body.—It sketches certain antennae into the nerve fibres.

Now suppose the sleeves of my coat were sewn up and I were to slip my arm into the coat—suppose I had a hundred arms and were to slip them in this way into what would amount to sacks. With these hundred arms I should come up against the places where the sleeves are sewn up. In the same way I slip into the physical body, right to the ends of the nerve-fibres. As long as I am in the act of slipping in, I feel nothing; it is only when I reach the point where the sleeves are sewn up that I feel anything. It is the same with the nerves; we feel the nerve only at the point where it ends. Throughout the day we are within the nerve-substance, touching our nerve-ends all the time. Man does not realise this consciously but it expresses itself in his consciousness willy nilly. Now man thinks with his ego and astral body and we may therefore say: Thinking is an activity that is carried over by the ego and astral body to the etheric body. Something from the etheric body also plays a part—its movement at any rate. The cause of consciousness is that in acts of thinking I continually come to a point where an impact occurs. I make an impact at an infinite number of points but I am not conscious of this. It comes into consciousness only in the case of one who consciously experiences the process of waking; when he passes consciously into the mantle of his nerves he feels as if he were being pricked all over.

I once knew an interesting man who had become conscious of this in an abnormal way. He was a distinguished mathematician, conversant with the whole range of higher mathematics at that time. He was also, of course, much occupied with the differential and integral calculus. The “differential” in mathematics is the atomic, the very smallest unit that can be conceived—I cannot say more about it today. Although it was not a fully conscious experience, this man had the sensation of being pricked all over when he was engrossed in the study of the differential calculus. Now if this experience is not lifted into consciousness in the proper way, by such exercises as are given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?—very strange things may occur. This man believed that he was feeling the differentials all over him. “I am crammed full of differentials”, he said. “I have nothing integral in me.” And moreover he demonstrated in a very ingenious way that he was full of differentials!

Now try to envisage these “pricks” vividly. What does a man do with them if they do not reach his consciousness?

He projects them into space, fills space with them—and they are then the atoms. That, in truth, is the origin of atomism. If there is a mirror in front of you and you have no idea that it is a mirror, you will certainly believe that there, outside, is another collection of people. In the same way man conceives that the whole of space is filled with what he himself projects into it. This entire nerve-process is reflected back into man owing to the fact that he comes up against it (as a kind of barrier). But he is not conscious of this and so he conceives of the whole of surrounding space as being filled with atoms: the atoms are ostensibly the pricks made by his nerve-endings. Nature herself nowhere obliges us to assume the existence of atoms, but the human constitution does. At the moment of waking man dives down into his own being and becomes inwardly aware of an infinite number of spatial points within him. At this moment he is in exactly the same position as when he walks up to a mirror, knocks up against it—and realises then that he cannot get behind it. Similarly, at the moment of waking a man comes up against his nerve-endings and knows that he cannot get beyond them. The whole atomic picture is like a reflecting-screen. The moment a man realises that he cannot get behind it, he knows how things are.

And now think of a saying of Saint-Martin which I have quoted on previous occasions. What does a natural scientist say? He says: Analyse the phenomena of nature and you find the atomic world! We, however, know that the atomic world is simply not there; the truth is that our nerve-ends alone are there. What then, is there where the atomic world is conjectured to be? Nothing is there! We must remain at the mirror, at the nerve-ends. Man is there; and man is a reflecting apparatus. When this is not recognised, all kinds of things are conjectured to lie behind him. The materialistic view of the world arises, whereas in reality, it is man who must be discovered. But this cannot happen as long as it is said: Analyse the phenomena of nature—for this results in atomism. It should rather be said: Try to get beyond what is mere semblance, try to see through semblance! And then it will not be said: ... and you find the atomic world, but rather, and you find man! And now call to mind what Saint-Martin said as a kind of prophecy without fully understanding it himself: “Dissipez vos ténèbres materiels et vous trouverez l'homme.” This is exactly the same thing, but it can only be understood with the help of what we have here been considering.

Through the way in which we are bringing Spiritual Science into connection both with Natural Science and also with its errors, we are fulfilling a longing that has existed ever since there were men who had some inkling of the fallaciousness of the modern materialistic view of the world.—When we think of the intrinsic character of our own conception of the world, the fact of untold significance that strikes us is this: Spiritual Science is there because it has been longed for by those who have had a feeling for the True, for the Truth which alone can bring that of which modern humanity stands in need.

In the lecture tomorrow I shall show you why error was bound to arise when the attempt with Spiritualism was made in the nineteenth century. I have indicated to you in many ways that it was a matter of suggestions exercised by living men, whereas it was believed that influences were coming from the dead. The dead can be reached only by withdrawing into those members of man's psychic being which can be lifted out of the physical body. The life of the human being between death and a new birth can be known only through what can be experienced outside the physical body; therefore mediums—using the word in its real meaning—cannot be used for this purpose. More about this tomorrow, when what is said will also be connected with the subject of the life after death.

• 1. In 1907.

I want to add certain things today in continuation of what has been said in these lectures about the development of spiritual life in the nineteenth century.

We must turn our attention, on the one hand, to the role of the materialistic view of the world, and to the attempt that was made to counter the inevitable penetration of this materialistic outlook by means of the spiritual Movement of the nineteenth century; and further, how an attempt was made from different sides among occultists to save men from succumbing altogether to materialism. On the other hand, it will be well to connect with this subject a study of matters with which we ourselves are particularly concerned just now. This will help us to understand the character of those powers and forces which take effect outwardly on the physical plane in the way that has already cost us many discussions and will—at least so I imagine—have caused you much brain-racking.¹

A connecting line exists from certain far-reaching factors in the spiritual development of the nineteenth century to the matters with which we ourselves are now concerned. I shall be obliged today to make a wide sweep and I ask you to treat the various communications I shall make with a certain discretion from the outset, for the simple reason that they relate to subjects which, as you will realise, can be known only to very few at the present time. Later on, they will be found to be fully confirmed.

We will take as our starting-point the fact that the nineteenth century was the epoch when materialism as a Weltanschauung arose in the natural course of progress and that the middle of that century was the time when the whole of mankind was, as it were, to be put to the test through the advent of materialism. Materialism was to stand on the horizon like a Circe, a temptress, and men's proclivities and feelings were to result in their becoming literally enamoured of it. For it may truly be said that the men of the nineteenth century were enamoured of materialism.

On the other side we have seen how greatly materialism deserves praise. As a method, materialism has made possible the great achievements of natural science which with all their technical, economic and social consequences, would not have been possible if the faculties of soul necessary for materialistic observation of the world had not been developed. There was a combination of two factors. On the one hand, the evolution of humanity had to take its course to the point where materialistic interpretations were inevitable when the study of nature was carried to a further stage. Honest thinkers could not but arrive at materialism if they adopted certain methods of investigation established by natural science; for materialism was good as a method for investigating and observing the secrets of the material world.—That was the one aspect that emerged. The other was that the hearts and souls of men were so attuned as to make them love materialism. Everything tended towards it. All the factors combined to put men to the test, as it were, through a materialistic view of the world.

Now I have already told you that those among the occultists who, so to speak, had the responsibility of seeing that humanity should not completely sink into materialism, an attempt was made with mediumship, and I showed you that mediumship led to aberrations. I have already indicated one of the most significant of these aberrations. It was remarkable that mediums everywhere professed to be able to give information, revelations, from the realm of the dead, the realm in which men live after death. The most remarkable thing of all, in addition to what I have already told you, was that these communications which came through mediums—allegedly from the realm of the dead—everywhere disclosed a strongly tendentious character.—You can examine all these proclamations made by the mediums and you will find that they invariably have a strongly tendentious character precisely where the life of the soul after death is concerned.

In important circles where mediums were used, declarations were made which to the old esotericists—that is to say, those who did not wish certain occult truths to be made public—were the cause of great consternation. I can indicate the reason for their consternation in the following way.

In order to be quite clear about the matter, please read the course of lectures I gave in Vienna in the year 1914, entitled The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a new Birth. The lectures contain very important facts which emerge when one approaches the realm of the dead in the right way by putting oneself into the condition where they are able to speak to one.

But in very many circles where mediums were used, revelations of a quite different kind were made. If you peruse the mass of literature compiled from the communications of different mediums, you will discover—especially when these mediums were guided by the souls of living persons—that everything has a strongly tendentious character. Descriptions of the life after death were given which, if you compare them with what was said in the Vienna lectures, are entirely false. You will perceive, too, the tendency in the different mediums to allow nothing concerning repeated lives on Earth to come to light. Wherever the mediums alleged that the dead had spoken to them, they described the life after death in such a way that the conclusion was: there can be no repeated Earth-lives! In the development of mediumship there was the tendency to make false assertions precisely about the most important aspects of the life between death and a new birth—especially to make assertions which preclude the fact of reincarnation. It was desired to speak to this effect through mediums. That is to say, certain people who exploited this tendency in pursuance of their special aims, desired that revelations indicating that there are no repeated Earth-lives should be proclaimed through the mediums. The desire, therefore, was to use the mediums in order to oppose the teaching of repeated Earth-lives.

That was a very striking fact, a fact which caused the right-wing occultists the greatest consternation of all, for they themselves had been a party to the use of mediumship and what it produced—and this was being made to serve tendentious interests instead of the unbiassed truth.

All these things were possible because the leaning towards materialism was so strong in men. Now what is said in the Vienna lectures about the life between death and a new birth is irreconcilable with any form of materialism as a view of the world. But a man can be a materialist in his way of thinking and give credence to what different mediums have said about the life after death, for that is really only a kind of embellished materialism that is ashamed of being materialism and therefore has recourse to mediums in order to glean something about the spiritual world. Materialism was therefore a factor to be reckoned with, and those who did reckon with it fared the best.

In addition to all this there was something else. Even among those who knew something about the spiritual worlds great confusion had arisen in the course of the nineteenth century in regard to a matter about which, if a spiritual Movement is to make any real progress, it is absolutely essential to be clear. The confusion was due to the fact that Ahriman and Lucifer were continually being intermixed. People were no longer able to distinguish between them. A principle of evil and the representative of the evil—that they understood, but they saw no need for any sharper distinction. Even Goethe was unable to distinguish Ahriman—whom he called Mephistopheles—from Lucifer. In Goethe's presentation they are indistinguishable, for Mephistopheles is a mixture, a cross between Ahriman and Lucifer. In the nineteenth century men had no faculty for making a distinction between the representatives of the two spiritual streams—between Ahriman and Lucifer. I can only make certain statements on this subject today, but later on I shall be able to elaborate them and then confirmation will be possible.

Now when it is a matter of clarity concerning the spiritual world, very much depends upon being able to distinguish between Ahriman and Lucifer. That is why a strict distinction between the figures of Ahriman and Lucifer will be made in the representations in our Building.² Lack of clear distinction between these two Powers leads to a particular kind of confusion in spiritual understanding. If Ahriman and Lucifer are intermixed as they are in Goethe's figure of Mephistopheles, the danger is that Ahriman will constantly appear in the form of Lucifer. There is no knowing whether one has to do with Ahriman himself or with Lucifer in the form of Ahriman. Ahriman wishes to convey untruths by way of the materialistic view of the world. But the materialistic view of the world would not lead to the consequence mentioned yesterday if people would only hold fast to the thread of thinking. Without this far-reaching thinking, materialism cannot be surmounted. But if Ahriman and Lucifer are intermixed, man is induced to accept the Ahrimanic picture of the world that is presented to him because Lucifer comes to the help of Ahriman and a certain longing arises in him to weave certain fallacies in the guise of truths into his conception of the world.

A remarkable trend has developed, namely, to harbour fallacies which indeed could flourish only in the age of materialism—one might say in the age of Ahrimanic deception—because Lucifer helps from within. Ahriman insinuates himself into the concepts formed of outer phenomena and deceives man about them. But man would see through these wiles if Lucifer did not incite him to lend force to certain materialistic facts in his view of the world.

That was the situation in which men were involved in the course of the nineteenth century and those who so desired were able to take advantage of it. A person able to see through such matters might set out to strengthen some tendency with a bias towards the left. This would not have been such a simple matter if in the nineteenth century men had not been in a position where they could easily be misled as a result of the intermixture of Ahriman and Lucifer.

And so it could happen that certain entirely materialistic natures had enough of the Luciferic element in them not to believe in materialism, but to attempt to find in materialism itself a spiritual conception of the world. Just think of it—the nineteenth century could produce a type of person whose head produced a thoroughly materialistic kind of thinking but whose heart was longing for the spiritual! When that is the case, such a man will endeavour to find the spiritual in materiality itself and will endeavour to give to the spiritual a materialistic form.

Now if behind a personality of this type there happens to stand some individuality who sees to the root of such matters, the latter has a very easy game to play. For if it is in the interests of this individuality, he can induce such a man to mislead others into envisaging the spiritual in a material form, and procedures calculated to trick these others can then take effect. These measures succeed best when they are carried out at just the right place, when truths are imparted to men and the door is opened for them to the things for which they long. In this way certain spiritual truths could be brought to mankind and a one-sided tendency steered in a certain direction; on the one hand a number of truths—with a materialistic colouring but truths for all that—were communicated, and on the other hand, at a certain place, something was introduced that would quite inevitably lead to fallacy but could not easily be detected.

This was what happened in the case of Sinnett's book Esoteric Buddhism. Sinnett wrote it—but behind him was the one he calls his “inspirer”, and whom we know as the later mask of a Mahatma-Individuality. Sinnett was a journalist and was therefore steeped in the materialistic tendencies of the nineteenth century; here, then, was a personality whose brain tended entirely to materialism, but the longing for a spiritual world was also present in him. He therefore had every aptitude for seeking the spiritual world in a materialistic form, and so it was easy for the above-mentioned individuality, in whose interests it was to make use of materialism in this way for special aims of his own, to develop in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism an ostensibly spiritual teaching with an eminently materialistic colouring.

Now you may say: “But Sinnett's book certainly does not contain materialistic teaching!” The fact that this is not perceived—there you have the gist of the whole matter! Everything is embellished and disguised and can be understood only when one knows the antecedents of which I have just spoken.

Of course, the teaching about the members of man's being, the doctrine of karma and reincarnation, are truths. But materialism has here been woven into all these truths. In Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism a genuinely spiritual outlook is combined with an eminently materialistic tendency—a combination that it was not easy to detect because there was scarcely anyone who could discern that something entirely materialistic had insinuated itself into a spiritual teaching—something that was materialistic not merely in the intellectual sense but materialistic as opposed to a spiritual view of the world.—I refer to what is said in Esoteric Buddhism about the “Eighth Sphere”.³

Here, then, are teachings which contain a great deal that is correct and into which this utterly materialistic and misleading statement about the Eighth Sphere has been woven. This culminates in the assertion made in Esoteric Buddhism that the Eighth Sphere is the Moon. Owing to its journalistic qualities and the good style in which it is written, the book was a tremendous draw and captivated many hearts. Consequently these readers imbibed, not the true teaching concerning the Eighth Sphere, but the strange assertion made by Sinnett that the Moon is the Eighth Sphere.

So there was Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. The book was written at the time when Blavatsky, after all the happenings of which I have told you, had already been driven into the one-sided sphere of influence of those Indian occultists who belonged to the left and had special aims of their own. Hence teachings relating to the constitution of man and to reincarnation and karma are given in Esoteric Buddhism. It is therefore written in opposition to those who wanted the knowledge of reincarnation to be allowed to disappear. This will also show you how vehemently the conflict was being waged.

Blavatsky was connected with American spiritualists who wanted to let the teaching of reincarnation disappear. Mediumship was a means to this end and so that method was adopted. As Blavatsky revolted, she was expelled and came more and more under the sway of the Indian occultists; she was driven into their hands. This led to a conflict between American and Indian views in the sphere of occultism. On the one side there was the strong tendency to let the teaching of reincarnation vanish from the scene, and on the other, the urge to bring this teaching into the world but in a form that took advantage of the materialistic leanings of the nineteenth century.

This was a possibility if the teaching about the Eighth Sphere was presented as Sinnett presented it in the book Esoteric Buddhism. There are a certain number of other facts which are perhaps of sufficient importance to be at least indicated—because I do not want to shock you by what I am saying but to explain the spiritual principle upon which our own standpoint is based.

Two difficulties had arisen as a result of the way in which the teaching about the Eighth Sphere had been presented in Sinnett's book. One of the difficulties had been created by Blavatsky herself. She knew that what Sinnett had written on this subject was false⁴ but on the other hand she was in the hands of those who desired that the false teaching should be inculcated into humanity. Therefore she tried—as you can read in The Secret Doctrine—she tried to correct in a certain way this conception of the Eighth Sphere and matters relevant to it. But she did this in such a way as to cause confusion. Hence there is a certain discrepancy between Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky corrected in a way that actually reinforced the bias of the left-wing Indian occultists. She tried by very peculiar means, as we shall presently see, to let more of the truth come to light in order to overshadow the error. She was therefore obliged, in turn, to create a counterweight, for from the standpoint of the Indian occultists it would have been very dangerous to allow the truth to be revealed in this way.

She set out to create this counterweight—we shall gradually understand it—by pursuing a definite course. She came nearer to the truth about the Eighth Sphere than Sinnett had done but she created the counterweight by giving vent in The Secret Doctrine to a volley of abuse on the subjects of Judaism and Christianity, interwoven with certain teaching about the nature of Jehovah. In this way, what she had put right on the one side she tried to balance out on the other, so that too much harm should not be done to the stream of Indian occultism. She knew that such truths do not remain theory or without effect as do other theories relating to the physical plane. Theories such as those of which we are speaking penetrate into the life of soul and colour the perceptions and feelings of men; indeed they were calculated to turn souls in a certain direction.—The whole affair is an inextricable jumble of fallacies.

H. P. Blavatsky did not, of course, know that the driving forces behind both tendencies were directed towards a special aim, namely, to foster this particular kind of error instead of the truth, to foster errors of a type that would be advantageous to the materialism of the nineteenth century—errors such as could be possible only at the high tide of materialism.—There you have one side of the situation.

On the other side, Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and, in a certain respect, Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine too, had made a great impression, especially upon those who were really intent upon seeking the spiritual world. And that again naturally alarmed those who had cause to be alarmed at the possibility that an Occult Movement with such an oriental trend would appear.

Now a number of senseless polemics have been levelled against Blavatsky, against Sinnett, against the Theosophical Movement, and so forth. But among the different attacks made upon the Theosophical Movement in the course of time there have been some which emanated from well-informed but biassed quarters. The tendency of Anglican spiritual life was that as little as possible of oriental teaching, as little as possible of any teaching concerning repeated Earth-lives, should be allowed to come to the knowledge of the public.

There is no doubt that among those who, from the standpoint that here lay a danger to Christianity in Europe, set themselves in opposition to the oriental teachings, were people who may be called “Christian esotericists”. Christian esotericists connected with the High Church party set themselves in opposition with this in mind.⁵ And from that quarter came declarations calculated to stem the current of oriental thought proceeding from Blavatsky and Sinnett, but on the other hand to foster in the outside world esotericism of a kind calculated to conceal the teaching of repeated Earth-lives. To amalgamate a certain trend of thought with the form of Christianity customary in Europe—such was the aim of this group. It desired that the teaching of repeated Earth-lives—which it was essential to make known—should be left out of account. And a method similar to that used in the case of Sinnett was put into operation.

I must emphasise once again that those who made the corresponding preparations were probably not fully aware that they were tools of the individuality who stood behind them. Just as Sinnett knew nothing of the real tendency of those who stood behind him, neither did those who were connected with the High Church party know much of what lay behind the whole affair. But they realised that what they were doing could not fail to make a great impression upon the occultists and that determined them to lend force to the trend of those who were intent upon eliminating the teaching of repeated Earth-lives.

If after these preliminary indications we turn to consider the particular fallacy contained in Sinnett's book, we find that it is the teaching that the Eighth Sphere makes itself manifest paramountly in the Moon; that the Moon with its influences and effects upon man is, in fact, the Eighth Sphere. Expressed in this form, this is a fallacy.—Here is the essential point. If in investigating the influences of the Moon we were to start from Sinnett's assumption, we should be trapped in a grave error arising from materialistic thinking and not easily fathomed.—What, then, was necessary if the truth were to be fostered? It was necessary to point out the true state of things in regard to the Moon as opposed to the erroneous presentation in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.

Read Chapter IV dealing with this subject in the book Occult Science: an Outline. It was my purpose there to describe how the Moon left the Earth. I attached particular importance to the fact that the exit of the Moon should be described with the utmost clarity. It was essential to indicate the truth here as opposed to the fallacy. Thus in order to counter the Indian influence it was necessary to describe in all clarity the function of the Moon in the evolution of the Earth. That was one of the things that had to be done in my book Occult Science: an Outline.

The other thing that was necessary will be clear to you if you think of the people of whom I have just spoken, people who were also under a certain leadership and who did not wish the teaching of repeated Earth-lives to be spread among men as a truth because they considered that it would alter the form of Christianity customary in Europe and America. They went to work in a particular way, a way which we can clearly discern if we picture how these occultists set about refuting Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. The occultists who were connected with the High Church party took upon themselves the task of refuting Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.

In point of fact a great deal of good was done in regard to Sinnett's statement about the Eighth Sphere, for the falsity of the indications about the Eighth Sphere and the Moon was emphasised very poignantly from that side. But at the same time this was combined with another teaching. It was stated from that quarter that man is not connected with the Moon in the way described by Sinnett, but in a different way. True, this different way was not specifically described, but it could be perceived that these people had realised something about the process of the Moon's departure from the Earth as I have presented it in the book Occult Science. But now they laid great stress on the following.—They said: The Earth—and above all, man—was never connected with the other planets of the solar system ... therefore man could never have lived on Mercury, Venus, Mars or Jupiter. From that side, therefore, it was sharply emphasised that there is no connection between man and the other planets of the solar system. But this is the best way to instil yet another fallacy into the world, and to spread the greatest possible obscurity over the teaching of reincarnation. The other fallacy, Sinnett's fallacy, actually furthers the teaching of reincarnation in a sense, but in a materialistic form. The fallacy which consists in the assertion that during his Earth-evolution man has never had any connection with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and so forth—this fallacy was not actually spread abroad by those who gave it publicity, but by those who stood behind them. It was they who worked upon the souls of men in such a way that these souls could never seriously believe in reincarnation. What, therefore, was strongly emphasised from this quarter was that man had never been connected with any planet other than the Earth nor had ever had anything to do with the other planets of the solar system.

If we think about man as he is between birth and death, we can envisage that in regard to his evolution he stands under the workings of the Spirits of Form. This too is set forth in Occult Science. But if we then think of his life from death until the next birth, an essential fact must be taken into consideration, namely, that the spheres of activity of these Spirits of Form fall as it were into seven categories, only one of which is allotted to Jehovah, namely, that concerned primarily with the life between birth and death. The six other categories of the Spirits of Form guide the life between death and a new birth.

This can be discovered only if we investigate the life between death and a new birth. Just as Jehovah has to do with the Earth and actually made the sacrifice of going to the Moon in order from there to neutralise certain things in Earth-evolution, so have the other Spirits of Form to do with the other planets. But this fact must be cloaked, must be kept secret if it is desired that the conception of repeated Earth-lives shall be withheld from men; and moreover the concealment must be really effective, it must be brought about in such a way that men do not become alive to the secret of which I have just spoken. For if they are diverted from a true vista of the life between death and a new birth, their attention will be rivetted, without this secret, upon the life between birth and death and they will allow mediums to talk them into believing that the life after death is simply a continuation of the life on Earth.

In all the things that happen in this domain a tremendous amount of scheming goes on. For naturally, an occultist who undertakes anything of this nature knows, if he belongs to the left, into which direction he must turn the thoughts in order to bring the feelings too into line and thus divert men's attention from certain secrets in order that these shall not come to light.

That is what actually happened, and you can read about it in the relevant literature. You will often find the statement that man has nothing to do with the other planets of our solar system—but the implication behind this is: Nothing to do with the Guiding Spirits of these planets of our solar system. This was sharply accentuated in order that men should never evolve such concepts as would lead them to realise the credibility of the teaching of reincarnation. And now the other task was to present the truth as opposed to the fallacy. If you read Occult Science you will again find emphasis laid upon the fact that it is necessary for men to go away from the Earth in order that part of his life shall be spent on other planets. The book Occult Science deals in detail on the one side with man's relation to the Moon, and on the other, with his relation to the planets.

What these people set out to achieve can be indicated briefly by saying: they too availed themselves of the materialistic outlook of the time. For if you present the matter as I have done in Occult Science, you will show what has to be accomplished in the evolution of our Earth through its connection with the planets. The other planets, too, belong to the evolution of the Earth. To the materialist, the planets move around in space as mere clods of matter. And so, in describing their functions in the spiritual evolution of humanity, one had to go back to their spiritual realities of being, to the Spirits of the planets.

You see by this how the spiritual Movement was wedged as it were between two set purposes, one intent upon distorting the truth concerning the Moon, the other upon distorting the truth concerning the planets.—That was the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. H. P Blavatsky and Sinnett were to distort the truth about the Moon; the others set out to distort the truth about the connection of the planets with the evolution of the Earth. Do not imagine that it is an easy position to be wedged between two such currents; for here we have to do with occultism, and where occultism is involved a stronger force is necessary for grasping its truths than for grasping the ordinary truths of the physical plane. But consequently there is also at work a far stronger force of deception which it is essential to see through. This is not easy, because of the strong force required to counter it. On the one side, the truth about the Moon is veiled by the distortion, and on the other, the truth about the planets. One was therefore wedged between two fallacies committed in the interests of materialism. First, it was a matter of reckoning with the materialism emanating from the oriental side, which was responsible for promoting the fallacy about the Moon in order to introduce the oriental teaching of reincarnation. The teaching of the fact of reincarnation was of course correct, but we shall soon see what a strong concession had been made to materialism in Esoteric Buddhism—as the book was called. On the other side there was the desire that a certain form of Catholic Esotericism should be protected from the assault of the Indian influence, and there, more than ever, the tendency was at work to allow all spiritual reality connected with the evolution of the planetary system as a whole to be submerged in materialism. The mission of Spiritual Science was wedged between these two currents. This was the situation with which one was confronted. Everywhere there were strong forces at work, intent upon making the one or the other influence effective.

And now it is a matter of showing in what respect this distorted teaching about the Moon is a very special concession to materialism, and how the way in which it was then corrected by H. P. Blavatsky actually made matters even worse, because on the one side, with a great talent for occultism—which Sinnett did not possess—she amended his statements but on the other side made use of particular methods whereby the error could be preserved with even greater certainty.

The first essential is to discern how far Sinnett's teaching about the Eighth Sphere is a fallacy. Here you must keep firmly in mind the teaching regarding the whole process of the evolution of the Earth, namely, the teaching that the planet Earth passed through the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods of evolution before entering its present stage. You must remind yourselves that the composition of the Old Moon was essentially different from that of the Earth. The mineral kingdom was added for the first time during the Earth period, and what constitutes the material world of the physical plane is entirely impregnated with the mineral element. All that you perceive in the plant, animal and human kingdoms is the mineral element that has been impregnated into them. Your body is “mineralised” through and through. That which is not mineral—the Moon-nature, the Sun-nature—is only occultly present there. We see only the mineral, the earthly. This must be firmly borne in mind if starting from what man now actually is on the Earth, we are to find the answer to the question: What is it in man that is the heritage of the Old Moon?

As you see, the preparation for our present study was made already a long time ago.—Within man as he now is, the Old Moon-man is present, but in a form that must be pictured as containing nothing mineral whatever. If you envisage earthly man in such a way that you see his mineral constituents only, you must picture the Moon-man within him. (A sketch was made on the blackboard.) But there is nothing mineral in this Moon-man, hence he cannot be seen with physical eyes but only with spiritual sight. A Moon-form underlies certain members of physical man, is contained within them, but can be perceived only with the eye of clairvoyance. Needless to say, what is there within was present on the Old Moon. But just remember how it was seen on the Old Moon. It was seen through Imaginative Cognition—in surging, undulating pictures. These are still present today, but to behold them, atavistic clairvoyance, at that time at least, was necessary. The Old Moon-man could be perceived only by atavistic clairvoyance, which in that era was the normal faculty of vision. Consequently everything that is connected with this Old Moon evolution can also be seen only in Imaginations, with the ancient visionary clairvoyance. It must never be thought that the Moon-man could be formed out of the mineral Earth; he was the product of the Old Moon as it can be seen in Imaginative clairvoyance. And so in connection with the Old Moon we must picture to ourselves that the whole environment was visible to the Imaginative clairvoyance of the Moon-men just as our own environment, with plants, animals, rivers, mountains, is visible to physical eyes.

Now we know that the forces contained in the Old Moon inevitably appear again in the Earth's evolutionary process but that Earth-evolution would have been doomed to perish, as I have shown in Occult Science, if these Moon-forces had not subsequently taken their departure. They could not have maintained their existence within the Earth-forces. And why not? Remember that the whole planet Earth had to receive into itself the mineral kingdom, to be mineralised, as it were. While the Moon formed part of the Earth, the Moon-forces were still within the Earth. But these forces had to be expelled, hence the Moon itself was obliged to separate from the Earth, because it could not have existed in the mineralised Earth; hence men would not have been able to evolve as they have actually evolved. I have spoken of all this in the book Occult Science. But now recall exactly what I have said to you today—that this Moon can be perceived only through Imaginative clairvoyance. If, therefore, you picture how man developed as earthly man, with a constitution organised for perception with physical senses, you will understand that he could never have beheld the departure of the Moon. The departure of the Moon and also its position out there in the Cosmos could only have been apprehended clairvoyantly. Man was so organised that the whole process of the departure of the Moon could have been seen only with clairvoyant sight, and the influences then proceeding from the Moon could only have been those of the Old Moon—that is to say, influences which worked in such a way upon man that among other things, Imaginative clairvoyance would have been evoked in him.

Try to imagine the situation in that ancient time! The situation was that “man” could come into being, that the souls could come down from the planets, and so forth—but the Moon would have worked as Moon, and in such a way that the forces in the human being as he descended would have been the same forces as had been present in the Old Moon which preceded the Earth. Nobody except one endowed with visionary clairvoyance could have beheld this Moon.

Then, as a material phenomenon accompanying this process of the departure of the Moon-forces, something else came about.—I have already told you how Jahve is related to the Moon. What happened was that through the connection of Jahve with the Moon, the Moon too was made material, was mineralised, but with a materiality much denser than that of the Earth. Therefore what can be seen today as physical Moon and of which it can be assumed that the Moon contains a mineral element, is to be traced back to the deed of Jahve whereby certain elements were added to the Old Moon.

Thereby, however, the Old Moon forces were crippled, and now work in a quite different way. Had the Moon remained unmineralised, its forces would have worked in such a way that its rays would always have evoked the old atavistic clairvoyance in men, and the effects of the Moon upon the will would have made men somnambulists in the most marked form. This was neutralised through the mineralisation of the Moon. The old forces can now no longer develop in such a way.

This is a truth of tremendous importance, for now you will realise that it was necessary for the Moon to be mineralised in order that it might not work in the old way. And so when speaking of the Moon as a recapitulation of the Old Moon, we must speak of a celestial body that is not visible with physical eyes, that is a concern of the spiritual world, albeit only the subconscious spiritual world that is perceptible to visionary clairvoyance. We must therefore speak of something spiritual if we are speaking of the recapitulation of the Old Moon; what is mineral in the present Moon has been added to the spiritual and does not belong to the Moon when the Moon is referred to in the old sense.

How was the materialism of the nineteenth century to be grappled with? Its adherents would certainly not believe that behind the material Moon there lies the very important remainder of the old, non-mineralised Moon; they would never believe such a thing. So a concession was made to materialism by speaking only of the physical, materialised Moon. Hence when Sinnett spoke of the Moon, he left out the spirit. In Esoteric Buddhism he merely says that the materiality of the Moon is far denser than that of the Earth. That is so, indeed must be so, but that the occult reality which I have indicated lies behind—that fact he omits altogether. He therefore made the concession in that he speaks only of the materiality of the Moon. But the spirituality behind the Moon does not there come into consideration; it does not belong essentially to the Earth but is connected much more closely with the Old Moon than with the Earth. This fact was completely veiled, and the consequence was of tremendous import; for Sinnett had thereby brought a true fact—namely, that the Moon has something to do with the Eighth Sphere—into an utterly false light and distorted it with great subtlety. He omits all mention of the spiritual aspect of the Eighth Sphere, namely that the Eighth Sphere, the representative of which is alleged to be the Moon, is that which lies behind the Moon, and he calls what was actually placed there to neutralise, to counter the effects of the Eighth Sphere, the Eighth Sphere itself. As we have heard, the materiality of the Moon is there in order to neutralise the Eighth Sphere, to render it ineffectual.

People do not realise what the effect of the Eighth Sphere would be if materiality were taken away from the Moon. The whole nature of the human soul would have become quite different on the Earth and that this has not happened is due to the fact that materiality of a greater density was incorporated into the Moon. That which actually makes the Eighth Sphere ineffectual, namely, its materiality, Sinnett calls the Eighth Sphere, and what is actually the Eighth Sphere, namely the Old Moon forces, he obscures. A trick frequently used in occultism is to say something that is true fundamentally but to put it in such a way that it is absolutely false—forgive the paradox! It is false to say that the material Moon is the Eighth Sphere, because actually it is the neutraliser of the Eighth Sphere. But it is quite correct that the “Moon” is the Eighth Sphere, because the Eighth Sphere is centred in the Moon, is actually present up there.

And now we have reached the point where we can say more specifically than has hitherto been possible, what the Eighth Sphere is in reality.—This is a matter most intimately connected with the spiritual aspect of evolution in the nineteenth century.

• 1. A reference to discussions that were taking place at the time in connection with certain internal affairs of the Society.
• 2. The first Goetheanum, later destroyed by fire. The statue now stands in a special room in the second Goetheanum.
• 3. See notes at end of Lecture Five.
• 4. See notes at end of Lecture Five.
• 5. Compare C. J. Harrison in The Transcendental Universe, London, 1893. See also Notes at end of Lecture Five.