The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Further Rules in Continuation
of the General Demands

The following rules should be understood so that every esoteric pupil arranges his life in such a way that he continuously observes and directs himself, especially as to whether he follows these demands in his inner life. All esoteric training, particularly if it ascends to higher regions, can lead the pupil only to disaster and confusion if such rules are not observed. On the other hand, no one need be afraid of such training who strives to live in the sense of these rules. And he need not despair when he has to say to himself, “I am following the demands in a very inadequate way.” If only he has honestly strived inwardly for his whole life not to lose sight of these rules, this will be sufficient. Yet this honesty must be above all an honesty before oneself. In this respect many a man may be deceived. He says to himself, I will strive in a pure sense. But if he would test this he would observe that much hidden egotism and many cunning feelings of self-seeking lie in the background. It is particularly such feelings which very often bear the mask of selfless striving and often mislead the pupil. One cannot test too often and too seriously by inner self-observation, whether such feelings are hidden in one's inmost soul. One becomes ever more free of such feelings through the energetic pursuit of the rules discussed here. These rules are:

First:mNo unproven concept shall enter my consciousness.

Observe how many concepts, feelings, and will impulses live in the soul of man which are acquired through his position in life, profession, family connections, national connections, conditions of the time, and so on. One should not assume that for everyone eradication of these contents of soul would be a moral deed. For man, after all, receives his firmness and security in life because he is carried by his nation, the condition of his time, his family, education, etc. He would soon find himself standing in life without support were he to throw away these things carelessly. Especially for a weak personality it is undesirable to go too far in this direction. The esoteric pupil should be particularly clear that the observance of this first rule must be accompanied by the acquisition of understanding for all the deeds, thoughts, and feelings of other beings. It should never happen that following this rule leads to impetuosity, or, for instance, to someone saying, “I will break with all things into which I have been born and into which my life has placed me.” On the contrary, the more one tests, the more one will see the justification of what lives in one's environment. It is not a matter of fighting against or of arrogant rejection of these things, but rather of gaining the inner freedom from them through careful testing of all that stands in relation to one's own soul. Then, through the power of one's own soul, a light will be shed over one's whole thinking and behavior; consciousness will correspondingly enlarge and one will really acquire more and more, and allow to speak, the spiritual laws which reveal themselves to the soul, and one will stand no longer as blind follower of the surrounding world. Obviously, one can assert regarding this rule, “If man has to verify everything, he will especially want to test the occult and esoteric teachings given by his esoteric teacher.” But this testing has to be understood in the right sense. One cannot always test a thing directly, but often one has to undertake this testing indirectly. For instance, nobody today is in a position to prove whether Frederick the Great lived or not. One can only prove whether the way through which the accounts of Frederick the Great have been transmitted is a trustworthy one. Investigation must be begun in the right place. One should hold all faith in so-called authority in the same way. If one is told something which one cannot directly comprehend then above all one must check on the basis of available material whether he is a trustworthy authority, whether he says things which call forth the presentiment and perception that they are true. From this example one can see the importance of beginning investigation at the right level.

A second rule is: There shall stand before my soul the living obligation continually to increase the number of my concepts.

There is nothing worse for the esoteric pupil than to wish to remain with a certain number of concepts which he already has, and to want to understand everything with their help. It is immensely important to acquire ever new concepts. If this does not happen the pupil, when he encounters super-sensible insights, has no sufficiently prepared concept with which to meet them. He will then be overwhelmed by these insights either to his disadvantage or at least to his dissatisfaction, the latter because, under such circumstances, he might already be surrounded by higher experiences without being at all aware of them. The number is by no means small of pupils who might already be surrounded by higher experiences but without being aware of this because, through the poverty of their concepts, they have had totally different expectations of these experiences than is accurate. Many people in their outer life do not at all incline to indolence, yet in their conceptual life they are little disposed to enrich themselves by forming new concepts.

A third rule is this: Knowledge will come to me only about such things, the yes or no of which I regard without sympathy or antipathy.

An initiate of old impressed again and again upon his pupils: “You will only know about immortality of the soul when you can just as gladly accept that the soul may perish in death, or may live eternally. As long as you wish to live eternally, you will gain no concept of the condition after death.” As it is in this important case, so it is with all truths. As long as man has even the slightest wish that anything might be this way or that, the pure light of truth cannot enlighten him. For example, for a man who, in his own review of himself, has even the most secret wish that his good qualities might prevail, this wish becomes an illusion and will not allow him true self-knowledge.

A fourth rule is this: I must overcome my aversion to the so-called abstract.

As long as the esoteric pupil depends on concepts whose material is derived from the sense world, he cannot reach truth about the higher worlds. He must attempt to acquire sense-free concepts. Of all four rules this is the most difficult, especially under the conditions of life in our age. Materialistic thinking has deprived man to a high degree of the ability to think in sense-free concepts. One has to try often to think concepts which in outer sense reality never exist in perfection but only in approximation, for example, the concept of the circle. A perfect circle does not exist—it can only be thought. But this conceptual circle is the underlying law of all circular forms. Or one can think a high moral ideal; this also cannot be totally realized by any human being in its perfection—yet it is the underlying law of many human deeds. Nobody will advance esoterically who does not recognize the full importance for life of this so-called abstract, and who will not enrich his soul with corresponding concepts.

(These four rules were added by Rudolf Steiner to the so-called Six Subsidiary Exercises, which carry the subtitle: Demands Which Every Aspirant for Occult Development Must Put to Himself.)

This book is about how to obtain super-sensible knowledge, or knowledge of “higher” worlds. It contains ten lectures on that theme given by Rudolf Steiner to different audiences in different places, but arranged here in a certain evolving depth of content.

In a time like the present, therefore, when so many people are looking for a spiritual understanding of life—and when many are being led astray by unscrupulous teachers—it is a matter of no little importance that such a book should appear now, a book that demands nothing of the reader but an independent, open-minded judgment of what it has to say.

As this book is likely to come to the attention of those who know little or nothing about Rudolf Steiner, and perhaps even less of super-sensible knowledge, it may be well to introduce it by saying something about both its author and his subject. This kind of prospective reader will then be better able to adapt himself to what it has to say, while those more familiar with Steiner can plunge straight into the book without spending any more time with this introduction.

Rudolf Steiner was a philosopher with a strong scientific background who attracted a great deal of attention in the first quarter of this century with his books and lectures on the nature of the super-sensible. He not only gave detailed descriptions of higher worlds and their beings that are inaccessible to ordinary sense-perception, but he explained how knowledge of these worlds could be acquired by anyone willing to follow a strict and guided development of the ordinary powers of cognition. Steiner based all that he said on the ability of the human mind to know. He would have nothing to do with any method that imposed strange, mystical practices on the aspirant for higher knowledge, or that demanded implicit obedience to the will of a teacher or guru. Everything he suggested can be explored only on the basis of the consciousness that modern man has acquired in the pursuit of knowledge of nature.

We are accustomed to calling this knowledge of nature “scientific,” and though this knowledge was to Steiner merely the outer aspect of a world of phenomena and beings active “behind the scenes,” as it were, he was so much in accord with the basic principles of scientific methodology that he called this higher knowledge spiritual science. The spiritual scientist directs thinking to what is given, as does the natural scientist, but does not confine himself only to that which is given to the senses. He applies thinking to thought itself as the primary manifestation of super-sensible reality.

The world that spiritual science explores, therefore, is the world of creative purposes and intentions in contrast to the world of sense-perceptible phenomena, or the “wrought work,” as Steiner called it on one occasion. Knowledge of these higher worlds is, therefore, “occult,” hidden from ordinary consciousness, and hence the term “occultism” used in the opening lines of this book to distinguish this knowledge from the comprehensive term “anthroposophy,” which Rudolf Steiner uses to describe his work as a whole.

Now occultism, referring as it does to something ordinarily inaccessible to us, has a strong fascination for some people. Others, of course, are just as strongly repelled by it. As it is the former who are likely to be attracted to this book (the others will hardly get beyond the title), we can proceed at once to offer certain cautionary remarks to the former, for just because of this strong fascination one might attempt to embark forthwith upon the discovery of this extraordinary knowledge without further reflection. It should be remembered, however, that Steiner had already written a book on this subject, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and the people who heard the lectures reproduced here would, for the most part, have been familiar with that book, and with anthroposophy in general.

To begin with, then, it needs to be said that as these higher worlds are indeed “hidden” from ordinary knowledge and consciousness, the reader would be well advised to get some information about them before embarking on a quest for higher knowledge. Rudolf Steiner's two books, Theosophy and Occult Science, an Outline, are excellent sources of such information.

There are several reasons for this suggestion. One is that Steiner himself held it as a sine qua non for the acquisition of higher knowledge that the aspirant should get some idea beforehand of these worlds from those able to speak of them from firsthand experience. This is not only important in light of much that is referred to in the book itself, but it is also a matter of common sense. Anyone contemplating traveling to a part of the world that he has never visited will invariably find out as much about it as he can beforehand from those who have already been there. He will then not only know what to expect, but he is likely to understand all the better what he sees when he gets there. This is even more relevant in the quest for knowledge of higher worlds, for one is seeking access to worlds that not only one has never seen, but that are utterly unlike anything one could see with physical eyes.

There is another and even more pressing reason. Such a study of the information about the higher worlds, already existing in what are called the “five basic books” of anthroposophy, is itself the first step to such knowledge. A reading of the first chapter of Occult Science, an Outline will do much to explain this. If the reader finds in such a preliminary study something to which he can with sound judgment say, Yes, he will be able to proceed on solid foundations with what this book has to offer. The reader will discover by such study the reality of something with which he has long been familiar as a figure of speech, but which he now recognizes as an inner faculty—his sense of truth. He will have learned something of the knowledge-potential of the inner nature of thought, and what can happen in thinking will take on a new depth of meaning for him. If he can combine this with a study of Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom, he will find his confidence in thinking enhanced, even in thinking about matters of which he has as yet no direct experience. This is important, because he will find as he reads this book that thinking itself is not only a super-sensible activity, but is the very vehicle by which he finds his way to experience of these worlds.

There is something else the reader will have to determine for himself before he takes up a quest such as this book describes—that is, whether he is both ready and able to embark upon it. While this might seem to call into question the statement already made that anyone can take this path, it does not really. The exercises outlined in this book are indeed such that anyone can practice them, but they are not easy. One must be aware of this. They are quite strict, and no one should embark on them without carefully weighing what that strictness involves.

We have already touched on the fact that the occult has a fascination for people. Many would like to have such knowledge, but it is of the utmost importance to understand why one wants to obtain this knowledge. The aspirant must be able to put that question to himself and to answer it with the utmost honesty and sincerity, for if anything of the nature of mere curiosity or personal advantage should lie at the root of that desire, harmless as that might be in itself, it will become an obstacle in the attainment of higher knowledge.

We touch here on the moral aspect of the acquisition of higher knowledge, a matter to which the reader will find Rudolf Steiner calls attention again and again throughout this book. It is not a matter, however, of Steiner laying down moral injunctions, but rather of the aspirant discovering the morality which is implicit in the attainment of knowledge. Here the strictest scientific integrity, demanding the exclusion of all personal gratification and desire, is essential. If the aspirant is not yet ready to accept that morality, then it would be better for him to continue studying the literature of spiritual science (which he should be doing in any case) until he is ready. Here self-knowledge precedes self-development, and if that knowledge is objective and thorough enough, it will be found to be essential to self-development. As Carl Unger, a pupil of Rudolf Steiner, once put it, “Every knowledge transforms the knower,” and the path to higher knowledge is primarily a transformation of the self.

A word or two on what was meant by being “able” to embark on this quest would not come amiss here, particularly regarding the “strictness” already mentioned.

Being “able” refers primarily to regularity in carrying out the exercises described by Steiner. Once having embarked on this path there should be no, but no, “letup.” Whether the reader has the ability to do that, especially if he is young, is something that needs careful reflection. “Able” here has nothing to do with superior intelligence; it is exclusively a matter of the will. This is why Steiner sets such a modest time limit on the duration of these exercises: a quarter of an hour, or even five minutes, is enough if used properly. But the exercises must be done every day. Regularity is everything; and if one considers all the eventualities that might upset that regularity, one might well reflect on whether one will be able to carry this through. There is nothing quite so discouraging as having to face having reneged on such work as this, even with the best reason in the world. It is like dropping from a great height a ball of string that one has just carefully wound, and having to face the prospect of winding it all up again.

The reader should also be aware of what will be happening to him if he decides to follow this path, and although Steiner makes this abundantly clear, it will not hurt to underline one thing. One is engaged in transforming the soul into an organ of perception, and one is doing this largely as the result of exercises based on thinking. We usually imagine perception and thinking to be two entirely different activities, but we cannot really keep them apart. One need only recall how, after a strenuous bout of thinking, when the concept for which we are searching at last appears, we invariably say, “Ah! Now I see!” to realize that perceiving (in this case, perceiving concepts) is closely interwoven with thinking. One does “see” the concept that has appeared in consciousness; and it is this seeing in thinking that the aspirant will be exercising in everything he does. “As color is to the eye,” says Steiner in Goethe the Scientist, “and sound to the ear, so are concepts and ideas to thinking: it [thinking] is an organ of perception.”

Finally, one must discover that the satisfaction in doing these exercises should be in the feeling they engender. There can be no setting a goal for oneself, such as, “I will do these exercises for a certain length of time, and then see what happens,” or of drawing an imaginary chart to plot one's progress, as business executives do to show whether their profits are going up or down. Paradoxical as it may seem, although one undertakes these exercises in order to achieve a certain result, that result should be the last thing with which one is concerned. For, again paradoxically, that result is not something one can acquire; it is something that is given when the higher powers deem that the time is ripe for enlightenment to be given. And that is something no man can foresee. It may take months, it may take years. The satisfaction, therefore, that one can legitimately hope to feel is only that which can be found in the work itself. It is “love for the action” that must be discovered. One must come to the point where one would rather omit anything else in the course of the day than miss the satisfaction which comes from this work. Then and then only will one become aware that something is beginning to happen in the soul, a genuine intercourse between oneself and higher worlds; and although one may still not be able to “see a thing,” that will not be important. One will know that such seeing will and must come, as come it only can, “in God's good time.”

There is just one more thing that should be said about this book and that should recommend it regardless of what the reader does about the book otherwise: that is, the way it reveals what I can only describe as the inner logic of knowledge. No one who reads this book with an open mind and the attention it deserves can lay it down without being convinced not only that such knowledge is possible, but that it is only really possible in the way the author describes. The reader may not want to advance to such knowledge himself—there may be reasons best known to him why he should not attempt it yet—but there can be no doubt that this knowledge is possible to anyone who has the determination to see it through. And to know just that from reading such a book is something unique. Furthermore, the material in this book is offered by a man who knows from personal experience what he is talking about, who “lays all his cards on the table” with regard to what is involved, and yet never once uses that authority to impose upon the freedom of the reader as to what he does about it.

There are two things with which our time has yet to come to grips: one is the extension of man's knowledge and human consciousness into regions of the mind hitherto declared forever inaccessible; and the other is the real nature of human freedom. In this book the author lays out a plan of approach for the one, and by the way he does so he acknowledges the indisputable existence of the other.

Alan Howard

The task which I should like to undertake in the following exposition is that of discussing the scientific character and value of a spiritual trend to which a widespread inclination would still deny the designation “scientific.” This spiritual trend bears—in allusion to various endeavors of its kind in the present period—the name theosophy. In the history of philosophy, this name has been applied to certain spiritual trends which have emerged again and again in the course of the cultural life of humanity, with which, however, what is to be presented here does not at all coincide, although it bears many reminders of them. For this reason we shall limit our consideration here to what can be described in the course of our exposition as a special condition of the mind, and we shall disregard opinions which may be held in reference to much of what is customarily called theosophy. Only by adhering to this point of view will it be possible to give precise expression to the manner in which one may view the relationship between the spiritual trend we have in mind and the types of conception characterizing contemporary science and philosophy.

Let it be admitted without reservation that, even regarding the very concept of knowledge, it is difficult to establish a relationship between what is customarily called theosophy and everything that seems to be firmly established at present as constituting the idea of “science” and “knowledge,” and which has brought and surely will continue to bring such great benefits to human culture. The last few centuries have led to the practice of recognizing as “scientific” only what can be tested readily by anyone at any time through observation, experiment, and the elaboration of these by the human intellect. Everything that possesses significance only within the subjective experiences of the human mind must be excluded from the category of what is scientifically established. Now, it will scarcely be denied that the philosophical concept of knowledge has for a long time adjusted itself to the scientific type of conception just described. This can best be recognized from the investigations which have been carried out in our time as to what can constitute a possible object of human knowledge, and at what point this knowledge has to admit its limits. It would be superfluous for me to support this statement by an outline of contemporary inquiries in the field of the theory of knowledge. I should like to emphasize only the objective aimed at in those inquiries. In connection with them, it is presupposed that the relationship of man to the external world affords a determinable concept of the nature of the process of cognition, and that this concept of knowledge provides a basis for characterizing what lies within the reach of cognition. However greatly the trends in theories of knowledge may diverge from one another, if the above characterization is taken in a sufficiently broad sense, there will be found within it that which characterizes a common element in the decisive philosophical trends.

Now, the concept of knowledge belonging to what is here called anthroposophy is such that it apparently contradicts the concept just described. It conceives knowledge to be something the character of which cannot be deduced directly from the observation of the nature of the human being and his relationship to the external world. On the basis of established facts of the life of the mind, anthroposophy believes itself justified in asserting that knowledge is not something finished, complete in itself, but something fluid, capable of evolution. It believes itself justified in pointing out that, beyond the horizon of the normally conscious life of the mind, there is another into which the human being can penetrate. And it is necessary to emphasize that the life of the mind here referred to is not to be understood as that which is at present customarily designated as the “subconscious.” This “subconscious” may be the object of scientific research; from the point of view of the usual methods in research, it can be made an object of inquiry, as are other facts of the life of nature and of the mind. But this has nothing to do with that condition of the mind to which we are referring, within which the human being is as completely conscious, possesses as complete logical watchfulness over himself, as within the limits of the ordinary consciousness. But this condition of the mind must first be created by means of certain exercises, certain experiences of the soul. It cannot be presupposed as a given fact in the nature of man. This condition of mind represents something which may be designated as a further development of the life of the human mind without the cessation, during the course of this further development, of self-possession and other evidences of the mind's conscious life.

I wish to characterize this condition of mind and then to show how what is acquired through it may be included under the scientific concepts of knowledge belonging to our age. My present task shall be, therefore, to describe the method employed within this spiritual trend on the basis of a possible development of the mind. This first part of my exposition may be called: A Spiritual Scientific Mode of Approach Based upon Potential Psychological Facts.

What is here described is to be regarded as experiences of the mind of which one may become aware if certain prerequisite conditions are first brought about in the mind. The epistemological value of these experiences shall be tested only after they have first been simply described.

What is to be undertaken may be designated as a “mental exercise.” The initial step consists in considering from a different point of view contents of the mind which are ordinarily evaluated to their worth as copies of an external item of reality. In the concepts and ideas which the human being forms he wishes to have at first what may be a copy, or at least a token, of something existing outside of the concepts or ideas. The spiritual researcher, in the sense here intended, seeks for mental contents which are similar to the concept and ideas of ordinary life or of scientific research; but he does not consider their cognitional value in relation to an objective entity, but lets them exist in his mind as operative forces. He plants them as spiritual seed, so to speak, in the soil of the mind's life, and awaits in complete serenity of spirit their effect upon this life of the mind. He can then observe that, with the repeated employment of such an exercise, the condition of the mind undergoes a change. It must be expressly emphasized, however, that what really counts is the repetition. For the fact in question is not that the content of the concepts in the ordinary sense brings something about in the mind after the manner of a process of cognition; on the contrary, we have to do with an actual process in the life of the mind itself. In this process, concepts do not play the role of cognitional elements but that of real forces; and their effect depends upon having the same forces lay hold in frequent repetition upon the mind's life. The effect achieved in the mind depends preeminently upon the requirement that the same force shall again and again seize upon the experience connected with the concept. For this reason the greatest results can be attained through meditations upon the same content which are repeated at definite intervals through relatively long periods of time. The duration of such a meditation is, in this connection, of little importance. It may be very brief, provided only that it is accompanied by absolute serenity of soul and the complete exclusion from the mind of all external sense impressions and all ordinary activity of the intellect. What is essential is the seclusion of the mind's life with the content indicated. This must be mentioned because it needs to be clearly understood that undertaking these exercises of the mind need not disturb anyone in his ordinary life. The time required is available, as a rule, to everyone. And, if the exercises are rightly carried out, the change which they bring about in the mind does not produce the slightest effect upon the constitution of consciousness necessary for the normal human life. (The fact that—because of what the human being actually is in his present status—undesirable excesses and peculiarities sometimes occur cannot alter in any way one's judgment of the essential nature of the practice.)

For the discipline of the mind which has been described, most concepts in human life are scarcely at all usable. All contents of the mind which relate in marked degree to objective elements outside of themselves have little effect if used for the exercises we have characterized. In far greater measure are mental pictures suitable which can be designated as emblems, as symbols.

Most fruitful of all are those which relate in a living way comprehensively to a manifold content. Let us take as an example, proven by experience to be good, what Goethe designated as his idea of the “archetypal plant.” It may be permissible to refer to the fact that, during a conversation with Schiller, he once drew with a few strokes a symbolic picture of this “archetypal plant.” Moreover, he said that one who makes this picture alive in his mind possesses in it something out of which it would be possible to devise, through modification in conformity with law, all possible forms capable of existence. Whatever one may think about the objective cognitional value of such a “symbolic archetypal plant,” if it is made to live in the mind in the manner indicated, if one awaits in serenity its effects upon the mind's life, there comes about something which can be called a changed constitution of mind.

The mental pictures which are said by spiritual scientists to be usable in this connection may at times seem decidedly strange. This feeling of strangeness can be eliminated if one reflects that such representations must not be considered for their value as truths in the ordinary sense, but should be viewed with respect to the manner in which they are effective as real forces in the mind's life. The spiritual scientist does not attribute value to the significance of the pictures which are used for the mental exercises, but to what is experienced in the mind under their influence.

Here we can give, naturally, only a few examples of effective symbolic representations. Let one conceive the being of man in a mental image in such a way that the lower human nature, related to the animal organization, shall appear in its relation to man as a spiritual being, through the symbolic union of an animal shape and the most highly idealized human form superimposed upon this—somewhat, let us say, like a centaur. The more pictorially alive the symbol appears, the more saturated with content, the better it is. Under the conditions described, this symbol acts in such a way on the mind that, after the passage of a certain time—of course, somewhat long—the inner life processes are felt to be strengthened in themselves, mobile, reciprocally illuminating one another. An old symbol which may be used with good result is the so-called staff of Mercury—that is, the mental image of a straight line around which a spiral curves. Of course, one must picture this figure as emblematic of a force-system—in such a way, let us say, that along the straight line there runs one force system, to which there corresponds another of lower velocity passing through the spiral. (Concretely expressed, one may conceive in connection with this figure the growth of the stem of a plant and the corresponding sprouting of leaves along its length. Or one may take it as an image of an electro-magnet. Still further, there can emerge in this way a picture of the development of a human being, the enhancing capacities being symbolized by the straight line, the manifold impressions corresponding with the course of the spiral.)

Mathematical forms may become especially significant, to the extent that symbols of cosmic processes can be seen in them. A good example is the so-called “Cassini curve,” with its three figures—the form resembling an ellipse, the lemniscate, and that which consists of two corresponding branches. In such a case the important thing is to experience the mental image in such a way that certain appropriate impressions in the mind shall accompany the transition of one curve form into the other in accordance with mathematical principles.

Other exercises may then be added to these. They consist also in symbols, but such as correspond with representations which may be expressed in words. Let one think, through the symbol of light, of the wisdom which may be pictured as living and weaving in the orderly processes of the cosmic phenomena. Wisdom which expresses itself in sacrificial love may be thought of as symbolized by warmth which comes about in the presence of light. One may think of sentences—which, therefore, have only a symbolic character—fashioned out of such concepts. The mind can be absorbed in meditating upon such sentences. The result depends essentially upon the degree of serenity and seclusion of soul within the symbol to which one attains in the meditation. If success is achieved, it consists in the fact that the soul feels as if lifted out of the corporeal organization. It experiences something like a change in its sense of existence. If we agree that, in normal life, the feeling of the human being is such that his conscious life, proceeding from a unity, takes on a specific character in harmony with the representations which are derived from the percepts brought by the individual senses, then the result of the exercises is that the mind feels itself permeated by an experience of itself not so sharply differentiated in transition from one part of the experience to another as, for example, color and tone representations are differentiated within the horizon of the ordinary consciousness. The mind has the experience that it can withdraw into a region of inner being which it owes to the success of the exercises and which was something empty, something which could not be perceived, before the exercises were undertaken.

Before such an inner experience is reached, there occur many transitional stages in the condition of the mind. One of these manifests itself in an attentive observation—to be acquired through the exercise—of the moment of awaking out of sleep. It is possible then to feel clearly how, out of something not hitherto known to one, forces lay hold systematically upon the structure of the bodily organization. One feels, as if in a remembered concept, an after-effect of influences from this something, which have been at work upon the corporeal organization during sleep. And if the person has acquired, in addition, the capacity to experience within his corporeal organization the something here described, he will perceive clearly the difference between the relationship of this something to the body in the waking and in the sleeping state. He cannot then do otherwise than to say that during the waking state this something is inside the body and during the sleeping state it is outside. One must not, however, associate ordinary spatial conception with this “inside” and “outside,” but must use these terms only to designate the specific experiences of a mind which has carried out the exercises described.

These exercises are of an intimate soul-character. They take for each person an individual form. When the beginning is once made, the individual element results from a particular use of the soul to be brought about in the course of the exercises. But what follows with utter necessity is the positive consciousness of living within a reality independent of the external corporeal organization and super-sensible in character. For the sake of simplicity, let us call such a person seeking for the described soul experiences a “spiritual researcher” {Geistesforscher). For such a spiritual researcher, there exists the definite consciousness—kept under complete self-possession—that, behind the bodily organization perceptible to the senses, there is a super-sensible organization, and that it is possible to experience oneself within this as the normal consciousness experiences itself within the physical bodily organization. (The exercises referred to can be indicated here only in principle. A detailed presentation may be found in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.)

Through appropriate continuation of the exercises, the “something” we have described passes over into a sort of spiritually organized condition. The consciousness becomes clearly aware that it is in relationship with a super-sensible world in a cognitional way, in a manner similar to that in which it is related through the senses to the sense world. It is quite natural that serious doubt at once arises, regarding the assertion of such a cognitional relationship of the super-sensible part of the being of man to the surrounding world. There may be an inclination to relegate everything which is thus experienced to the realm of illusion, hallucination, autosuggestion, and the like. A theoretical refutation of such doubt is, from the very nature of things, impossible. For the question here cannot be that of a theoretical exposition regarding the existence of a super-sensible world, but only that of possible experiences and observations which are presented to the consciousness in precisely the same way in which observations are mediated through the external sense organs. For the corresponding super-sensible world, therefore, no other sort of recognition can be demanded than that which the human being offers to the world of colors, tones, etc. Yet consideration must be given to the fact that, when the exercises are carried out in the right way—and, most important, with never relaxed self-possession—the spiritual researcher can discern through immediate experience the difference between the imagined super-sensible and that which is actually experienced; just as certainly as in the sense world once can discern the difference between imagining the feel of a piece of hot iron and actually touching it. Precisely concerning the differences among hallucination, illusion, and super-sensible reality, the spiritual researcher acquires through his exercises a practice more and more unerring. But it is also natural that the prudent spiritual researcher must be extremely critical regarding individual super-sensible observations made by him. He will never speak otherwise about positive findings of super-sensible research than with the reservation that one thing or another has been observed and that the critical caution practiced in connection with this justifies the assumption that anyone will make the same observations who, by means of the appropriate exercises, can establish a relationship with the super-sensible world. Differences among the pronouncements of individual spiritual researchers cannot really be viewed in any other light than the different pronouncements of various travelers who have visited the same region and who describe it.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, that world which, in the manner described, appears above the horizon of consciousness has been called—in accordance with the practice of those who have been occupied as spiritual researchers in the same field—“the imaginative world.” But one must dissociate from this expression, used in a purely technical sense, anything suggesting a world created by mere “fancy.” Imaginative is intended merely to suggest the qualitative character of the content of the mind. This mental content resembles in its form the “imaginations” of ordinary consciousness, except that an imagination in the physical world is not directly related to something real, whereas the imaginations of the spiritual researcher are just as unmistakably to be ascribed to a supersensibly real entity as the mental picture of a color in the sense world, for instance, is ascribed to an objectively real entity.

But the “imaginative world” and the knowledge of it mark only the first step for the spiritual researcher, and very little more is to be learned through it about the super-sensible world than its external side. A further step is required. This consists in a further deepening of the life of the soul than that which has been considered in connection with the first step. Through intense concentration upon the soul life, brought about by the exercises, the spiritual researcher must render himself capable of completely eliminating the content of the symbols from his consciousness. What he then still has to hold firmly within his consciousness is only the process to which his inner life was subjected while he was absorbed in the symbols. The content of the symbols pictured must be cast out in a sort of real abstraction and only the form of the experience in connection with the symbols must remain in the consciousness. The unreal symbolic character of the forming of mental images—which was significant only for a transitional stage of the soul's development—is thereby eliminated, and the consciousness uses as the object of its meditation the inner weaving of the mind's content. What can be described of such a process actually compares with the real experience of the mind as a feeble shadow compares with the object which casts the shadow. What appears simple in the description derives its very significant effect from the psychic energy which is exerted.

The living and moving within the content of the soul, thus rendered possible, can be called a real beholding of oneself. The inner being of man thus learns to know itself not merely through reflecting about itself as the bearer of the sense impressions and the elaborator of these sense impressions through thinking; on the contrary, it learns to know itself as it is, without relationship to a content coming from the senses; it experiences itself in itself, as super-sensible reality. This experience is not like that of the ego when in ordinary self-observation, attention is withdrawn from the things cognized in the environment and is directed back to the cognizing self. In this case, the content of consciousness shrinks more and more down to the point of the “ego.” Such is not the case in the real beholding of the self by the spiritual researcher. In this, the soul content becomes continuously richer in the course of the exercises. It consists in one's living within law-conforming interrelationships; and the self does not feel, as in the case of the laws of nature, which are abstracted from the phenomena of the external world, that it is outside the web of laws; but, on the contrary, it is aware of itself as within this web; it experiences itself as one with these laws.

The danger which may come about at this stage of the exercises lies in the fact that the person concerned may believe too early—because of deficiency in true self-possession—that he has arrived at the right result, and may then feel the mere after-effects of the symbolic inner pictures to be an inner life. Such an inner life is obviously valueless, and must not be mistaken for the inner life which appears at the right moment, making itself known to true circumspection through the fact that, although it manifests complete reality, yet it resembles no reality hitherto known.

To an inner life thus attained, there is now the possibility of a super-sensible knowledge characterized by a higher degree of certitude than that of mere imaginative cognition. At this point in the soul's development, the following manifestation occurs. The inner experience gradually becomes filled with a content which enters the mind from without in a manner similar to that in which the content of sense perception enters through the senses from the outer world. Only, the filling of the mind with the super-sensible content consists in an actual living within this content. If one wishes to employ a comparison with a fact taken from ordinary life, it may be said that the entering of the ego into union with a spiritual content is now experienced as one experiences the entering of the ego into union with a mental picture retained in memory. Yet there is the distinction that the content of that with which one enters into union cannot be compared

in any respect with something previously experienced and that it cannot be related to something past but only to something present. Knowledge of this character may well be called knowledge “through inspiration,” provided nothing except what has been described is associated in thought with this term. I have used the expression thus as a technical term in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

In connection with this “knowledge through inspiration,” a new experience now appears. That is, the manner in which one becomes aware of the content of the mind is entirely subjective. At first, this content does not manifest itself as objective. One knows it as something experienced; but one does not feel that one confronts it. This comes about only after one has through soul-energy condensed it, in a sense, within itself. Only thus does it become something which can be looked at objectively. But, in this process of the psyche, one becomes aware that, between the physical bodily organization and that something which has been separated from this by the exercises, there is still another entity. If one desires names for these things, one may employ those which have become customary in so-called theosophy—provided one does not connect with these names all sorts of fantastic associations, but designates by them solely what has been described. That “something” in which the self lives as in an entity free from the bodily organization is called the astral body; and that which is discovered between this astral body and the physical organism is called the etheric body. (One is, of course, not to connect this in thought with the “ether” of modern physics.)

Now, it is from the etheric body that the forces come, through which the self is enabled to make an objective perception of the subjective content of inspired knowledge. By what right, it may be asked with good reason, does the spiritual researcher come to the standpoint of ascribing this perception to a super-sensible world instead of considering it a mere creation of his own self? He would have no right to do this if the etheric body, which he experiences in connection with his psychic process, did not in its inner conformity to law compel him to do so with objective necessity. But such is the case, for the etheric body is experienced as a confluence of the all-encompassing complex of laws of the macrocosm. The important point is not how much of this complex of laws becomes the actual content of the spiritual researcher's consciousness. The peculiar fact is that direct cognition sees clearly that the etheric body is nothing else than a compacted image reflecting in itself the cosmic web of laws. Knowledge of the etheric body by the spiritual researcher does not at first extend to showing what content from the sum total of the universal cosmic web of laws is reflected by this formation, but to showing what this content is.

Other justifiable doubts which the ordinary consciousness must raise against spiritual research, together with much besides, are the following. One may take note of the findings of this research (as they appear in contemporary literature) and may say: “Actually, what you there describe as the content of super-sensible knowledge proves upon closer scrutiny to be nothing more, after all, than combinations of ordinary conceptions taken from the sense world.” And, in fact, this is what is said. (Likewise, the descriptions of the higher worlds which I myself felt justified in giving in the volumes, Theosophy and Occult Science,. an Outline, are found to be, so it seems, nothing but combinations of conceptions taken from the sense world—as, for instance, when the evolution of the earth through combinations of entities of warmth, light, etc., is described.)

Against this view, however, the following must be said. When the spiritual researcher wishes to give expression to his experiences, he is compelled to employ the means available to sense-conceptions for expressing what is experienced in a super-sensible sphere. His experience is not to be conceived, then, as if it were like his means of expression, but with the realization that he uses this means only like the words of a language which he requires. One must seek for the content of his experience, not in the means of expression—that is, not in the illustrative representations—but in the manner in which he uses these instruments of expression. The difference between his presentation and a fantastic combining of sensible representations lies in the fact that fantastic combining arises out of a subjective arbitrariness, whereas the presentation of the spiritual researcher rests upon a conscious familiarity with the super-sensible complex of laws, acquired through practice. Here, however, the reason is also to be found why the presentations of the spiritual researcher may so easily be misunderstood. That is, the manner in which he speaks is more important than what he says. In the how is reflected his super-sensible experience. If the objection is raised that, in this case, what the spiritual researcher says has no direct relationship with the ordinary world, it must be emphasized in reply that the manner of his presentation does, in fact, meet the practical requirements for an explanation of the sense world drawn from a super-sensible sphere, and that the understanding of the world process perceptible to the senses is aided by real attention to the findings of the spiritual researcher.

Another objection may be raised. It may be asked what the assertions of the spiritual researcher have to do with the content of ordinary consciousness, since this consciousness, it may be said, cannot subject them to testing. Precisely this latter statement is, in principle, untrue. For research in the super-sensible world, for discovering its facts, that condition of mind is necessary which can be acquired only by means of the exercises described. But this does not apply to the testing. For this purpose, when the spiritual researcher has communicated his findings, ordinary unprejudiced logic is sufficient. This will always be able to determine in principle that, if what the spiritual researcher says is true, the course of the world and of life as they proceed before the senses becomes understandable. The opinion which may be formed at first concerning the experiences of the spiritual researcher is not the important point. These may be viewed as hypotheses, regulative principles (in the sense of Kantian philosophy). But if they are simply applied to the sense world, it will be seen that the sense world confirms in the course of its events everything which is asserted by the spiritual researcher. (Naturally, this is valid only in principle; it is obvious that, in details, the assertions of so-called spiritual researchers may contain the gravest errors.)

Another experience of the spiritual researcher can come about only provided the exercises are carried still further. This continuation must consist in the fact that the spiritual researcher, after having attained to beholding the self, shall be able by energetic power of will to suppress this experience. He must be able to free the mind from everything that has been achieved through the continued after-effects of his exercises resting upon the outer sense world. The symbol-images are combined out of sense-images. The living and moving of the self within itself in connection with achieved inspired knowledge is, to be sure, free from the content of the symbols, yet it is a result of the exercises which have been carried out under their influence. Even though the inspired knowledge thus brings about a direct relationship of the self to the super-sensible world, the clear beholding of the relationship can be carried still further. This results from the energetic suppression of the self-view which has been attained. After this suppression, the self may, as one possibility, be confronted by a void. In this case the exercises must be continued. As a second possibility, the self may find that it is more immediately in the presence of the super-sensible world in its real being than it had been in connection with inspired knowledge. In the latter experience, there appears only the relationship of a super-sensible world to the self; in the case of the kind of knowledge we are now describing the self is completely eliminated. If one wishes an expression adapted to ordinary consciousness for this condition of mind, it may be said that consciousness now experiences itself as the stage upon which a super-sensible content, consisting of real being, is not merely perceived but perceives itself. (In the volume, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have called this kind of knowledge “intuitive knowledge,” but in connection with this expression the ordinary term intuition must be disregarded—which is used to designate every direct experience of a content of consciousness through feeling.)

Through intuitive knowledge, the whole relationship in which the human being as “soul” finds himself with respect to his bodily organization is altered for the direct observation of the inner being of the soul. Before the faculty of spiritual vision, the etheric body appears, in a sense, as a super-sensible organism differentiated within itself. And one recognizes its differentiated members as adapted in a definite way to the members of the physical bodily organization. The etheric body is experienced as the primary entity and the physical body as its copy, as something secondary. The horizon of consciousness appears to be determined through the law-conforming activity of the etheric body. The coordination of the phenomena within this horizon results from the activity of the differentiated members of the etheric body striving towards a unity. The etheric body rests upon an all-embracing cosmic web of laws; basic in the unification of its action is the tendency to relate itself to something as a center. And the image of this uniting tendency is the physical body. Thus the latter proves to be an expression of the World-Ego, as the etheric body is an expression of the macrocosmic web of laws.

What is here set forth becomes clearer if we refer to a special fact of the inner life of the soul. This shall be done with reference to memory. As a result of the freeing of the self from the bodily organization, the spiritual researcher experiences the act of recollecting differently from one with ordinary consciousness. For him, recollecting, which is otherwise a more-or-less undifferentiated process, is separated into partial factors. At first, he senses the attraction toward an experience which is to be remembered, like a drawing of the attention in a certain direction. The experience is thus really analogous to the spatial directing of one's look toward a distant object, which one has first seen, then turns away from, and then turns toward again. The essential aspect of this is that the experience pressing toward remembrance is sensed as something which has stopped far away within the temporal horizon, and which does not merely have to be drawn up from the depths below in the soul's life. This turning in the direction of the experience pressing toward remembrance is at first a merely subjective process. When the remembrance now actually occurs, the spiritual researcher feels that it is the resistance of the physical body which works like a reflecting surface and raises the experience into the objective world of representations. Thus the spiritual researcher feels, in connection with the process of remembering, an occurrence which (subjectively perceptible) takes place within the etheric body and which becomes his remembrance through its reflection by the physical body. The first factor in recollecting would give merely disconnected experiences of the self. Through the fact that every remembrance is reflected by being impressed upon the life of the physical body, it becomes a part of the ego-experiences.

From all that has been said it is clear that the spiritual researcher comes to the point in his inner experience where he recognizes that the human being perceptible to the senses is the manifestation of a human being who is super-sensible. He seeks for a consciousness of this super-sensible human being, not by way of inference and speculation based upon the world that is directly given, but, on the contrary, by so transforming his own condition of mind that this ascends from the perceiving of the sense-perceptible to real participation in the super-sensible. He arrives in this way at the recognition of a content of soul which proves to be richer, more filled with substance, than that of ordinary consciousness. What this road then leads to further can only be suggested here, of course, since a thorough exposition would require a comprehensive treatise. The inner being of the soul becomes for the spiritual researcher the producer, the builder, of that which constitutes the single human life in the physical world. And this producer manifests in itself that it has—interwoven into its life as realities—the forces, not only of the one life, but of many lives. That which may be considered as evidence of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives, becomes a matter of actual observation. For what one learns of the inner core of the human life reveals, one might say, the telescoping together of interrelated human personalities. And these personalities can be sensed only in the relationship of the preceding and the succeeding. For one which follows is always manifested as the result of another. There is, moreover, in the relationship of one personality to another no element of continuity; rather, there is such a relationship as manifests itself in successive earthly lives separated by intervening periods of purely spiritual existence. To the observation of the soul's inner being, the periods during which the core of the human being was embodied in a physical corporeal organization are differentiated from those of the super-sensible existence through the fact that, in the former, the experience of the content of the mind appears as if projected against the background of the physical life; while, in the latter, it appears as merged in a super-sensible element which extends into the indefinite. It has not been the intention to present here anything more concerning so-called reincarnation than a sort of view of a perspective which is opened by the preceding reflections.

Anyone who admits the possibility that the human self may be able to become familiar with the core of being which is supersensibly visible will also no longer consider it unreasonable to suppose that, after further insight into this core of being, its content is revealed as differentiated, and that this differentiation provides the spiritual view of a succession of forms of existence extending back into the past. The fact that these forms of existence may bear their own time-indications may be seen to be intelligible through the analogy with ordinary memory. An experience appearing in memory bears in its content also its own time-indication. But the real “resurvey in memory” of past forms of existence, supported by rigid self-supervision, is still very remote, of course, from the training of the spiritual researcher which has thus far been described, and great difficulties for the inner soul life tower up on the path before this can be attained in an incontestable form. Nevertheless, this lies on the direct continuation of the path to knowledge which has been described. It has been my desire at first to register here, so to speak, facts of experience in the inner soul-observation. It is for this reason that I have described reincarnation only as one such fact, but this fact can be established also on a theoretical basis. This I have done in the chapter entitled “Karma and Reincarnation” in the book, Theosophy. I undertook there to show that certain findings of modern natural science, if thought out to their conclusion, lead to the assumption of the ideas of reincarnation of the human being.

Regarding the total nature of the human being, we must conclude from what has been said that his essential nature becomes understandable when viewed as the result of the interaction of the four members: 1) the physical bodily organization; 2) the etheric body; 3) the astral body; 4) the ego (the “I”), which develops in the last-named member and comes to manifestation through the relationship between the central core of man's being and the physical organization. It is not possible to deal with the further articulation of these four life-manifestations of the total human being within the limits of one lecture. Here the intention has been to show only the basis of spiritual research. Further details I have sought to provide: 1) as to the method, in the volume, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment; and, 2) as to the system, in Theosophy and Occult Science, an Outline.

The Experiences of the Spiritual Researcher and the Theory of Knowledge

The exposition which has been presented will render it clear that anthroposophy, rightly understood, rests upon the foundation of a way of developing the human soul which is to be rigidly systematized in its character, and that it would be erroneous to suppose that there exists in the condition of mind of the spiritual researcher anything of the nature of what is ordinarily called at present enthusiasm, ecstasy, rapture, vision, and the like. Misunderstandings arise which may be presented in opposition to anthroposophy precisely through the confusion between the condition of mind here characterized and these other conditions. First, the belief is created through this confusion that there exists in the mind of the spiritual researcher a state of rapture, of being transported beyond self-possession in one's consciousness, a sort of striving after immediate instinctive vision. But the truth is just the opposite. The condition of mind of the spiritual researcher is even further removed than is ordinary consciousness from what is ordinarily called ecstasy, vision, from every sort of ordinary seer-ship. Even such states of mind as those to which Shaftesbury refers are nebulous inner worlds in comparison with what is striven for by means of the exercises of the genuine spiritual researcher. Shaftesbury finds that by means of the “cold intellect,” without the rapture of the feeling nature, no path can be discovered leading to deeper forms of knowledge. True spiritual research carries with it the whole inner mental apparatus of logic and self-conscious circumspection when it seeks to transfer consciousness from the sensible to the super-sensible sphere. It cannot be accused, therefore, of disregarding the rational element of knowledge. It can, however, elaborate its contents in concepts through thinking after perception, for the reason that, in passing out of the sense world, it always carries with it the rational element and always retains it, like a skeleton of the super-sensible experience, as an integrating factor of all super-sensible perception.

Naturally, it is impossible here to show the relationship of spiritual research to the various contemporary trends in theories of knowledge. The effort will be made by means of a few rather sketchy observations, therefore, to point out that particular conception of the theory of knowledge and its relationship to spiritual research which must experience the greatest difficulties in relation to spiritual research. It is, perhaps, not immodest to call attention to the fact that a complete basis for discrimination between philosophy and anthroposophy can be obtained from my two publications, Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom.

To the epistemology of our time it has become increasingly axiomatic to maintain that there are given in the content of our consciousness only pictures, or even only “tokens” (Helmholtz) of the transcendent-real. It will be needless to explain here how critical philosophy and physiology (“specific sense-energies,” views of Johannes Mueller and his adherents) have worked together to make of such a conception an apparently irrefutable idea. Naive Realism, which views the phenomena within the horizon of consciousness as something more than subjective representations of something objective, was considered in the philosophical development of the nineteenth century to have been invalidated for all time. But from that which lies at the foundation of this conception, there follows almost as a matter of course the rejection of the anthroposophical point of view. From the critical point of view, the anthroposophical viewpoint can be considered only as an impossible leap over the limits of knowledge inherent in the nature of our consciousness. If we may reduce to a simple formula an immeasurably great and brilliant expression of the critical theory of knowledge, it may be said that the critical philosopher sees in the facts within the horizon of consciousness representations, pictures, or tokens, and holds that a possible relationship to a transcendental external can be found only within the thinking consciousness. He holds that consciousness, of course, cannot leap beyond itself, cannot get outside itself, in order to plunge into a transcendental entity. Such a conception, in fact, has within it something that seems self-evident, and yet it rests upon a presupposition which one need only see into in order to refute it. It seems almost paradoxical when one brings against the subjective idealism expressed in the conception just cited the charge of a veiled materialism. And yet one cannot do otherwise. Permit me to render clear by a comparison what can be said here. Let a name be impressed in wax with a seal. The name, with everything pertaining to it, has been transferred by the seal into the wax. What cannot pass across from the seal into the wax is the metal of the seal. For the wax, substitute the soul life of the human being and for the seal substitute the transcendental. It then becomes obvious at once that one cannot declare it impossible for the transcendental to pass over into the impression unless one conceives the objective content of the transcendental as not spiritual, since this passing over of a spiritual content could be conceived in analogy with the complete reception of the name into the wax. To serve the requirement of Critical Idealism, the assumption would have to be made that the content of the transcendental is to be conceived in analogy with the metal of the seal. But this cannot be done otherwise than by making the veiled materialistic assumption that the transcendental must be received into the impression in the form of a materially conceived flowing-across. In the event that the transcendental is spiritual, it is entirely possible that the impression could take this up.

A further displacement in the simple facts of consciousness is caused by Critical Idealism through the fact that it leaves out of account the question of the factual relationship existing between the cognitional content and the ego. If one assumes a priori that the ego, together with the content of laws of the world reduced to the form of ideas and concepts, is outside the transcendental, it will be simply self-evident that this ego cannot leap beyond itself—that is, that it must always remain outside the transcendental. But this presupposition cannot be sustained in the face of an unbiased observation of the facts of consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, we shall here refer to the content of the cosmic web of law in so far as this can be expressed in mathematical concepts and formulae. The inner conformity to law in the relationships of mathematical forms is acquired within consciousness and is then applied to empirical factual situations. Now, no distinction can be discovered between what exists in consciousness as a mathematical concept when, on the one hand, this consciousness relates its own content to an empirical factual situation, and when, on the other, it visualizes this mathematical concept within itself in pure abstract mathematical thinking. But this signifies nothing else than that the ego, with its mathematical representation, is not outside the transcendental mathematical law-conformity of things but inside this. Therefore, one will arrive at a better conception of the ego from the viewpoint of the theory of knowledge, not by conceiving the ego as inside the bodily organization and receiving impressions “from without,” but by conceiving the ego as being itself within the law-conformity of things, and viewing the bodily organization as only a sort of mirror which reflects back to the ego through the organic bodily activity the living and moving of the ego outside the body in the transcendental. If, as regards mathematical thinking, one has familiarized oneself with the thought that the ego is not in the body but outside it, and that the bodily activity represents only the living mirror, from which the life of the ego in the transcendental is reflected, one can then find this thought epistemologically comprehensible concerning everything which appears within the horizon of consciousness.

One could then no longer say that the ego would have to leap beyond itself if it desired to enter the transcendental; but one would have to see that the ordinary empirical content of consciousness is related to that which is truly experienced in the inner life of man's core of being as the mirrored image is related to the real being of the person who is viewing himself in the mirror.

Through such a manner of conceiving in relation to the theory of knowledge, conflict could be decisively eliminated between natural science, with its inclination toward materialism, and a spiritual research, which presupposes the spiritual. For a right of way should be established for natural scientific research, in that it could investigate the laws of the bodily organization uninfluenced by interference from a spiritual manner of thinking. If one wishes to know according to what laws the reflected image comes into existence, one must give attention to the laws of the mirror. This determines how the beholder is reflected; it occurs in different ways depending on whether one has a plane, concave, or convex mirror. But the being of the person who is reflected is outside the mirror. One could thus see in the laws to be discovered through natural scientific research the reasons for the form of the empirical consciousness, and with these laws nothing should be mixed of what spiritual science has to say about the inner life of man's core of being. Within natural scientific research one will always rightly oppose the interference of purely spiritual points of view. It is natural that, in the area of this research, there is more sympathy with explanations which are given in a mechanistic way than with spiritual laws. A conception such as the following must be congenial to one who is at home in clear natural scientific conceptions: “The fact of consciousness brought about by the stimulation of brain cells does not belong in a class essentially different from that of gravity connected with matter” (Moriz Benedikt).

In any case, such an explanation gives with exact methodology that which is conceivable for natural science. It is scientifically tenable, whereas the hypotheses of a direct control of the organic processes by psychic influences are scientifically untenable. But the idea previously given, fundamental from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, can see in the whole range of what can be established by natural science only arrangements which serve to reflect the real core of man's being. This core of being, however, is not to be located in the interior of the physical organization, but in the transcendental. Spiritual research would then be conceived as the way by which one attains knowledge of the real nature of that which is reflected. Obviously, the common basis of the laws of the physical organism and those of the super-sensible would lie behind the antithesis, being and mirror. This, however, is certainly no disadvantage for the practice of the scientific method of approach from both directions. With the maintenance of the antithesis described, this method would, so to speak, flow in two currents, each reciprocally illuminating and clarifying the other. For it must be maintained that, in the physical organization, we are not dealing with a reflecting apparatus, in the absolute sense, independent of the super-sensible. The reflecting apparatus must, after all, be considered as the product of the super-sensible being who is mirrored in it. The relative reciprocal independence of the one and the other method of approach mentioned above must be supplemented by a third method coming to meet them, which enters into the depths of the problem and which is capable of beholding the synthesis of the sensible and the super-sensible. The confluence of the two currents may be conceived as given through a possible further development of the life of the mind up to the intuitive cognition already described. Only within this cognition is that confluence superseded.

It may thus be asserted that epistemologically unbiased considerations open the way for rightly understood anthroposophy. For these lead to the conclusion that it is a theoretically understandable possibility that the core of man's being may have an existence free of the physical organization, and that the opinion of the ordinary consciousness—that the ego is to be considered a being absolutely within the body—is to be adjudged an inevitable illusion of the immediate life of the mind. The ego—with the whole of man's core of being—can be viewed as an entity which experiences its relationship to the objective world within that world itself, and receives its experiences as reflections in the form of impressions from the bodily organization. The separation of man's core of being from the bodily organization must, naturally, not be conceived spatially, but must be viewed as a relatively dynamic state of release. An apparent contradiction is then also resolved which might be discovered between what is here said and what has previously been said regarding the nature of sleep. In the waking state the human core of being is so fitted into the physical organization that it is reflected in this through the dynamic relationship to it; in the state of sleep the reflecting ceases. Since the ordinary consciousness, in the sense of the epistemological considerations here presented, is rendered possible only through the reflection (through the reflected representations), it ceases, therefore, during the state of sleep. The condition of mind of the spiritual researcher can be understood as one in which the illusion of the ordinary consciousness is overcome, and which gains a starting point in the life of soul from which it actually experiences the human core of being in free release from the bodily organization. All else which is then achieved through exercises is only a deeper delving into the transcendental, in which the ego of ordinary consciousness really exists although it is not aware of itself as within the transcendental.

Spiritual research is thus proved to be epistemologically conceivable. That it is conceivable will be admitted, naturally, only by one who can accept the view that the so-called critical theory of knowledge will be able to maintain its dogma of the impossibility of leaping over consciousness only so long as it fails to see through the illusion that the human core of being is enclosed within the bodily organization and receives impressions through the senses. I am aware that I have given only indications in outline in my epistemological exposition. Yet it may be possible to recognize from these indications that they are not isolated notions but grow out of a developed fundamental epistemological conception.

A simple tale is found among the Mongolians in Asia, which has been transplanted as far as the eastern part of Europe, where Mongolian sagas and stories live on. Even without as yet knowing the wisdom inherent in it, is there not something profoundly gripping in this Mongolian saga which tells us:

There is a mother who has a single eye at the top of her head. This mother hurries inconsolably through the world, for she has lost her only child. She hurries through the world, lifting every stone and raising it to her eye, only to throw it to the ground again in disappointment, so that it breaks into a thousand pieces, for she has to convince herself that it is not her lost child. She does the same with every object, each time believing she will find her lostchild. Seizing the object, she holds it to her eye and, her hopes dashed, throws it from her. Thus, she hastens on ceaselessly through the world, repeating this procedure over and over again.

This story is nothing other than the memory of the tribe driven farthest to the east, which still knew of ancient Atlantis, of the primeval state of humanity in which human beings stood closer to the spiritual worlds and were themselves still able to look into these worlds.

You all certainly know that with a child after birth the bones up here on the head only gradually become closed. A different relation to the external world existed among human beings in primeval times. At that time, had one been able to see in the same way as today, one would have seen an organ, like a shining body, protruding at that place on the head, its rays extending to the boundaries of the human form and disappearing into the surroundings. One would have observed something like a wondrous lantern that is only quite inappropriately called an eye, since this organ was not an eye. It was an organ of feeling and perception of humanity in those very ancient, primeval times, with which human beings were able to look out freely and unhindered into what we call the astral world. With this, they could see not only bodies, but also souls, and what actually lived in the souls around them.

This organ has shrunk to become the so-called pineal gland, now covered over by the roof of the head. However, human beings bear this ancient organ, with which they were able to experience the spiritual worlds around them, as an heirloom today within the soul. It is the yearning for these worlds, the door to which has closed, the door of one's own head. The yearning for this world has remained, though not the possibility of looking into it. This longing is expressed in the different religions, in what lives in human souls. If human beings formerly saw warm, feeling-imbued beings in the spiritual regions surrounding them, with their eyes they now see physical forms around them with defined contours.

Is this not indeed a compelling story, in which this woman, the mother of humanity, searches the world, seeking for what will allay her longing, not finding it in all the external objects, because she no longer sees what she was once able to see when the eye at the top of the head still functioned? This is no longer to be found in all the external objects granted humanity to see today by means of the senses. In this way, the world-spirit speaks to us profoundly through sagas and myths. Only in contemplating them from the standpoint of true spiritual science do we come to understand their deep meaning.

What human beings expressed in such grandiose truths so compellingly in ancient sagas and fairy tales - as in the Mongolian fairy tale of the woman with the single eye - will come to expression in a different form in a future humanity. The power of spiritual seeing will come alive again in human beings. That power of spiritual seeing which is an attribute of the head-eye will no longer leave them feeling dissatisfied in looking at physical objects in our surrounding world, as with the woman in the legend who throws away everything in her vicinity. This power will begin to permeate the current nature of human beings, and they will come to see not only the external, physical aspect of things, but what is expressed of a spiritual nature in external objects. What has become merely material will then be spiritual for them. Their now hardened physical bodies will be spiritualized once again. That woman of the Mongolian legend will live again and look out into the world. And whereas she now throws away things that show only their sense-perceptible side, not finding in them what she is looking for, human beings of the future will again see the spirit in matter and find what belongs to them. They can then take hold of it and press it lovingly to their hearts. They will find in other entities the spirituality of the world, which they can clasp with affection.

Human evolution will evolve as a gradual ascent into the cosmos. This will have to occur by degrees, it cannot be caught in a flash. Were human beings not to want to participate in this with patience, then the power of the eye situated on the head of the ancients would not stream through their entire being, through all their organs, as an aura of love. This power would exhaust itself, and human beings would have to separate themselves off in love-lessness from what is outside them and wither away. Human beings are called upon, however, to permeate everything on their planet with love, to take the planet with them and to redeem it. The redemption of our inner self cannot take place without the redemption of what is outside us. Human beings have to redeem the planet along with themselves. Redemption can only occur if human beings pour their forces out into the cosmos. The human being has not only to become one who is redeemed, but a redeemer.

A number of things make it seem precarious to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation. One of them is the difficulty of the subject itself, since the sources of a genuine and true fairy tale mood have in fact to be sought at deep levels of the human soul. The methods of spiritual research often described by me must follow convoluted paths before these sources can be discovered. Genuine fairy tales originate from sources lying at greater depths of the human soul than is generally supposed, speaking to us magically out of every epoch of humanity's development.

A second difficulty is that, in regard to what is magical in fairy tales, one has to a considerable extent the feeling that the original, elementary impression, indeed the essential nature of the fairy tale itself is destroyed through intellectual observations and a conceptual penetration of the fairy tale. If one has the justified conviction in regard to explanations and commentaries that they destroy the immediate living impression the fairy tale ought to make in simply letting it work on one, then one would far rather not accept explanations in place of their subtle and enchanting qualities. These well up from seemingly unfathomable sources of the folk-spirit or of the individual human soul-disposition. It is really as though one were to destroy the blossom of a plant, if one intrudes with one's power of judgment in what wells up so pristinely from the human soul as do these fairy tale compositions.

Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources.

It may be regarded as entirely natural that someone like Goethe who attempted, alongside his artistic activity, to penetrate deeply into the background, into the sources of existence, in having something to communicate of the soul's profoundest experiences, did not resort to theoretical discussion. Instead, having gained insight into the underlying sources, he makes use of the fairy tale once again for the soul's most noteworthy experiences. This is what Goethe did in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, wanting, in his fashion, to bring to expression those profound experiences of the human soul that Schiller set forth in a more philosophical-abstract form in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race. It lies in the nature of what is magical in fairy tales that explanations cannot ultimately destroy their productive mood. For, whoever is able to arrive at the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual investigation, discovers a peculiar fact. (If I were to say all that I should like to say about the nature of fairy tales, I would have to hold many lectures. Hence, it will only be possible today to put forward a few indications and results of investigation.)

That is to say, whoever seeks to come to the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual research finds that these fairy tale sources lie far deeper down in the human soul than do the sources of creativity and artistic appreciation otherwise. This applies even with regard to the most compelling works of art—the most moving tragedies for instance. Tragedy depicts what the human soul can experience in connection with powers the poet tells us derive from the tremendous destiny uplifting it, while overwhelming the individual. The shock-waves of tragedy derive from this destiny, but such that we can say: The entanglements, the threads spun in the course of the tragedy and unraveled again are inherent in definite experiences of the human soul in the external world. These are in many respects hard to foresee, since for the most part we penetrate only with difficulty into the particular make up of the individual. Still, they can be surmised and fathomed in sensing what takes place in the human soul in consequence of its relation to life. In experiencing something tragic, one has the feeling, in one way or another, a particular soul is entangled in a particular destiny, as this is presented to us.

The sources of fairy tales and of the moods out of which they arise lie deeper than these entanglements of tragedy. The tragic, as well as other forms of artistic expression, results for us, we may feel, in seeing the human being—for instance at a particular age, a particular period of life—at the mercy of certain blows of destiny. In being affected by a tragedy, we necessarily assume that the human being is led to the corresponding involvements of destiny as a result of particular inner experiences. We sense the need to understand the specific human beings presented to us in the tragedy with their particular sets of experiences. A certain circumscribed range of what is human comes to meet us in the tragedy, as in other works of art.

In approaching fairy tales with sympathetic understanding, we have a different feeling than the one just described, since the effect of the fairy tale on the human soul is an original and elemental one, belonging to effects that are hence unconscious. In sensing what comes to meet us in fairy tales we find something altogether different from what a human being in a particular life situation may become involved in. It is not a matter of a narrowly circumscribed range of human experience, but of something lying so deep, and so integral to the soul, as to be “generally human.” We cannot say, a particular human soul at a particular age of life, in a certain situation, encounters something of the kind. Rather, what comes to expression in the fairy tale is so deeply rooted in the soul that we identify with it no matter whether as a child in the first years of life, whether in our middle years, or whether in having grown old.

What comes to expression in the fairy tale accompanies us throughout our lives in the deepest recesses of the soul. Only, the fairy tale is often a quite freewheeling and playful, pictorial expression of underlying experiences. The aesthetic, artistic enjoyment of the fairy tale may be as far removed for the soul from the corresponding inner experience—the comparison can be ventured—as say, the experience of taste on the tongue when we partake of food is removed from the complicated, hidden processes this food undergoes in the total organism in contributing to building up the organism. What the food undergoes initially evades human observation and knowledge. All the human being has is the enjoyment in tasting. The two things have seemingly little to do with each other in the first instance, and from how a particular food tastes, no one is capable of determining what purpose this food has in the whole life-process of the human organism. What we experience in the aesthetic enjoyment of the fairy tale is likewise far removed from what takes place deep down in the unconscious, where what the fairy tale radiates and pours forth out of itself joins forces with the human soul. The soul has a deep-rooted need to let the substance of the fairy tale run through its spiritual “veins,” just as the organism has a need to allow the nutrients to circulate through it.

Applying the methods of spiritual research that have been described for penetrating the spiritual worlds, at a certain stage one acquires knowledge of spiritual processes that continually take place quite unconsciously in the depths of the human soul. In normal everyday life, such spiritual processes unfolding in the soul's depths surface only occasionally in faint dream experiences caught by day-consciousness. Awakening from sleep under especially favorable circumstances, one may have the feeling: You are emerging out of a spiritual world in which thinking, in which a kind of pondering has taken place, in which something has happened in the deep, unfathomable background of existence. Though apparently similar to daytime experiences, and intimately connected with one's whole being, this remains profoundly concealed for conscious daily life.

For the spiritual researcher who has made some progress and is capable of initial experiences in the world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts, things often proceed in much the same way. As far as one advances, one still arrives again and again, so to speak, only at the boundary of a world in which spiritual processes approach one out of the deep unconscious. These processes, it must be said, are connected with one's own being. They can be apprehended almost the same way as a fata morgana appearing to one's spiritual gaze, not revealing themselves in their totality.

That is one of the strangest experiences—this peering into the unfathomable spiritual connections within which the human soul stands. In attentively following up these intimate soul occurrences, it turns out that conflicts experienced in the depths of the soul and portrayed in works of art, in tragedies, are relatively easy to survey, as compared to the generally-human soul conflicts of which we have no presentiment in daily life. Every person does nonetheless undergo these conflicts at every age of life.

Such a soul conflict discovered by means of spiritual investigation takes place for example, without ordinary consciousness knowing anything of it, every day on awakening, when the soul emerges from the world in which it unconsciously resides during sleep and immerses itself once again in the physical body. As already mentioned, ordinary consciousness has no notion of this, and yet a battle takes place every day in the soul's foundations, glimpsed only in spiritual investigation. This can be designated the battle of the solitary soul seeking its spiritual path, with the stupendous forces of natural existence, such as we face in external life in being helplessly subjected to thunder and lightning—in experiencing how the elements vent themselves upon the defenseless human being.

Though arising with stupendous force, even such rare occurrences of Nature experienced by the human being are a trifling matter as compared with the inner battle taking place unconsciously upon awakening. Experiencing itself existentially, the soul has now to unite itself with the forces and substances of the physical body in which it immerses itself, so as to make use of the senses and of the limbs once again, these being ruled by natural forces. The human soul has something like a yearning to submerge itself in the purely natural, a longing that fulfils itself with every awakening. There is at the same time, as though a shrinking back, a sense of helplessness as against what stands in perpetual contrast to the human soul—the purely natural, manifesting in the external corporeality into which it awakens. Strange as it may sound that such a battle takes place daily in the soul's foundations, it is nonetheless an experience that does transpire unconsciously. The soul cannot know precisely what happens, but it experiences this battle every morning, and each and every soul stands under the impression of this battle despite knowing nothing of it—through all that the soul inherently is, the whole way it is attuned to existence.

Something else that takes place in the depths of the soul and can be apprehended by means of spiritual investigation presents itself at the moment of falling asleep. Having withdrawn itself from the senses and from the limbs, having in a sense left the external body behind in the physical sense-world, what then approaches the human soul may be called a feeling of its own “inwardness.” Only then does it go through the inner battles that arise unconsciously by virtue of its being bound to external matter in life—and having to act in accordance with this entanglement. It feels the attachment to the sense world with which it is burdened as a hindrance, holding it back morally. Other moral moods can give us no conception of what thus transpires unconsciously after falling asleep, when the human soul is alone with itself. And all sorts of further moods then take their course in the soul when free of the body, in leading a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

However, it should not be supposed that these events taking place in the soul's depths are not there in the waking state. Spiritual investigation reveals one very interesting fact in particular, namely that people not only dream when they think they do, but all day long. The soul is in truth always full of dreams, only the human being does not notice this, since day consciousness is stronger as compared to dream consciousness. Just as a weaker light is drowned out by a stronger one, so what continually takes place in the course of waking consciousness as an ongoing dream-experience is drowned out by day consciousness. Though not generally aware of it, we dream all the time. And out of the abundance of dream experiences, of dreams that remain unconscious, presenting themselves as boundless in relation to the experiences of day consciousness, those dreams of which the human being does actually become conscious, separate themselves off. They do so much as a single drop of water might separate itself from a vast lake. But this dreaming activity that remains unconscious is a soul-spiritual experience. Things take place there in the soul's depths. Such spiritual experiences of the soul located in unconscious regions take their course much as chemical processes, of which we are unconscious, take place in the body.

Connecting this with a further fact arising from these lectures, additional light may be shed on hidden aspects of the soul-life spoken of here. We have often stressed—this was emphasized again in the previous lecture—that in the course of humanity's development on the earth, the soul-life of human beings has changed. Looking back far enough, we find that primeval human beings had quite different experiences from those of the human soul today. We have already spoken of the fact—and will do so again in coming lectures—that the primeval human being in early periods of evolution had a certain original clairvoyance. In the manner of looking at the world normal today in the waking state, we receive sense impressions from an external stimulus. We connect them by means of our understanding, our reason, feeling and will. This is merely the consciousness belonging to the present, having developed out of older forms of human consciousness. Applying the word in the positive sense, these were clairvoyant states. In an entirely normal way, in certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, human beings were able to experience something of spiritual worlds. Thus, even if not yet fully self-conscious, human beings were by no means as unfamiliar in their normal consciousness with experiences taking place in the depths of the soul, such as those we have spoken of today.

In ancient times human beings perceived more fully their connection with the spiritual world around them. They saw what takes place in the soul, the events occurring deep within the soul, as connected with the spiritual in the universe. They saw spiritual realities passing through the soul and felt themselves much more related to the soul-spiritual beings and facts of the universe. This was characteristic of the original clairvoyant state of humanity. Just as it is possible today to come to a feeling such as the following only under quite exceptional conditions, in ancient times it occurred frequently—not only in artistic, but also in quite primitive human beings.

An experience of a quite vague and indefinite nature may lie buried in the depths of the soul, not rising into consciousness—an experience such as we have described. Nothing of this experience enters the conscious life of day. Something is nonetheless there in the soul, just as hunger is present in the bodily organism. And just as one needs something to satisfy hunger, so one needs something to satisfy this indefinite mood deriving from the experience lying deep within the soul. One then feels the urge to reach either for an existing fairy tale, for a saga, or if one is of an artistic disposition, perhaps to elaborate something of the kind oneself. Here it is as though all theoretical words one might make use of amount to stammering; and that is how fairy tales arise. Filling the soul with fairy tale pictures in this way constitutes nourishment for the soul as regards the “hunger” referred to.

In past ages of humanity's development every human being still stood closer to a clairvoyant perception of these inner spiritual experiences of the soul, and with their simpler constitution people were able—in sensing the hunger described here far more directly than is the case today—to seek nourishment from the pictures we possess today in the fairy tale traditions of various peoples. The human soul felt a kinship with spiritual existence. Without understanding them, it sensed more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, giving pictorial form to them in pictures bearing only a distant similarity to what had taken place in the soul's substrata. Yet there is a palpable connection between what expresses itself in fairy tales and these unfathomable experiences of the human soul.

Ordinary experience shows us that a childlike soul disposition frequently creates something for itself inwardly, such as a simple “companion”—a companion really only there for this childlike mind, accompanying it nonetheless and taking part in the various occurrences of life. Who does not know, for instance, of children who take certain invisible friends along with them through life? You have to imagine that these “friends” are there when something happens that pleases the child, participating as invisible spirit companions, soul companions, when the child experiences this or that. Quite often one can witness how badly it affects the child's soul disposition when a “sensible” person comes, hears the child has such a soul companion, and now wants to talk it out of this soul companion, even perhaps considering it salutary for the child to be talked out of it. The child grieves for its soul companion. And if the child is receptive for soul-spiritual moods, this grieving signifies still more. It can mean the child begins to ail, becoming constitutionally infirm. This is an altogether real experience connected with profound inner occurrences of the human soul.

Without dispersing the “aroma” of the fairy tale, we can sense this simple experience in the fairy tale which tells of the child and the toad, related by the Brothers Grimm.¹ They tell us of the girl who always has a toad accompany her while eating. The toad, however, only likes the milk. The child talks to the animal as though with a human being. One day she wants the toad to eat some of her bread as well. The mother overhears this; she comes and strikes the animal dead. The child ails, sickens, and dies.

In fairy tales we feel soul moods reverberate that do absolutely in fact take place in the depths of the soul, such that the human soul is actually not only cognizant of them in certain periods of life, but simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of being a child or an adult. Thus, every human soul can sense something re-echo of what it experiences without comprehending it—not even raising it into consciousness—connected with what in the fairy tale works on the soul as food works on the taste buds. For the soul, the fairy tale then becomes something similar to the nutritional substance as applied to the organism. It is fascinating to seek out in deep soul experiences what re-echoes in various fairy tales. It would of course be quite a major undertaking actually to examine individual fairy tales in this regard, collected as they are in such numbers. This would require a lot of time. But what can perhaps be illustrated with a few fairy tales can be applied to all of them, in so far as they are genuine.

Let us take another fairy tale also collected by the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin.” A miller asserts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold and is requested to have her come to the castle, so the king can ascertain her art for himself. The daughter goes to the castle. She is locked in a room and given a bundle of straw with which to demonstrate her art. In the room she is quite helpless. And while she is in this helpless state, a manikin appears before her. He says to her: “What will you give me, if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The miller's daughter gives him her necklace and the little man thereupon spins the straw into gold for her. The king is quite amazed, but he wants still more, and she is to spin straw into gold once again. The miller's daughter is again locked in a room, and as she sits in front of all the straw, the little man appears and says, “What will you give me, if I spin the straw to gold for you?” She gives him a little ring, and the straw is once more spun into gold by the little man. But the king wants still more. And when she now sits for the third time in the room and the little man again appears, she has nothing further to give him. At that the little man says, if she becomes queen one day, she is to grant him the first child she gives birth to. She promises to do so. And when the child is there, and the little man comes and reminds her of her promise, the miller's daughter wants a postponement. The little man then says to her: “If you can tell me what my name is, you can be free of your promise.” The miller's daughter sends everywhere, inquiring after every name. In learning every name, she wants to find out what the little man's name is. Finally, after a number of vain attempts, she actually succeeds in discovering his name—Rumpelstiltskin.

With really no work of art other than fairy tales does one have such a sense of joy over the immediate picture presented, while yet knowing of the profound inner soul-experience out of which the fairy tale is born. Though the comparison may be trivial, it is perhaps still apt: Just as a person can be aware of the chemistry of food and still find a bite to eat flavorful, so it is possible to know something of the profound inner experiences of soul that are only experienced, not “known,” and that come to expression in fairy tale pictures in the manner indicated. In fact, unknowingly the solitary human soul—it is after all alone with itself during sleep, as also in the rest of life even when united with the body—feels and experiences, albeit unconsciously, the whole disparate relation in which it finds itself in regard to its own immense tasks, its place within the divine order of the world.

The human soul does indeed feel how little it is capable of in comparing its ability with what external Nature can do, in transforming one thing into another. Nature is really a great magician, such as the human soul itself would like to be. In conscious life it may light-heartedly look past this gulf between the human soul and the wise omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit of Nature. But at deeper levels of soul experience, the matter is not done away with so easily. There, the human soul would necessarily go to rack and ruin if it were not after all to feel within it a more profound being inside the initially perceptible one, a being it can rely on, of which it can say to itself: As imperfect as you now still are—this being within you is cleverer. It is at work within you; it can carry you to the point of attaining the greatest skill. It can grant you wings, enabling you to see an endless perspective spread out before you, leading into a limitless future. You will be capable of accomplishing what you cannot as yet accomplish, for within you there is something that is infinitely more than your “knowing” self. It is your loyal helper. You must only gain a relation to it. You have really only to be able to form a conception of this cleverer, wiser, more skillful being than you yourself are, residing within you.

In calling to mind this discourse of the human soul with itself, this unconscious discourse with the more adroit part of the soul, we may feel reverberating in this fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” what the soul experiences in the miller's daughter who cannot spin straw into gold, but finds in the little man a skillful, loyal helper. There, deep in the substrata of the soul—in pictures, the distinctive aura of which is not destroyed through knowing their origin—the profound inner life of soul is given.

Or, let us take another fairy tale.—Please do not take it amiss, however, if I connect this with matters having an apparently personal tinge, though not at all meant in a personal sense. The essential point will become clear in adding a few observations.

In my Esoteric Science you will find a description of world evolution. It is not my intention to talk specifically about this now—that can be left for another occasion. In this world evolution our earth is spoken of as having gone through certain stages as a planet in the cosmos, comparable to human lives that follow one upon the other. Just as the individual human being goes through lives that follow each other sequentially, so our earth has gone through various planetary life-stages, various incarnations. In spiritual science, we speak, for certain reasons, of the earth as having gone through a kind of “Moon” existence before beginning its “Earth” existence, and prior to this a kind of “Sun” existence. Thus, we may speak of a Sun-existence, a planetary predecessor existence of our Earth-existence, as having been present in a primeval past—an ancient Sun, with which the earth was still united. Then, in the course of evolution a splitting off of Sun and earth took place. From what had originally been “Sun,” the moon separated itself off as well, and our sun of today, which is not the original Sun, but only a piece of it, so to speak. Thus, we may speak, as it were, of the original Sun and of its successor, the sun of today. And we may also refer to the moon of today as a product of the old Sun. If spiritual scientific investigation follows the evolution of the earth retrospectively to where the second sun, the sun of today, developed as an independent cosmic body, it has to be said that at that time, of the creatures that might have been externally perceptible to the senses, among the animals, only those existed that had developed to the stage of the fishes.

These things can all be looked up more precisely in Esoteric Science. They can be discovered only by means of spiritual scientific investigation. At the time they had been discovered and written down by me in EsotericScience, the fairy tale in question was quite unknown to me. That is the personal factor I should like to add here. I am able to establish with certainty that it was quite unknown to me, since I only later came across it in Wilhelm Wundt's Ethnic Psychology,² whose sources I only then followed up further.

Before briefly outlining the fairy tale, I should like to say one thing in advance: Everything the spiritual researcher is able to investigate in this way in the spiritual world—and the things just referred to do have to be investigated in the spiritual world, since they are otherwise no longer extant—everything investigated in this way presents a world with which the human soul is united even so. We are connected with this world in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is always present, indeed we unconsciously enter this spiritual world in normal life upon falling asleep. Our soul is united with it and has within it not only the soul's experiences during sleep, but also those relating to the whole of evolution referred to here. Were it not paradoxical, one would like to say: in the unconscious state, the soul knows of this and experiences itself in the ongoing stream issuing from the original Sun and subsequently from the daughter sun we now see shining in the sky, as well as from the moon, also a descendant of the original Sun. And in addition, the soul experiences the fact that it has undergone an existence, soul-spiritually, in which it was not yet connected with earthly matter, in which it could look down on earthly processes; for instance, on the time in which the fish species were the highest animal organisms, where the present sun, the present moon, arose and split off from the Earth. In unconscious regions, the soul is linked to these events.

We shall now briefly follow the outline of a fairy tale found among primitive peoples, who tell us: There was once a man. As a human being, he was, however, actually of the nature of tree resin and could only perform his work during the night, since, had he carried out his work by day, he would have been melted by the Sun. One day, however, it happened that he did go out by day, in order to catch fish. And behold, the man who actually consisted of tree resin, melted away. His sons decided to avenge him. And they shot arrows. They shot arrows that formed certain figures, towering one over the other, so that a ladder arose reaching up to heaven. They climbed up this ladder, one of them during the day, the other during the night. One of them became the sun, and the other became the moon.

It is not my habit to interpret such things in an abstract way and to introduce intellectual concepts. But it is a different matter to have a feeling for the results of investigation—that the human soul in its depths is united with what happens in the world, to be grasped only spiritually, that the human soul is connected with all this and has a hunger to savor its deepest unconscious experiences in pictures. In citing the fairy tale just outlined, one feels a reverberation of what the human soul experienced as the original Sun, and as the arising of sun and moon during the fish epoch of the Earth. It was in some respects a quite momentous experience for me—this is once more the personal note—when I came across this fairy tale, long after the facts I have mentioned stood printed in my Esoteric Science. Though the notion of interpreting the whole matter abstractly still does not occur to me, a certain kindred feeling arises when I consider world evolution in the context of another, parallel portrayal—when I give myself up to the wonderful pictures of this fairy tale.

Or, as a further example, let us take a peculiar Melanesian fairy tale. Before speaking of this fairy tale, let us remind ourselves that, as shown by spiritual investigation, the human soul is also closely linked to prevailing occurrences and facts of the universe. Even if stated rather too graphically, it is still nonetheless true in a certain respect, from a spiritual scientific point of view, if we say: When the human soul leaves the physical body in sleep, it leads an existence in direct connection with the entire cosmos, feeling itself related to the entire cosmos. We may remind ourselves of the relationship of the human soul, or for example, of the human “I” with the cosmos—at least with something of significance in the cosmos. We direct our gaze to the plant world and tell ourselves: The plant grows, but it can only do so under the influence of the sun's light and warmth. We have before us the plant rooted in the earth. In spiritual science we say: the plant consists of its physical body and of the life-body which permeates it. But that does not suffice for the plant to grow and unfold itself. For that, the forces are required that work on the plant from the sun.

If we now contemplate the human body while the human being sleeps, this sleeping human body is in a sense equivalent to a plant. As a sleeping body it is comparable to the plant in having the same potential to grow as the plant. However, the human being is emancipated from the cosmic order which envelops the plant. The plant has to wait for the sun to exert its influence on it, for the rising and setting of the sun. It is bound to the external cosmic order. The human being is not so bound. Why not? Because what spiritual science points out is in fact true: the human being exerts an influence from the “I”—outside the physical body in sleep—upon the plant-like physical body, equivalent to what the sun exerts on the plant. Just as the sun pours its light out over the plants, so does the human “I” pour its light over the now plant-like physical body when the human being sleeps. As the sun “reigns” over the plants, so the human “I” reigns, spiritually, over the plant-like sleeping physical body. The “I” of the human being is thus related to the sun-existence. Indeed, the “I” of the human being is itself a kind of “sun” for the sleeping human body, and brings about its enlivening during sleep, brings it about that those forces are replenished that have been used up in the waking state. If we have a feeling for this, then we recognize how the human “I” is related to the sun. Spiritual science shows us in addition that, just as the sun traverses the arc of heaven—I am of course speaking of the apparent movement of the sun—and in a certain respect the effect of its rays differs according to whether it stands in this or that constellation of the zodiac, so the human “I” also goes through various phases in its experience. Thus, from one phase it works in one way, from a different phase it works in another way on the physical body. In spiritual science one acquires a feeling for how the sun works differently onto the earth according to whether it does so, for example, from the constellation of Aries, or from the constellation of Taurus, and so on. For that reason, one does not speak of the sun in general, but of its effect in connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac—indicating the correspondence of the changing “I” with the changing activity of the sun.

Let us now take everything that could only be sketched here, but which is developed further in Esoteric Science, as something to be gained as soul-spiritual knowledge. Let us regard it as what takes place in the depths of the soul and remains unconscious but takes place in such a way that it signifies an inner participation in the spiritual forces of the cosmos that manifest themselves in the fixed stars and planets. And let us compare all this, proclaimed by spiritual science as the secrets of the universe, with a Melanesian fairy tale, that I shall again outline only briefly:

On a country road lies a stone. This stone is the mother of Quatl. And Quatl has eleven brothers. After the eleven brothers and Quatl have been created, Quatl begins to create the present world. In this world he created, a difference between day and night was still unknown. Quatl then learns that there is an island somewhere, on which there is a difference between day and night. He travels to this island and brings a few inhabitants from this island back to his country. And, by virtue of their influence on those in his country, they too come to experience the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the rising and setting of the sun takes place for them as a soul experience.

It is remarkable what reverberates once again in this fairy tale. Considering the fairy tale as a whole there re-echoes, with every sentence, so to speak, something of world secrets, something of what, in the sense of spiritual science, the soul experiences in its depths. One then has to say: The sources of fairy tale moods, of fairy tales generally, lie in hidden depths of the human soul. These fairy tales are presented in the form of pictures, since external happenings have to be made use of in order to provide what is to be spiritual nourishment for the hunger that wells up as an outcome of the soul's experiences. Though we are far removed from the actual experiences in question, we can sense how they reverberate in the fairy tale pictures.

With this in mind, we need not wonder that the finest, most characteristic fairy tales are those handed down from former ages when people still had a certain clairvoyant consciousness and found easier access to the sources of these fairy tale moods. Further, it need not surprise us that in regions of the world where human beings stand closer to spirituality than do the souls of the Occident, for example in India, in the Orient in general, fairy tales can have a much more distinctive character.

Neither need we be surprised that in the German fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in the form told them by relatives and others, often simple people, we come upon accounts reminiscent of the periods of European life in which the great heroic sagas arose. Fairy tales contain attributes found in the great heroic sagas. It need not surprise us to hear that it belatedly came to light that the most significant fairy tales are even older than the heroic sagas. Heroic sagas after all show human beings only at a particular age of life and in particular situations, while what lives in fairy tales is of a generally-human nature, accompanying human beings at every age, from their first to their last breath. It need not surprise us if the fairy tale also insistently depicts, for example, what we have referred to as a profound experience of the soul, the feeling of the soul's inadequacy on awakening in regard to the forces of Nature it helplessly faces and is only a match for, if it has the consolation of knowing at the same time: Within you, there is something that transcends your personal self, and makes you in a certain respect the victor once again over the forces of Nature.

In sensing this mood, one has a feeling for why human beings so often find themselves up against giants in fairy tales. Why do these giants appear? Well, as an image, these giants arise as a matter of course from the whole tone of the soul in wanting to make its way into the body again in the morning, seeing itself confronted by the “giant” forces of Nature occupying the body. What the soul senses there as a battle, what it then feels is altogether real—not in rational terms, but as corresponds to depictions of the manifold battles of the human being with giants. When all this comes to meet it, it clearly senses how it possesses only one thing, its shrewdness, in this whole battle—in its stand in confronting giants. For, this entails the feeling: You could now reenter your body, but what are you, as against the immense forces of the universe! However, you do have something not there in these giants, and that is cunning—reason! This does in fact stand unconsciously before the soul, even if it has also to say to itself, that it can do nothing against the immense forces of the universe. We see how the soul transposes this literally into a picture in giving expression to the mood in question:

A man goes along a country road and comes to an inn. In the inn he asks for milk-soup (blancmange). Flies enter the soup. He finishes eating the milk-soup, leaving the flies. Then he strikes the plate, counts the flies he has killed, and brags: “A hundred at one blow!” The innkeeper hangs a sign around his neck: “He has killed a hundred at one blow.” Continuing along the country road, this man comes to a different region. There a king looks out the window of his castle. He sees the man with the sign around his neck and says to himself: I could well use him. He takes him into his service and assigns him a definite task. He says to him: “You see, the problem is, whole packs of bears always come into my kingdom. If you have struck a hundred dead, then you can certainly also strike the bears dead for me.” The man says: “I am willing to do it!” But, until the bears are there, he wants a good wage and proper meals, for, having thought about it, he says to himself: If I can't do it, I shall at least have lived well until then.—When the time came, and the bears were approaching, he collected all kinds of food and various good things bears like to eat. Then he approached them and laid these things out. When the bears got there, they ate until they were full to excess, finally lying there as though paralyzed; and now he struck them dead one after the other. The king arrived and saw what he had accomplished. However, the man told him: “I simply had the bears jump over a stick and chopped off their heads at the same time!” Delighted, the king assigns him another task. He says to him: “Now the giants will soon also be coming into my land, and you must help me against them as well.” The man promised to do so. And when the time approached, he again took a quantity of provisions with him, including a lark and a piece of cheese. On actually encountering the giants, he first entered into a conversation with them about his strength. One of the giants said: “We shall certainly show you that we are stronger,” taking a stone and crushing it in his hand. Then he said to the man: “That is how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” Another giant took an arrow, shooting it so high that only after a long time did the arrow come down again and said: “That's how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” At this, the man who had killed a hundred at one blow said: “I can do all that and more!” He took a small piece of cheese and a stone, spreading the stone with cheese, and said to the giants: “I can squeeze water out of a stone!” And he squashed the cheese so that water squirted out of it. The giants were astonished at his strength in being able to squeeze water from a stone. Then the man took the lark and let it fly off, saying to the giants: “Your arrow came back down again, the one I have shot, however, goes up so high that it does not come back down at all!” For the lark did not return at all. At that, the giants were so amazed, they agreed among themselves that they would only be able to overcome him with cunning. They no longer thought of being able to overcome him with the strength of giants. Nonetheless, they did not succeed in outwitting him; on the contrary, he outwitted them. While they all slept, he put an inflated pig's bladder over his head, inside which there was some blood. The giants had said to themselves: Awake, we shall not be able to get the better of him, so we shall do it while he sleeps. They struck him while he slept, smashing the pig's bladder. Seeing the blood that spurted out, they thought they had finished him off. And they soon fell asleep. In the peaceful quiet that overcame them, they slept so soundly that he was able to put an end to them.

Even though, like some dreams, the fairy tale ends here somewhat indefinitely and on an unsatisfactory note, we nonetheless have before us a portrayal of the battle of the human soul against the forces of Nature—first against the “bears,” then against the “giants.” But something else becomes evident in this fairy tale. We have the man who has “killed a hundred at one blow.” We have an echo of what lives at the deepest unconscious levels of the soul: the consolation in becoming aware of its own shrewdness over against these stronger, overwhelming forces. It is not a good thing when what has been presented artistically in pictures is interpreted abstractly. That is not at all what matters. On the other hand, nothing of the artistic form of the fairy tale is diminished if one has a feeling for the fact that the fairy tale is an after-echo of events taking place deep within the soul. These events are such that we can know a great deal about them, as much as one can come to know by means of spiritual investigation—yet, in immersing ourselves in fairy tales and experiencing them, they still remain original and elementary.

In researching them, it is certainly agreeable to know that fairy tales present what the soul needs on account of its deepest experiences, as we have indicated. At the same time, no fairy tale mood is destroyed in arriving at a deeper recognition of the sources of subconscious life. Presented only abstractly, we find these sources are impoverished for our consciousness, whereas the fairy tale form is really the more comprehensive one for expressing the deepest experiences of the soul.

It is then comprehensible that Goethe expressed in the significant and evocative pictures of the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he was abundantly able to experience, and which Schiller chose to express in abstract-philosophical concepts. Thus, despite having thought a great deal, Goethe wanted to say in pictures what he felt concerning the deepest underlying strata of human soul-life. And because the fairy tale relates in this way to the innermost soul, it is precisely the form most suited to the child. For it may be said of fairy tales that they have brought it about that what is most profound in spiritual life is expressed in the simplest possible form. In fact, one gradually comes to feel that in all conscious artistic life there is no greater art than that which completes the path from the uncomprehended depths of soul-life to the delightful, often playful pictures of the fairy tale.

An art capable of expressing in the most self-evident form what is hard to comprehend is the greatest and most natural art, an art intimately related to the human being. And just because, in the case of the child, the essential human being is still united in an unspoilt way with the whole of existence, with the whole of life, the child especially needs the fairy tale as nourishment for its soul. What depicts spiritual powers can come alive more fully in the child. The childlike soul may not be enmeshed in abstract theoretical concepts if it is not to be obliterated. It has to remain connected with what is rooted in the depths of existence.

Hence, we can do nothing of greater benefit for the soul of the child than in allowing what unites the human being with the roots of existence to act upon it. As the child still has to work creatively on its own physical formation, summoning the formative forces for its own growth, for the unfolding of its natural abilities, it senses wonderful soul nourishment in fairy tale pictures that connect it with the roots of existence. Since, even in giving themselves over to what is rational and intellectual, human beings can still never be wholly torn away from the roots of existence, they gladly turn again at every age to the fairy tale, provided they are of a sufficiently healthy and straightforward soul disposition. For there is no stage of life and no human situation that can estrange us altogether from what flows from fairy tales—in consequence of which we could cease having anything more to do with what is most profound in human nature or have no sense for what is so incomprehensible for the intellect, expressed in the self-evident, simple, primitive fairy tale and fairy tale mood.

Hence, those who have concerned themselves for a long time with restoring to humanity the fairy tales that had been rather glossed over by civilization, individuals such as the Brothers Grimm, understandably had the feeling—even if they did not adopt a spiritual scientific view—that they were renewing something that belongs intimately to human nature. After an intellectual culture had done its part over a period of centuries to estrange the human soul, including the soul of the child, such collections of fairy tales as those of the Brothers Grimm have quite properly found their way again to all human beings receptive for such things. In this way they have become once more the common heritage of children's souls, indeed of all human souls. They will do so increasingly, the more spiritual science is not just taken as theory, but becomes an underlying mood of the soul, uniting it more and more in feeling with the spiritual roots of its existence.³

In this way, by means of the dissemination of spiritual science, what genuine fairy tale collectors, those truly receptive for fairy tales as well as those who present them have declared, will prove well-founded. This is what a certain individual, a true friend of fairy tales, often said in lectures I was able to hear.⁴ It is a wonderfully poetic utterance which at the same time summarizes what results from such spiritual scientific considerations as we have presented today. It may be formulated in words this man spoke—knowing as he did how to love fairy tales, collecting them, and appreciating them. He always liked to add the saying:

“Fairy tales and sagas are comparable to a good angel, granted human beings as a companion from birth on their life's wanderings, to be a trustworthy comrade throughout—offering comradeship, and making life inwardly into a truly ensouled fairy tale!”⁵

• 1. in “Tales About Toads”
• 2. published in 10 volumes, 1900-1920
• 3. In 1856 Wilhelm Grimm wrote: “Common to all fairy tales is a residual faith reaching back into ancient times, expressing itself in a pictorial grasp of supersensible things.”
• 4. This is in all probability a reference to Rudolf Steiner's friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900), professor of literature at the Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Vienna, discoverer of the Oberufer Christmas Plays, and described by Rudolf Steiner as “a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm.” (Document of Barr, Sept. 1907.)
• 5. Schröer was in turn quoting Wilhelm Grimm

The present lecture is to be a short preparation for the study of the Mystery of Golgotha, which will be more fully explained on the second day of our Easter Festival. As the basis for our study, let us take a text which to many appears incomprehensible, or, at any rate, difficult, and can only be understood when connected with the deepest esoteric meaning. This text will lead us to-day still deeper into the spirit and meaning of Christianity: ‘All sins may be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit.’

These words really contain the purpose and mission of Christianity, and Anthroposophy is the right instrument with which to reveal and express the profound meaning hidden in these words. Anthroposophy does not wish to inaugurate a new faith or found a new sect; the time is past when new faiths or new special religions can be founded. The task of the future is the formation of the already existing religions into one great common religion of humanity. Anthroposophy does not wish to preach a new religion; it is rather the means for teaching the various religions how to comprehend the profound truths contained in them, and which fundamentally are one and only one!

The tendency of the age is to make trivial the religious truths. From the modern standpoint people like to consider Christ Jesus as ‘the simple Man of Nazareth’; they like to look upon Him as a sort of higher ideal man, in somewhat the same manner as Socrates, Plato, Goethe and others are also looked upon as ideals; they do not wish to uplift Him too far above the level of humanity; they are far from recognising that in this Christ Jesus there lived something which towered far above humanity.

But in order to have at least some small perception of the Mystery of Christ Jesus we must throw a strong light upon the old Gnostic questions. We must bring to our help all human wisdom to understand what happened between the first and thirtieth years of our era.

The religious records are certainly not there to be explained by trivialities, and there is no wisdom deep or wise enough to unveil the deep meaning in this Mystery. It is certainly true that the understanding of this Mystery ought also to be brought down to the simple mind, but it is also true that it is so profound and full of wisdom that no wisdom reaches far enough to measure all its depths! From this standpoint and in this frame of mind we may first explain what is understood in Christianity—in true esoteric Christianity—by the Holy Spirit, the Son—also called the Word or Logos—and the Father. We shall not penetrate into the meaning of these conceptions by means of philosophic speculations; we shall not give them an arbitrary meaning. The meaning was attached by the initiates, and we have to keep to what was taught in the schools of the Christian Initiates. It is bad when one probes into the Bible and speculates as to what this or that means. We know that there are schools in which the meaning has been taught from very ancient times and it is always the same meaning, there was never a different knowledge; there were never at any time different standpoints in it.

If we hold to what has come most to the surface of history, we find the esoteric school which St. Paul had at Athens, the school of Dionysius. The learned are accustomed to speak of a pseudo Dionysius, because the existence of these schools is not sufficiently indicated by documentary evidence; only in the sixth century a.d. do we find written traditions of them.

We must clearly understand that as regards writing the custom has radically changed. When at the present day a person has a clever thought he cannot wait, but must have it printed at once and scattered over the world. But the earlier custom was otherwise. The profoundest thoughts were strictly withheld from publicity; they were not thrown at everybody’s head; they were only given to one who was known, only to one who had been found worthy to receive them. Only he who had a sense of truth was allowed to receive the truths. They were only given to one who devotedly and with a true feeling towards the truths, opened his heart to receive them. What the pupil had to acquire was calmness, a deep longing, a feeling of devotion towards the higher truths. This was quite a different view from that of the present day, for now everyone may receive the truths, quite irrespective of the frame of mind in which he approaches them. In those days, however, it was held that one might not receive indifferently a truth, for example, about the starry heavens. It was clearly understood that the frame of mind was important if the truths were really to influence: only in a pure and uplifted frame of mind were even simple truths received, such as the truths of mathematics, and the student’s preparation before he was allowed to receive the truths consisted in the production of the right frame of mind.

This was also the case in the school of St. Paul: the pupils were most strictly prepared before they were allowed to receive the highest truths. This preparation—as well as the subsequent training—was given by word of mouth; the living spirit passed on from teacher to pupil, for a long period of time, and the highest Initiates who were the vehicles of the esoteric truths, always bore the same name. Thus in the sixth century the recorder of the Dionysian training was still known as Dionysius. One has to know this in order to be able to judge correctly when a pseudo Dionysius is spoken of.

Now to-day let us investigate according to esoteric Christianity into the profound meaning of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In our lecture on the Lord’s Prayer we have already discussed this meaning. We have learned how the Godhead is expressed in the three higher principles of man. We have heard that behind the ‘Father’ stands the Divine Will, behind the ‘Kingdom’ there is the Word, the Logos, and behind the ‘Name’ the Holy Spirit.

We shall now consider these three principles from a different point of view, in the manner taught in Christian esoteric training. Let us briefly recall the relations between the higher and lower parts of man. We have always learned that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, and within the astral body dwells the ‘I’; this was once the so-called sacred quaternary. We have also learned how in the course of human evolution the three bodies are transformed. The ‘I’ transforms the astral body, which is the vehicle of passions, impulses and desires; it may also be called the consciousness- body. In esoteric Christianity one is also taught to ennoble, cleanse and purify this body; and as far as this takes place in man it is called the work of the Holy Spirit. One might say that that part of the astral body which is purified by Manas or Spirit-Self, is called in Christianity: ‘To be seized by the Holy Spirit.’

We know that the ‘I’ also works transformingly on the etheric body. Now this is much more difficult. What man receives from art and religion alone works in a transforming, ennobling way upon the etheric body. Art sees and perceives the Eternal; the Eternal shines through it, and the impulses of art act more strongly on the ennobling of mankind than all the laws of ethics. But the religious impulses work the most strongly! One who with deep devotion looks up to the Eternal, who opens himself towards It and allows It to stream in, receives Buddhi or Life-Spirit—in a Christian sense, the Logos, Christ. In esoteric Christianity this is known as ‘taking the Christ into oneself.’ In order to explain to you the third principle, the process of taking in the Father, you must allow me to make a slight digression.

I beg you always to remember that Anthroposophy is absolutely not a colourless theory, for then it would run into the danger of forming a sect; no, it is to act upon the daily life, it is to ennoble and spiritualise it—then it is practical Anthroposophy. It does not wish to weave fancies, to excogitate anything, it intends that the spirit shall flow into the whole of our civilisation, and therefore it also draws attention to the practical side.

When you are in the midst of life, when the multitude of impressions press in upon you from life, then what you experience in this way is but a portion of the sum-total of your experiences. One who does not take this into account cannot unravel the secrets of life! The anthroposophist looks deeper; he knows that the etheric body and the astral body are influenced in various ways by his daily experiences. What you take into yourselves consciously, what attracts your conscious attention, for example, as you go along the street, is expressed in ebullitions and currents in the astral body. The occultist can observe these ebullitions and movements. But there are other impressions which do not usually engage one’s full attention. I will give an example to explain what I mean. We walk along a street and pass numberless things which do not arouse our strict attention; we know that we have passed shop windows left and right, that there were buildings left and right, and that we met human beings and carriages, but our attention was not directed to them, we have not consciously received anything from them. However, it does not on this account pass by us without leaving a trace; it makes a certain impression upon us. When we look at a placard or skim through a comic paper, not only what we follow consciously remains within us, but the things of which we are unconscious also make an impression upon us. One is wont to say that these impressions remain below the threshold of consciousness; but in truth it is different. Many things act upon a human being without coming to his consciousness, and in the meantime they act upon him deeply and produce an important effect. To begin with, they act on the etheric body. This body is continually taking in impressions, and from this we may gather how tremendously important to human development is also that to which a person pays no attention.

Everything that takes place on the surface of civilisation acts upon human beings; all these things call forth pictures in them. But Anthroposophy indicates the undercurrents of our civilisation; again and again it emphasises the need of understanding the spiritual world which lies behind the physical, it draws attention to the deep connection between the external world and spiritual things.

One age thinks differently from another and has different inclinations; in one age the spiritual movements are higher and in another lower, depending more upon sensation. To the occult investigator all this which makes an impression upon the etheric body is reflected as secret influences which act upon human beings. When in an occult manner one investigates the temperament, inclinations and sentiments of the people in central Europe in the eleventh or twelfth century one has to trace back the results to the style of architecture, the art, the means of civilisation which at the time surrounded them. The effect upon a man of that particular age in passing along the street of his town was different from the effect produced upon a man of the present age; other objects surrounded him and other sentiments filled him.

One must not leave out of account the fact that what lies more deeply down than the consciousness, is profoundly influenced by such impulses. And on this account one must not undervalue the seriousness of the statement when I say that just at the present time it is in the underground of our civilisation that the real foundation for materialism is found. I should not on this account be considered as a reactionary. The one who guides his method of observation by spiritual truths knows that the profound and noble things which act upon the etheric body also provide it with constructive forces; and when he extends this method of observation to what is produced by the materialistic way of looking at things it is then clear to him that nothing can be done by theories and teachings if they do not come down to these things. A change for the better cannot be expected until the spiritual truths are reflected in what surrounds man and influences him, even though his attention may not be continually directed towards it. With these remarks as a basis we may now consider the part of the higher man called the Spirit Man, Atma, Father.

We know that, starting from ‘I,’ the physical body also can be transformed. This transformation takes place consciously through what is taught in esoteric training. All that the pupil can learn with the intellect, all that influences his astral body is only the preparation; the training begins when the ‘I’ begins to work upon the etheric body, when he conquers his temperament, his inclinations and habits, when he becomes a different man. Through this he gains insight into the higher worlds. All that he learns, all that gives him a theoretical insight, all sciences, only influence the astral body; but all that works upon his etheric body gives such an impetus to his development that gradually the spiritual organs are formed in him and he begins to see in the higher worlds. Thus we see how the astral body and etheric body are transformed. That which transforms the physical body comes from the breathing process; this purifies and spiritualises the physical body. Christian esotericism calls this the Father. We have to distinguish that as much as a person has within him of what purifies and transforms the astral body, so much has he of the Holy Spirit within him.

As far as a person has within him that which purifies and transforms the etheric body, so far has he the Son, the Logos, within him.

As far as a person has within him (this is only known to an Initiate) that which ennobles and transforms the physical body, so far has he the Father within him.

If we wish to distinguish between the sins or blasphemies against the Holy Spirit, against the Son, and against the Father, we have to remember what the esoteric teachers understood as the mission of Christianity. You will find this mission expressed in the words which Christ Jesus uttered when He was told that His mother and His brethren were outside: ‘He who does not leave father and mother, etc., has no part in Me,’ or ‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (Matt. 10, 37).

In Mark and Luke it is somewhat different. There He says: ‘My mother and My brethren are those who hear God’s word and do it’ (Luke 8, 21; Mark 3, 33; Matt. 12, 46-50).

In all these statements we have the true mission of Christianity; let us now go into this more closely and we shall gain at the same time the best preparation for our Easter Festival—the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we go a long way back along the path of the development of humanity we arrive at the Lemurian epoch. We know that ancient Lemuria lay south of present-day Asia, in the part now occupied by the Indian Ocean. In ancient Lemuria we find the four-membered, half-animal man, who indeed was already gifted with his fourfold nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the germ of the ‘I,’ but he was not yet able to work even to the very tiniest extent, on the three lower coverings, for the forces necessary for the work on these coverings had first to come into the vehicle of these coverings. That which is the content of your soul did not at that time exist in man! The ‘I’ was, as it were, a hollow space into which these forces could come, and this hollow space still exists within man. That which at the present time is called the depth of his inner being was formerly outside him, and at that time it sank into the human shell. Previously it was a part of the Divine Nature, it still rested in the Bosom of the Deity. We have often represented the outpouring of this divine part by saying that it was as if a number of little human sponges had each absorbed a drop, as it were, of this divine spiritual substance, which we pictured as a body of water. What is now within you, which forms your soul and which formerly rested in the Divine Bosom, was divided up among the several human bodies so that each one received a drop of this common divine substance. This common substance thus individualised itself into parts of the Deity. Just as each finger has its own life and still belongs to the whole human organism and from it receives its life, so each drop in each human being received its own life and dwelt in the human bodies which had prepared themselves to receive it and which waited to be ensouled by the Deity.

Now those human beings looked very different from what they do at present. You would be much astonished if I were to describe those grotesque bodies which absorbed the souls! Who worked so that these grotesque bodies developed into our present human bodies? Who did this? It is the work of the soul which is active within I From within, it shapes and forms the human body.

One may gain an idea of this work of the soul-forces by observing the remains of this self-out-shaping of the soul in the body of a human being of the present day; for example, when we consider the feeling of shame. The soul drives the blush of shame to the face; what is in the soul, namely, shame, expresses itself in the body in the blush of shame. Anxiety, fear, terror—these psychic experiences express themselves in the body as pallor. We all know that this is connected with the blood; the blood is the expression of the being that works within. But this only applies to warm blood! Just as it is true that at the present day in the feeling of shame, fear, anxiety and terror the ‘I’ acts on the blood and expresses itself in the body in a very limited way, so it is also true that in the remote past the effect was very great; at that time the blood expressed the inner force very accurately and minutely; it formed and fashioned the human figure through the several races. The inner experiences and feelings fashioned the human body when it was still soft and plastic, and their activity, their constructive forces, worked indirectly through the blood. The creator, the inner being, the power which shaped the body plastically, worked from the ‘I,’ indirectly through the blood, at the construction of the human being. Thus we may recognise that the blood is the vehicle of the ‘I.’

In this thought we have an explanation of the statement in the Bible that Adam was hundreds of years old. This depends upon endogamy or near marriage. In the earlier days of human evolution we find in every race smaller groups who were related to one another by blood, for they married exclusively within their groups and tribes. This had an important result, which is indicated in the following conversation between the authors Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger describes his peasants in a dry matter-of-fact way, but Anzengruber describes them much more vividly, his peasants truly live before us. Once when these two authors were together, Rosegger gave Anzengruber the advice that he ought to go to the country and there live for a time amongst the peasants in order to see them and thus be able to describe them more vividly. But Anzengruber answered: ‘That I would never do, for then I should forget all my art. I have never seen a peasant, but the understanding of them is in my blood; I do not need to have seen them to be able to describe them, for the blood of generations of peasants flows through my veins. The spirit which lives in the peasants Eves in me, it passes through my father, grandfather and great-grandfather to me—for all my ancestors were peasants.’

Thus in Anzengruber there was still a degree of the peasant consciousness. And this was much more the case in ancient times! In those days a son did not merely feel in the same way as his father and grandfather had felt, but in him there was actually a vivid remembrance of the experiences of his ancestors.

There was a time when man had in his memory not only what he himself, but also what his father and grandfather had experienced. And therefore in those ancient, strictly limited communities a son said in regard to what his father had experienced: ‘I have experienced’ it. This was also the case in the generation of Adam, his ‘I’ was preserved for nine hundred years.

The ‘I’ continued through the generations; it was a common ‘I,’ a group ‘I.’ This ‘I’ which passed through several generations was called ‘Adam,’ and for this reason it is said that Adam lived for so long. This fact is hidden behind the statements in the Bible regarding the longevity of the persons mentioned at the beginning of the Bible.

From this we see how the blood, which was common to these narrowly limited groups, comes into consideration as the expression of the inner creative soul of man and how it binds these people to a certain extent into unity.

Now how was this broken through? By what means was the memory of the human being limited to his own life? It was through exogamy! By this means the narrowly limited tribe was loosened and expanded into a nation. Man would have been unable to develop if this strict community had not been broken through. The memory of the members of these blood-related communities extended up through the generations. Now we must remember that the vehicle of the memory is the etheric body. And here we have the intimate connection between the blood and the etheric body. The ‘I’ imprints itself into the etheric body, and is expressed in that which shoots into the blood.

Let us remember what he who is to be initiated has to accomplish in his etheric body and we shall to-day learn what this has to do with his blood. We know whence these schools of initiation originated; they can be traced back to the ancient Turanian Adept-Schools of Atlantis. And let us now call to mind how initiation took place. We know that when the pupil was sufficiently prepared he was put into a sleep by the Initiator for three days, and this made it possible for the Initiator to lift the etheric body of the pupil out of his physical body. The etheric body then lived in the higher worlds; the pupil consciously experienced the higher worlds; he knew their reality from his own experience. Only through his being prepared did he gain this power. When he returned again into his physical body he could bear witness to the reality of the higher worlds in which he had lived.

We see that this initiation depended upon one thing. The pupil had to suppress his consciousness, which was absolutely under the control of the Initiator. The Initiators worked through the Initiates into life, to a certain extent they were at the head of the social structure, they were there like a social pyramid, everyone believed them, everyone looked up to them. Through acting upon the impulses of the Initiates they had everything under their authority. And this authority was founded upon truth and wisdom, for only wise ones might exercise this authority without harm coming to humanity.

In Initiation all depends upon leading out the etheric body in the right way. The Initiator could not do this with everyone. In order to initiate a person in this way long and careful preparations were necessary. It depended upon the blood of the neophyte being of the right composition. This was the reason for the great value attached to the priestly caste or tribe which might not be mixed with other blood. For centuries they were prepared; people were brought together who were necessary for this right mixture of blood, until one was produced who could become an Initiate. This was handling human life in grand style! The greatest Initiates were prepared for centuries with respect to their mixture of blood. This was the method of initiation of pre-Christian times. But this could not remain the same for ever in the course of human development; for with what is it connected? It is connected with the small blood-communities. The further we go back the more do we come to this principle of initiation. Then this blood principle was broken through; the family expanded to the tribe and the tribe to the nation. It was then proclaimed that all such limited blood-ties had to be broken through; for where dwelt the communal principle in man? It came through his blood. When in ancient times it was made possible by means of warm blood for the Divine to be implanted in the developing humanity—how did this implantation take place? It surged through the blood. Where did He work most powerfully Who said: ‘I Am He Who is, Who was and Who will be’? In the blood running through the veins. When one led a human being to the highest, to initiation, one led him by handling his blood!

He who only considers the Mystery of Christianity externally understands it badly! Christianity itself is a mystical fact! We can only understand it as we understand the mystery of blood.

With the advent of Christ Jesus a new configuration of our planet came about! If someone on another planet had been able to observe ours, from a few centuries before Christ, if he had directed his attention to it through the centuries and right into the distant future, if he saw it, not with his physical eyes, but directing his attention to the astral and etheric atmosphere of our planet, he would have seen that from the sixth century before Christ our planet slowly changed. Then it made a sudden leap, it gained a new impulse; something else entered into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Only he who admits that there is something spiritual around the earth, and who considers this as something real and actual, can understand what this means! He who considers it in this way will find the expression for this transformation in the spiritual, and to such an one we say: All that holds people together in small blood communities gradually breaks asunder. There comes the time when a person leaves father, mother, etc. All that which acts upon the blood as a kind of ‘group “ I ”’ has to disappear from the earth! When it is ready to become a new, astral planet all this must have disappeared and in the place of what has disappeared something new will come I A great bond of brotherhood will then bind humanity, and the impulse for this brotherhood is given by Christ Jesus! He is the spiritual fact which effects this transformation. Hence the ideal which He presents when He says, ‘He who does not leave father and mother cannot be My disciple,’ and the indication which He gives: ‘They who believe in the Divine Spirit are My brothers and My sisters !’ Hence the non-recognition of those related to Him, for these ties of blood were something which had been overcome. It is from this standpoint that we have to consider these words of Christ, not as a symbol, not as a comparison, but as reality I For they are a reality!

Now consider the uplifted cross and the blood which flows from the wounds 1 Understand well the profound significance of this in the course of the world’s history I Why does it flow? Why is the blood spoken of? It is that which has to lose its importance in this narrow sense if humanity is to broaden out to the coming ideal, to the common brotherhood! That which is to make all humanity one is no longer to depend upon the blood which pulsates in the ‘I.’ Therefore the superfluous ‘I’-blood flows through the wounds of Christ. All egoistic, self-seeking blood which unites a man with mother, father, brother, sister—all this has to flow! This is the real fact! With the amount of blood which flows there is lost the tendency to form limited communities, and there originates the tendency for the whole of humanity to be united into one great community. No one has come so close to this as Richard Wagner in his ‘Parsifal’ I Never did an exoteric person approach so closely to the deepest truth of the esoteric secrets of Christianity!

When we learn to understand it in this way, we shall see that the deepest purpose of Christianity is to unloose that which binds mankind within narrow egoistic limits. It will split up mankind into individuals who feel themselves to be separate, and who unite again in love of their own free will; who increase in individuality to the same extent that they feel themselves to be part of the whole world. This you see in the Mystery of Golgotha, in this religious impulse. which is of the very greatest importance. Here everything that is to come about in the future is prepared! It begins to work at Whitsuntide when the Holy Spirit is poured forth, that is, when the understanding of this tie of brotherhood begins to stir. This is expressed in a most beautiful symbol when we are told that the Apostles spoke to all nations in every tongue! That which had flowed through the blood of the Logos is there spread abroad by the Holy Spirit!

Let us go back to the ancient principle of initiation. At that time everything depended upon the Initiates. The whole of civilisation received its impulses from them. This now ceased. The splitting up of mankind into individuals had to take place and thereby the impulse towards brotherhood was created at the same time. The ancient principle of initiation exercised by the Initiators of truth and wisdom no longer sufficed if humanity was to mature to this brotherhood. Each human being must himself be in possession of truth and wisdom. We then see the spreading abroad of this wisdom step by step and its co-operation with the individual, in the activity of the Holy Spirit, how it worked from then onwards in humanity. As long as man listened to authority he could live quietly in the narrowest circles, for this authority took care of the whole group; but this now ceases, the limited community is broken through, each one must now take care of himself; each individual has now to receive that which holds good for each human being. What can this be?

The wisdom which was poured into humanity through the Initiates was One; when, however, it was to be given to the individual human being it was specialised. Thus originated the teachings which Buddha, Zoroaster, Hermes and others brought to mankind; the smaller the community the more it was specialised.

When brotherhood was founded there had to flow down into the whole of humanity that of which the Initiates had formerly taken care. In this wisdom we have that which unites, that which will unite the human beings who have left father and mother. But so far removed are people from this universal wisdom that they talk about ‘their own opinions,’ and they say, ‘I find this,’ ‘I believe that.’ They have passed over to egotism; they are in a condition of separation, but they have not yet made their connection with universal wisdom. They are as individual as possible! They must first disaccustom themselves from saying, when they are speaking about the knowledge of wisdom, ‘This is my standpoint.’ That is a childish position! There is no special standpoint in regard to wisdom. He only has comprehended the idea of the Holy Spirit who has comprehended that truth and wisdom are one I He who presses forward along the path knows that there is no such thing as different standpoints in truth; he knows that he is dealing with a fundamental unity. He no longer needs to attach himself to an authority, because the universal common Spirit of Wisdom and Truth joins mankind together into the great brotherhood I That is the experience at Whitsuntide, when the Apostles speak from the hearts of all men to all men. The festival of Whitsuntide is the indication that with the development of the highest authority, the Spirit of Truth unites us all. That which from that time on will live and work is the unifying wisdom which can be revealed to us as soon as we open ourselves to it and wish to receive it!

And he who sins against this wisdom which forms humanity into one brotherhood, he who sins against this universal Spirit of Truth and Wisdom, commits the great sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven him, because he is sinning against the development of the earth, because he is teaching the spirit of division and not the Unifying Spirit who will form the brotherhood of the future.

What teaches us this Unifying Spirit? Anthroposophy! Therefore positive Anthroposophy is also positive wisdom. It does not wish to preach in general ethical terms, for it is unnecessary to preach brotherhood to humanity; it wishes to give humanity wisdom, concrete wisdom which must lead to brotherhood. It gives this wisdom by teaching people to understand their own being, by answering the profound riddles of existence as to the whence and whither of man, by teaching the evolution of the world! He who thus penetrates into the wisdom, he who thus gathers knowledge, he who is prepared in this way by the positive teachings of Anthroposophy, comes entirely of himself to the union with humanity, for people are united into a brotherhood when the Sun of Wisdom unites them in the spirit; it completely ennobles them, completely transfigures them, completely unites them.

That is the mission of Christianity. Christianity is the expression of the connection between human beings who are becoming freer and freer, and it is the union in perfect freedom into a brotherhood in the light of the one truth I This brotherhood develops entirely of itself when you pay heed to those sublime words of Christ: ‘Ye will know truth by means of truth and the truth shall make you free.’

There will not be two thoughts about one and the same thing when humanity has come to this brotherhood in the spiritual; that is the profound meaning of this statement.

When humanity has known the truth, when it has lived the truth, it will have found the truth, through itself; it will then be truly free and will know the depth of the statement: ‘Ye will know the truth by means of truth and will make yourselves free!’

In this lecture we shall speak about the Mystery of Golgotha and connect it with an anthroposophical consideration of Easter. In the last lecture I was able to point out that the Mystery of Golgotha is extremely important, not only in the historical development of humanity, but that it has the deepest significance for the evolution also of the earth, inasmuch as we human beings are included in it. If an observer were to direct his gaze for thousands of years towards our earth from a distant planet it would appear to him to be undergoing a transformation. If he were to see clairvoyantly and not only physically, he would be able to observe that with the advent of Christ Jesus a spiritual transformation took place, and that the spiritual atmosphere of the whole earth changed. The earth also has a physical body, etheric body and astral body, and we are all enveloped not only by air but also by the etheric body and astral body of the earth. The observer would see that up to the advent of Christ Jesus these bodies exhibited certain colours; they then changed and took on new colours and different movements, so important was this event to the earth and to the evolution of humanity! But we must not think that with the birth of Jesus, with the advent of Christ, this transformation took place suddenly: it was being prepared during hundreds of years, and the change is not yet complete; it will, in fact, be a long time before all the fruits have matured, the seed for which was sown through the advent of Christ. If we wish to understand this, we must once more bring to mind the whole of evolution. We must go back to the time when man first assumed his present shape; we know that this was in the Lemurian epoch. We are now living in the so-called fifth age of the fifth epoch of our earth. If we were to go back to the Graeco-Latin age we should find in that fourth age a wonderful art and a wonderful justice. Further back, in the third age, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian- Hebrew Age, the priestly wisdom flourished. In ancient Persia appeared the first germs of religion which the wise Zarathustra sowed in the second age of our fifth epoch. Still further we come to the time when the most ancient Indian culture flourished, not that which we know from the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita; further back than that there was a wonderful ancient culture in the first age of our fifth epoch which was guarded and guided by the ancient Rishis, who instructed and led even the Initiates! Immediately prior to that, old Atlantis had been engulfed by the great flood. In Atlantis, which is called the fourth epoch, there lived people who had neither laws nor commandments; they were not yet able to think logically, neither could they reckon nor count. However, at that time people possessed other psychic powers, for example, their memory was extraordinary, and they lived in what to us would appear a wonderful intercourse with nature. We only imagine this epoch aright when we know that at that time the physical conditions which surrounded humanity were quite different from what they are to-day. A remembrance of it has been preserved in the Sagas of Niflheim or Nebelheim. Heavy, dense volumes of mist filled the whole atmosphere of ancient Atlantis, and as all the beings lived in these masses of mist the spiritual conditions also were entirely different. If we go still further back we come to the third epoch, to ancient Lemuria. The humanity which developed in this epoch did not come to an end, like the Atlanteans, through a gigantic flood, but through a mighty upheaval by the forces of fire. This ancient Lemuria lay south of present Asia, north of Australia and east of Africa. The seer who with spiritual vision looks back to the first portion of this Lemurian epoch, finds human beings with quite a different form from present-day humanity. They did not yet possess the germ of the higher soul which dwells in present-day humanity; they only had the coverings of this soul. These coverings consisted of physical body, etheric body and astral body, and these coverings had a kind of indentation in which to receive the Ego or ‘I.’

The self-consciousness, that of which we say ‘I,’ this immortal kernel in the nature of man still rested in the bosom of the Deity. Below on the earth were those bodies which were ready to take in this germ; and if we could see them they would seem very grotesque and extremely ugly. Just as at the present time these human coverings are enveloped by the air, so at that time the beings were enveloped by a spiritual atmosphere, they lived and moved in it. They had a form, a covering (the diagram may make this more comprehensible), which was ready to take in the ‘I,’ the higher soul. But this was still in a spiritual stratum which surrounded and moved around man. We must clearly understand that the spirit can assume different forms and that, which at that time was your spirit, had not till then needed a body; that is just its development, that it took up its abode in man, that it needed the physical body for its further development. The several souls at that time were not yet separated, but might be compared to a glass of water which consists of a great number of drops of water; just as the several drops are united with one another in this glass of water, so were all the souls dissolved in this spiritual atmosphere and united with one another. And if I now place a great number of tiny sponges in this water and each one absorbs a drop of it, so that the water is then divided up among the sponges, in the same way must we conceive of the process of the ensouling of the human bodies. That, which previously was around, sank into the bodies and thus the common spiritual substance was individualised in the several human coverings. However, these human vehicles did not take in the soul entirely. I had to indicate to you the method of ensouling in this manner, but you must clearly understand that outside the body, in the environment, a great deal of this spiritual substance was left over. And the development from Lemurian times up to our own consisted in this spiritual part which remained outside mankind, drawing in more and more into the human bodies.

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You must imagine that at that time man was continually in a half-sleeping, half-waking condition. Just as to-day when a sleeper is observed with spiritual eyes it is seen that only the physical body and etheric body He on the bed, while the astral body is outside and works upon the physical body (for the condition of sleep is produced through the astral body being outside), in the same way at that time one would have been able clairvoyantly to see these human beings always in this condition, but dreaming the most vivid dreams. When one human being approached another there arose in his soul a form of colour which signified sympathy or antipathy according as the other was a friend or a foe. Thus did the human being perceive the objects around him. But the more that which I have just described to you sank into man from the spiritual environment, the more did his consciousness become like the present-day consciousness and along with this went a physical fact. In the Bible there is the statement that ‘God breathed breath into man and he became a living soul’! In fact, at that time not only the breath was breathed into man as a physical movement of air, but there was also that which was contained in the air as Spirit. That which is within us as material air, the air which we can trace, is the physical body of a spirit surrounding the earth! When we breathe we inhale spirit.

It is quite true that that which sank into the coverings of man at that time when he breathed in the breath is the spirit, and the air is only the substance of this spirit! Really and truly we to-day inhale the body of this spirit; that which sank into man at that time is what is called the Holy Spirit! We must clearly understand that together with this kind of air-breathing, together with this in-sinking, there was something else which was interiorly connected with it, namely, the warm blood of man. Before this period of time had arrived there were no warm-blooded beings on the earth, these only originated later. Therefore at that time something else also took place: into the human body came a certain amount of warmth. The warmth which you now have within you was at that time in the environment of the physical ancestors of mankind. Imagine that the warmth which is in the blood of all mankind upon the earth was still at that time outside man, enveloping the earth. Warmth and spirit surrounded the globe,—it was enveloped in a mighty atmosphere of warmth. In this warmth was embodied a different spirituality, which was similar to the spirits who had reached their perfection on the Sun, when the Sun was still a planet. The spirituality embodied in warmth, equals in perfection the beings now inhabiting the sun. In fact, at that time, when this warmth-spirituality enveloped the earth, it was the vehicle of a common spiritual nature for all mankind, indeed it was none other than that of the Spirit of the Earth itself. For just as each man has a spirit, so to those who can see these things each planet is the expression of a spiritual being; and thus our earth is the body of a spirit, the Earth-Spirit, and the means by which this spirit penetrates into man is the warmth of the blood; through it the Spirit of the Earth penetrates into man himself. We must imagine that when the Lemurian development began, the spirit which belongs to the air sank into man, and also at the same time, as a higher spirit there began to sink into man, the spirit which is contained in the warmth of the blood, namely, the true Earth-Spirit.

The first spirit, which has its body in the air, makes it possible for man to develop the power of Speech; with the breathing process speech develops, the process of the utterance of the Ego begins, attaining its culmination in the Atlantean epoch. At the moment when God breathed breath into man the spirit began to speak out of the inner being of man, the soul began to utter its language,—from within man spoke Jehova Jahve—that is: ‘I Am. He Who is, He Who was, and He Who will be!’ This is the eternal kernel of being in every man, which is imperishable, and which will develop to all eternity as the permanent individuality. This was the first outpouring of the Deity into man; it is called the outpouring of the Holy Spirit or the outpouring of Jehova I According to the myths and sagas this god lives in the rushing wind; that which dwells in the air, that which is perceived as a sort of Storm-God or Wind-God is Jehova. It indicated that this Deity has His external body in the air. This Deity worked at the individualisation of mankind. He could not, however, accomplish this individualisation all at once, he had first to find a means to this end. At first mankind was divided into groups; a human being did not yet feel himself separated as an individual, he felt that he belonged to a tribe. The man of the present day, who has such a different consciousness, can scarcely form a right idea of this ‘feeling that one is part of a tribe.’ As a hand feels itself to be a part of our organism so did a human being feel himself to be a part of his tribe. The more the tribe expanded to a nation the more individual did the several human beings become.

What we know as the process of becoming more individualised is connected with the blood. When this outpouring of the spirit took place in the Lemurian epoch, it was not one common spirit which sank into the human bodies. There were many separate individualities in the spiritual environment of the earth. Jehova was one Deity among many! It is because many such Race-Spirits sank down, that mankind split up into peoples; the more they sank down the more were the greater races formed. But a complete union of humanity into one single brotherhood was impossible in this way! Brotherhood is only possible when in addition to this ensouling which acts in many races, the common Earth- Spirit which dwells in warmth gradually streams into mankind! When one speaks of Jehova one has really to speak of many Jehovas, many Holy Spirits; but when we speak of the spirit dwelling in warmth we are then speaking only of one. In this one spirit we have the Logos itself, the Christos, the Spirit of the Earth, the unifying spirit of humanity on the earth!

If we reflect that everything contained in what pertains to Manas exists in multitude, and that everything contained in Buddhi acts as unity, we have here the contrast between the two, and we understand it in this way: That through the outpouring of spirit through Manas humanity had to be prepared for the outpouring of the uniting Spirit of Buddhi, until Christos Himself came Who gathers all together into an unity!

At the time when Christos appeared there was a common covering which surrounded the whole earth. In it we have all that exists as Christos Spirit, as the unifying principle. And just as in Lemuria the Spirit was out-poured, so also the Christos Spirit was poured forth slowly into humanity and is still being out-poured, that Spirit Who has His Body in the warmth of the blood. When He is completely poured forth, there will be in the whole of humanity the consciousness that it is a single brotherhood. Each one will feel himself drawn to the others as a brother; all that separated will have given way, and humanity will be gathered into one great community.

In the earth-planet and in all the beings connected with it we have what is called the body of the Christos Spirit. Therefore, we have to take quite literally the statement, ‘He who eats My bread treads upon Me with his feet!’ (John 13, 18, Lutheran version). For whose bread does man eat? What does he tread upon with his feet? He eats the bread of the body, and treads with his feet upon the body, which is described as the body of the Christos Spirit, that into which the Christos Spirit has come!

If we had been able from another planet to observe our earth a few centuries before Christ, and then on through further centuries, we should have been able to follow with the eyes of the spirit how that which previously formed the spiritual atmosphere gradually began to pour into the several human beings, and how the whole atmosphere of our earth has thereby changed. This is the Christos Spirit, Who from that time has poured Himself in, and that is the cosmic significance of Christ Jesus!

Preparations for this were made thousands of years before Christ. Anyone able to follow the evolution of the earth would see that the transformation began in the circle of the so-called founders of religion. In Egypt Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great, guided humanity in the transformation of the narrow tribal-principle; Zoroaster, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, all worked at this transformation also. Only when we understand all this do we learn to understand the spirit of Christianity more and more.

The outpouring of the Spirit was able to bring it about that the love of human beings towards one another was connected with the blood: people loved one another more as members of a tribe, their love was conditioned by the blood which they had in common; but the spirits who came into mankind as Race-Spirits, who brought about this love which was connected with the blood, acted at the same time in such a way that they separated and individualised the human beings more and more; men thereby became more and more egoistic and selfish. But then, on the other hand, there poured down the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of the unifying Christos. Only when these two streams work fully in man can he, entirely of himself, and filled with the Christos Spirit, find his way to others in love.

Now we must clearly understand that with the human blood was connected that which produced the feeling which expressed the blood-love. This later developed into selfishness; the blood took on the character of egoism, selfishness. This blood which had become egoistic had to be overcome. The surplus egoism in human blood was sacrificed on the Cross. If it had not flowed then, selfishness would have become greater and greater, egoism would have had the upper hand more and more. Human blood was sacrificed in order to cleanse humanity from egoism, and this cleansing of the blood from the egoistic ‘I’ is the Mystery of Golgotha!

He who sees only the material process, he who only sees the Man bleeding upon the Cross can never understand this deeply mystic event! We only understand the Mystery of Golgotha when we know that on the Cross flowed the blood which humanity had to lose in order to be set free from the bonds of egoistic selfishness. He who cannot understand this spiritually can never understand Christianity, nor can he understand the so-called redemption. We only understand the evolution of humanity when we comprehend the central position occupied in it by the Mystery of Golgotha, which expresses the highest spiritual development of humanity.

In ancient times before the Christos-principle entered into human evolution we have the Mystery of the Spirit; later, when Christos Jesus came in, the Mystery of the Son was revealed; in the future there will be the Mystery of the Father. This last is announced in the Apocalypse where the future Mysteries of the Father are described.

We shall now describe the Mysteries of the Spirit. They were founded in the ancient seminaries of the Adepts in a place lying between America and Europe, in ancient Atlantis. These ancient Atlantean Adept-Schools have been continued up to our day. The Mysteries in Post-Atlantean countries were a continuation of these ancient Turanian Adept-Schools. We find these Mysteries everywhere, in ancient India, in Persia, Chaldea, Egypt and Greece. One who was sufficiently prepared and who had withstood the necessary tests was admitted to the training and could be initiated. He had received the teachings of the Wisdom, he had purified himself from impulses and desires, he had accustomed himself to a regulated thought-life, he loved all humanity; he had become homeless, for he could love all men equally—not only those to whom he belonged through the ties of blood. All this was done in these Schools. What was gained in them and is still gained to-day is a stage of development in advance of the normal.

The pupil who had advanced so far that he no longer felt himself as the son of a tribe or a family, who had reached this last phase so that he loved all humanity, and had thus become the Son of Man, passed on to initiation, to the secret of the Pyramids. He was then put into a sleep which lasted for three days. In this sleep the Initiator was able to withdraw the spirit of the pupil, just as your spirit is withdrawn from your body in sleep; this process, however, was conscious in the case of the pupil. The Initiator was thus able to lead over into life what the pupil had previously learned. He had learned that there is an astral and a devachanic world, he had acquired ideas and feelings, and because he passed out of his physical body with these ideas and feelings, which are anchored in the astral body and etheric body, the Initiator was able to present all this before him in actuality; the pupil went through the astral and devachanic worlds, he experienced what he had previously learned, he thus became one who knows. Those worlds were no longer hidden from him; be brought back the remembrance of them. When he then reawakened in his physical body there came a cry which wrung itself from the soul when it returned from the spiritual worlds, when the ‘I’ had become a citizen of the higher worlds, when it had sojourned among spirits. When the pupil had experienced the secrets of the spiritual worlds, when he had returned into this life and become a missionary, a messenger of the spirit—all this on awaking burst forth exultantly in the words, ‘Eh, Eh, lama azobothami!’ that is, ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’ This was what one heard from each one who was initiated in this way: ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’

If you had tested such a person you would have found that initiation was a pre-announcement of what is contained in Christos Jesus; that in the etheric body of such an Initiate Buddhi had awakened; in him Christ had inwardly awakened, but He had not come as far as to the physical body. As etheric men these Initiates had become immortal, in their etheric body they had experienced immortality.

Then came a great advance. It came with the advent of Christos to the earth,—with the One Who died upon the Cross. He experienced everything down even to the physical body: in the physical body everything had become life within Him which the Initiate in the Mysteries underwent in his etheric body. One could now see this with physical eyes.

The Initiates could feel bliss because they inwardly experienced how life must conquer death. After this time one needed this no longer; through Golgotha there had descended to the physical plane that which formerly was experienced in the Mysteries.

I must now describe one thing to you before we can understand the Mystery of the Son. In the Gospel we find a description of the last Easter-supper. This was not an ordinary meal. Christos Jesus was surrounded by twelve human figures. He sat among them as if at table. And as what did they appear, these twelve human figures? Each one who as an Initiate had gone through the experiences of the higher worlds, had experienced the same. By these twelve Apostles are to be understood twelve of the Initiate’s own embodiments, twelve of his own lives through which he himself had passed. And these twelve lives were nothing else than that which he bore within himself as the parts of his body. In an occult sense the body is divided into twelve parts, and this is also meant to be nothing else than the representation of twelve incarnations. Each incarnation signifies an ascent; a human being is gradually purified in this ascent through his incarnations. Thus a human being is surrounded by the forms through which he himself has passed. They surround him as on the occasion of a meal; he himself, the human being, is the host. This is a picture which comes before the soul of each one in the Mystery of the Spirit. The one who comes last is the Son of Man; this is the man who through the series of his incarnations is so purified from egoistic love that he no longer feels himself as the son of a family, tribe or nation, but as the son of all humanity. This is the thirteenth among the twelve, who represents the highest perfection, he who loves all; this is the Initiate, he himself. That which was experienced by each one who was initiated into the higher world was repeated by Christos Jesus on the physical plane in this Easter meal.

Let us now trace this repetition. It is enveloped as if by a veil. Just as everything esoteric is given externally, exoterically, hidden as with a veil, so also was this Easter meal which Christos Jesus gave. This is not an ordinary meal; that which the Initiates of the Spirit had formerly experienced so often on the higher plane was to be repeated on the physical plane as an external, physical gathering.

In St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 22, v. 8-20, we read: ‘His disciples asked Him: Where wilt Thou that we prepare the Pascal Lamb? He sent His disciples, saying: Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water, follow him. And where he goes in, say to the householder, the Master saith unto thee, where is the guest-chamber where I may eat the Pascal Lamb with My disciples? And he will show you a large room furnished with cushions and ready, there make ready for us.’ (Also Mark 14, v. 12-25.)

During the Easter meal He explains once more that He is the Spirit of the Earth, that the bread is His Body and the wine His Blood. As the Spirit of the Earth He may say of all the fluids which course through the earth, ‘This is my Blood,’ and with regard to all the materials which make up the body of the earth he may say, ‘This is My Body.’

Then comes the scene where Jesus develops the Mystery of the Spirit into the Mystery of the Son, in order to lead it up to the Mystery of the Father.

If you bear in mind the fact of the embodiment of twelve of his own incarnations as the figures which represent around him twelve of his own parts,—if you bring this to mind correctly and then with delicacy and inward tactfulness of soul try to comprehend a passage which contains what is deepest in Christianity, then in it you will be able to see the transition from the Mystery of the Spirit to the Mystery of the Son.

Remember once more what had to happen before the Mystery of the Son could come. That blood which is important to egoism on the earth had to be lost. Times will come when men will become more and more egoistic, and precisely for this reason had the superfluous egoistic blood to be sacrificed, in order that humanity might be united into one great brotherhood.

That which had been produced by humanity as such was spiritualised and ennobled by Christianity, although the egoistic element grew greater and greater through humanity becoming more and more independent. If we survey what since then has surrounded the globe; for example, if we consider all the means of external intercourse, all that reason has devised, all that the egoistic intellect has produced—all these things are only subsidiary means for the gratification of egoism. People were less egoistic when they produced fire by knocking two stones together and when they satisfied their needs in the simplest manner! The only counterbalance to this egoism was Christianity.

Just as the Son of Man sees the twelve figures around Him as the expression of his own incarnations, so will one who sees into the future recognise in these figures what humanity has still to pass through before it attains the conditions of completeness. He who passes through the Mystery of the Son sees into the future, and indeed to the end of the earth’s evolution when the earth passes over from the astral condition it will then have attained, into the Jupiter condition, the new planetary condition. Then as the fruit of its development it will imprint into the Jupiter condition the perfect love which will have been divested of all egoism, which will be entirely refined, purified, and spiritualised.

Hence Christos Jesus could say, ‘You who now sit around Me represent the various parts of My bodies, various degrees of perfection, and when I look into the future these are the twelve stations which must be surmounted in order to lead to the Father, to perfection.’ All that pertains to sensuality, all impulses and passions, instincts and passionate desires must be overcome. This is shown symbolically by what happens to the twelve. The age which follows is represented by Judas Iscariot! The lowest sensuality is here connected with the greatest egoism. It is Judas Iscariot who betrays Christianity! There will come a time when that which took place upon Golgotha will take place over the whole earth. It will seem as if egoism would put Christos and Buddhi to death. That will be the time of Antichrist. It is the law that everything that took place around the Cross will have to take place also on the physical plane. Then in a still later period of development everything that is base in man will fall away from him, and even now there is being prepared what he will become later. He will then no longer create from the impulse of lower passion. Just as at the present time he produces the word which can embody the highest that is in his soul, so he will in the future work creatively by the word; just as through sexuality he has become egoistic, so by the falling away of the same he will again become selfless. The blood of man will be transformed so that in the future he may create from pure, selfless feeling. There will be a human race which will create by the Word. The sexual organ will be transferred to the heart, lungs and larynx, and here we have one of the two evolutions which follows after Christianity.

The age when egoism rules is represented by Judas Iscariot. He who considers the events of the world impartially sees how sexuality in man is in the position to betray and kill everything spiritual. Man will become more alive when his higher part, the Word, is creative and when his heart is his spiritual creative organ. This is a picture which is to be compared with a passage in St. John’s Gospel from which we may see what will be the consequence when Christianity shall have made all mankind selfless and brotherly.

That which makes mankind egoistic you see embodied in Judas Iscariot; and the ultimate goal to which humanity will develop in the distant future, the twelfth station, is the Figure of Christ Himself.

The transformation comes about through the creative power pressing upwards from the lap to the heart. Now read the passage concerning the disciple of Jesus whom He loved most, and of whom it is said that he lies on Jesus’ breast. This is the passage which tells how the lowest power of production, the creative power of man, moves upwards from the lap to the heart, which is connected with the lungs and larynx. This passage tells that John is initiated into the Mystery of the Son by Christ Jesus. After the pupil has experienced this, he will have transformed his lower productive power into the higher and he will come through the Son to the Father.

And what may he then say? He may say what all Initiates say, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Thy Son.’

Read in St. John’s Gospel: ‘Then Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.’ Then the Easter meal, which took place on the physical plane, was finished.

Those who have gone through this by the side of Christos Jesus, will, when they pass out of earthly evolution and rise to a higher development, gather around Christos, and He will then once more be able to utter in the midst of this gathering the words which He uttered at that time on the Cross.

This passage has been wrongly translated as it passed through the Greek. It ought to read, ‘My God, My God, how very much hast Thou glorified me!’ (That is, spiritualised me).

This passage reveals to us the struggling loose from matter: The Mystery of the Son. It shows us that at that time the seer’s inner vision of the Redeemer of the world saw to the end of the earth’s evolution.

The great goal of humanity consists in overcoming all difference and in founding the great love of humanity. This goal will not be gained in any other way than by people learning to penetrate more and more into the spiritual worlds. But they will then not be dissolved in the Deity, as they were before they descended into the several human beings, they will be individualised—like the water in the tiny sponges. Humanity proceeded from the Divine Being and developed the various egos, and it will ultimately, completely individualised, but at the same time united into a brotherhood, form an unity which will give birth to a new star: the new star which in the Apocalypse is called The New Jerusalem. And then the Sphere-Harmony will echo the words, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Me!’

These words were uttered on Golgotha, and they will be repeated when humanity has risen to the highest stage, when it has progressed from Son to Father. Far, very far does the spiritual vision extend when it seeks to comprehend this Mystery of Golgotha!

The great festivals of the year are important times at which we ought to halt, lift ourselves above ordinary everyday affairs and cast our eyes over the great path of human evolution; they are occasions when we ought to survey not only centuries but thousands of years, and when at the same time we ought to look back consciously at the stations through which humanity has passed in the course of its evolution.

Goethe, the inspiring spirit of modern times, describes in a striking manner the power of the Easter bells. He describes how Faust, the representative of striving humanity, had come to the end of earthly life, and how the bells of Easter, the light of the Easter Festival, are able to conquer the impulse of death in the heart of this one who is seeking death. Goethe presented the development of humanity in the same way that he presents to us the impulse of the Easter bells. And when, in the not very distant future, humanity understands the close connection between the soul and all that lives and moves in the world, it will then also be known how the comprehension of the sources of life liberates us from the bondage of matter. At Easter-time mankind will learn something that will give it the unshakeable confidence that in man there dwells the source of Divine existence, uniting with the source of universal existence when we are able through this knowledge to rise to illumination. The nature of the Easter festival shows that humanity has known this deepest Christian Mystery as an external token; for the present festival of Easter is a symbol of what can only be found in the depths of the Sacred Mysteries. This festival was celebrated in the Sacred Mysteries of many lands in order to call forth the conviction that the life in Spirit is able to conquer the death in matter. In ancient times that which was able to give to man this conviction had to be announced from the Mysteries. But the progress consists in this being brought out of the Mysteries and becoming a possession common to all humanity. In this lecture and the next we shall try to show that this perception and conviction is making its way into ever-widening circles.

Since Easter is the festival of the resurrection of the human spirit we must gather together for serious study and try to rise to the greatest height of Spiritual Science.

Our Christian Easter festival is one of the forms of the universal Easter festival, and what the sages possessed as their strongest, deepest conviction was hidden in this Easter festival. A beautiful, profound, Eastern legend relates the following:

The great Teacher of the East, Sakya-Muni, the Buddha, blessed the countries of the East with his profound wisdom. Sakya-Muni preserved for later ages of humanity that which was the source of profound happiness when mankind was still able to see into the Divine world, viz., the Ancient Wisdom. Sakya-Muni had a great pupil, Kashiapa by name, and while the others did not comprehend the great wisdom that Buddha taught, Kashiapa did. When Kashiapa was about to die, he went to a mountain, hid himself in a cave and in this cave his body did not putrefy, but continued as it was. The Initiates alone know of this Mystery, for the body of the great Initiate rests in a hidden place. But Buddha said that when the Maitreya Buddha, the great Teacher and Leader of humanity would come, he would search out that cave, and with his right hand touch the corpse, and then a wonderful fire would descend from heaven and in this fire the body of the great Enlightened One would ascend. Thus this Easter legend also speaks of a resurrection, ‘a being withdrawn’ from earthly existence; it speaks of a victory, so that the forces of the earth have no power over the body, and when the great Initiate touches it with his hand, the supernatural fire will carry it up. Through this legend we shall be able to arrive at a deep understanding of the Easter festival; in it there is a hidden, a primeval wisdom which we shall only be able to approach gradually.

Why is not Kashiapa, like the Redeemer, the victor over death after three days? Why does the Eastern Initiate wait for a long time before he is withdrawn by the heavenly fire into heaven?

We shall gradually gain some idea of the wisdom contained in this. We must control our feelings in order to approach these great truths in all their warmth and fire at such festivals.

For present humanity there stand on the horizon two truths which are intimately connected with one another, two important points for the humanity that is developing and making efforts at the present stage of evolution. These are first, the burning thorn-bush of Moses (Exodus iii) and secondly, the fire that appears on Sinai (Exodus xix) amidst lightning and thunder and announces to Moses, ‘I AM THE I AM’ (Exodus iii, 14). Who is this Being? One who understands the message of Christianity also understands who this Being is who appears to Moses amidst lightning and thunder and gives the ten Commandments. The Gospel of St. John tells us that Moses foretold Christ Jesus (John v, 45 & 46) and, therefore, the power in the burning bush was the Christ. No other Divinity could be imagined when the words were uttered, ‘I AM THE I AM’. He governs invisibly, announcing Himself beforehand in the fiery lightning upon Sinai. And he alone understands the New Testament who knows that the God announced by Moses is the Christ. The God Who was to bring redemption to mankind made Himself known in a form derived from the fiery element in nature; for therein lives the Christ.

The same Being holds sway throughout the whole of the Old Testament and then He appeared visibly through the Event of Palestine.

Whom did the ancient Hebrew people reverence in reality? Those belonging to the Hebrew Mysteries were aware that they reverenced Christ; they recognised Christ in the statement: ‘Say to my people “I AM THE I AM.”’ And even if it were only known that God makes Himself known in fire, that would have been sufficient to enable one to recognise that the God in the burning bush and the God of Sinai is the same as the One who brought about the Mystery of Golgotha through His descent into the human body.

There is a mysterious connection between the fire that is enkindled externally and the warmth of the blood. It has often been said that man is a microcosm; but one must also know the external process that corresponds to each inward process. We shall have to enter deeply into spiritual science if we wish to recognise the meaning of the Easter festival. Here we come in touch with a deep mystery, a great truth.

What is it in the outer world that corresponds to the origin of human thought? Through his thought man experiences a world, and in that form no other being experiences thought. What enkindles thought within us, the simplest as well as the most sublime? Two things co-operate within us when a thought passes through our mind, viz., the astral body and the ‘I.’ The physical expression of the ‘I’ is the blood; the physical expression of the astral body is in the nerves. And our thoughts would never flash through us unless there were this interplay of blood and nerves. In the interplay between blood and nerves (inner fire and inner air) we have thought. And this in the cosmos is the rolling thunder when the fiery lightning is enkindled. Imperceptibly to the external world there rings out as thought that which outside is lightning and thunder. The lightning is like the blood, the thunder like the thought; and as the lightning gives rise to the thunder, so the thunder corresponds to the thought produced by the soul. We see the lightning flash out in the air, we hear the thunder, and we feel the blood, we perceive the nervous system, we perceive the thought flash through us and say, ‘both are one.’ And when the thunder rolls above, it is not a material phenomenon alone; it is actual reality when a person looks up and sees the lightning and hears the thunder and says: God is now thinking in fire in the way He has to announce Himself to us; this is the invisible God Whose thoughts are in rolling fire—the God who spoke to Moses. Where would this God have to dwell if He wished to appear on the earth itself?

That which is in the macrocosm is also in the microcosm. The God whom Moses heard above appeared as Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ appeared in the whole body of Jesus of Nazareth; He descended into the human form and thought as a man in the human body. And thus, the two poles meet, the macrocosmic God on Sinai and the same God microcosmically as a man incarnate in Palestine.

Truth, profound truth, is contained in the ancient Mystery-Wisdom. It is so deep that we need all knowledge to unveil this truth. And what an impulse did humanity receive through the descending Christ!

In ancient times the course of human development was very well known. It was known that man consists of four principles, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ‘I,’ and that he can rise to higher stages of existence through the transformation of his three lower bodies into Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. This physical body, in all its parts, has to be gradually spiritualised, so that that which has made man into man, the in-streaming of the Divine Breath, is spiritualised. And because this begins with the breath (Atem—Atman), the Old Testament says that at the beginning of his earthly existence man received the breath of life, which he has gradually to spiritualise. This can be seen in the whole of antiquity. Still more has to be spiritualised in man if he is to make the whole of his physical body living, viz., that which breath produces, the blood, the expression of the ‘I.’ It has to be laid hold of by an impulse that impels towards the spiritual. Christianity adds the Mystery of the blood, the Mystery of human fire, to the ancient Mysteries.

Regarding the human soul on earth in an earthly form the ancient Mysteries say:—Man’s spiritual being is enveloped by a physical body. It has to return again to the spiritual. As long as the human ‘I’ was not seized by an impulse that could be found on the earth, so long could religion not teach what may be called the self-redemption of the human ‘I.’ The great Avatars incarnate from time to time when mankind needs help. Thus Vishnu descends from time to time. One incarnation of Vishnu is Krishna, who explains what the nature of an Avatar is: He expresses what he himself is in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am the Spirit of Creation, its beginning, its middle and its end.’ The omnipotence of the Divine Being could not be described more beautifully—the Divine Being whom Moses saw in the element of fire, who not only weaves and moves through the world as a macrocosmic God, but who can also be found in the inner being of man. The Krishna-Being lives in all that bears the human countenance as a great ideal towards which the germ of man is developing. And when the breath can be spiritualised through the impulse of Golgotha, we have the principle of redemption through that which dwells within us: The Avatar Christ has redeemed us because He has the power for this, and thereby shows where the victory of the spirit over matter may be found.

Therefore, full redemption cannot be brought to Kashiapa until Maitreya Buddha comes for him. For only when the physical body is so spiritualised through Christ does it no longer need the cosmic fire, but the fire that seethes within man that brings about redemption. Thus we are able to illuminate legends such as these with the light that streams from Golgotha.

To begin with the world is dark. We may compare it to a dark room in which at first we can see nothing; we kindle a light and then all the splendour of the room appears. To begin with man strives in darkness; but when the true light burns, which comes from Golgotha, everything is illumined, even to the farthest future. To express this as a certainty is the purpose of the Easter festival. And when humanity can remember that through Spiritual Science it may really experience the most important symbols of the festival of Easter, the soul will feel itself expanded into an universe and will gradually rise to unite with all that lives there, ever more and more spiritually, from man to the universe. These are the sounds of the spiritual Easter bells, and when we hear them, all doubt about the spiritual world will vanish. Life in the spirit has claimed us again when we understand these spiritual Easter Bells.

One great advantage of such an important time-symbol as the festival of Easter is that it makes our hearts and souls well fitted to see more and more deeply into the riddle of the nature of man.

Let us once more consider the Oriental legend upon which we threw a little light in the last lecture and regarding which we already know that it contains something important for human life—the legend of Kashiapa, the enlightened pupil of Sakya-Muni, who possessed all the wisdom of the East and regarding whom it was justly said that all his followers could not preserve what he had drawn from Sakya-Muni’s fount of wisdom. The legend says that when Kashiapa was about to die he went to a cave in a mountain and died consciously, and that his body did not putrefy, but it could not be found by any human being until he was able to penetrate into such mysteries through Initiation. And it was prophesied that the vehicle of the ancient Wisdom would appear in a new form as Maitreya Buddha, who, when he has reached the zenith of his earthly existence will go to where the corpse is resting and will touch it with his right hand, and fire will come down from the universe and the undecayed body of Kashiapa will be drawn into the higher worlds. Thus the East is awaiting the appearance of Maitreya Buddha and his action on the body of Kashiapa.

Will it be so? Will he appear? Will Kashiapa’s body be withdrawn by the wonderful fire?

We shall be able to get an inkling of the profound wisdom contained in this as an Easter miracle when we inquire into the miraculous fire that is to take up Kashiapa’s remains.

In the last lecture we observed that Christ announced Himself to Moses in the thunder and fiery lightning of Sinai. For it was none other that said to him, ‘I AM THE I AM.’ He gave His blessing in a prophetic manner as a fiery flash of lightning upon Sinai. And then He appeared in the microcosm in Palestine: The God who announced Himself in the heavens appeared in a human body in the Event of Palestine in the fire that dwells in our blood, and through this Event—if we follow the consequences of what it was to the earth—we find the fire which takes up Kashiapa’s remains.

The progress of the world consists in everything material being spiritualised. The fire appeared materially to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and upon Sinai; through Christ this fire is spiritualised. And who sees the burning fire after the Christ-Event? It is the spiritual eye which is opened by the Christ- Impulse itself and which the Christ-impulse has awakened. Thus the fire worked spiritually. It was perceived again when Saul’s eyes had been enlightened, when he became clairvoyant and recognised in the heavenly fire the One who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus both saw the Christ: Moses saw Him in the material fire; but the Christ spoke to the illuminated eye of Saul from the spiritualised fire. As matter is related to spirit, so in the course of the development of the world is the material fire of Sinai related to the fire that streamed towards Saul or Paul.

And what has come into evolution through all this? Let us consider the figures in humanity which were the expression for the Avatars, such as Vishnu, Krishna, etc., who had to appear in order that humanity might find the way back into the spiritual world. In ancient times humanity needed divine power for this. Through the Mystery of Golgotha the power has been given to man to find within himself the forces which raise him up. Christ descended deeper than all, for He used even this earthly body for this. Christ redeemed humanity with human powers; He placed these powers before our souls in the form in which they can be in their original power. What would have happened if Christ had not appeared? If the Enlightened Ones had been able to descend they would at length have found only human beings so steeped in matter that the spiritual powers would not have been able to bring man up again out of the impure matter. The Oriental sages looked out sadly into the future, for they knew that Maitreya Buddha would appear, but the Ancient Wisdom would then have no disciples. And if it had continued in this way, Maitreya Buddha would also have preached to deaf ears, and that which would have been on the earth would have caused Kashiapa’s body to decay, so that Maitreya Buddha would not have been able to carry up Kashiapa’s remains. They pondered sadly as to whether there would be anyone left who would understand Maitreya Buddha. Something had to sacrifice itself in a physical substance, not a God in human form, but a human being who bears God within him, in order that matter may be made into such a purified substance that for future incarnation the ancient wisdom can be intelligible. And it can be understood that the Event of Golgotha has acted in this way for humanity. How deeply has it penetrated into the nature of man and into human existence!

Six hundred years before the Event of Golgotha we see certain occurrences in the human soul and again six hundred years after. One can scarcely present to the human soul a greater or more important time than that sublime period when Buddha was gradually enlightened. He appeared in a royal palace—not in a stable, among poor shepherds. It should be noticed, however, that he went forth from the palace and observed life in its various forms. He perceived that ‘birth is sorrow.’ He searched further with his soul and found a sick man: thus can man become when he is carried to the earthly world by the thirst for existence: disease is sorrow. He found an old man who had gradually lost the use of his limbs: age is sorrow. He saw a corpse: death stood before him with all that it blots out. To be separated from what one loves is sorrow. To be united with what one does not love is sorrow. Not to have what one desires is sorrow.

The teaching regarding sorrow rang out with sublimity and innumerable people learned that they ought to long for release from this earthly existence, because only deliverance from the thirst for existence can lead to the spiritual.

And now let us allow our vision to sweep over a period of 1,200 years, 600 b.c. to 600 a.d. Notice, one thing in the age of Buddha, viz., the corpse and what Buddha felt and taught when he saw this—and then 600 years after the Event of Golgotha I Innumerable souls then turned towards a wooden cross upon which hung a corpse; but from this corpse proceeds the impulse through which life conquers death. It is the opposite pole of what Buddha perceived when he saw a corpse. It is the certainty that existence is not sorrow. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the body of Christ Jesus on the cross was the token of the knowledge of life, the resurrection of life, the victory over death. Although in 600 b.c. the entry into the physical world was sorrow for man, how do the great truths of life now present themselves before the soul? Is birth sorrow? Those who understand the Event of Golgotha, who feel that they are connected with it, gladly enter upon this earth which Christ has entered; and through the union with Christ comes the knowledge that birth is the door to the finding of the Redeemer who also clothed Himself with physical matter. Is disease sorrow? No! Even though humanity cannot yet understand what the spiritual life is which streams in with Christ, and that the one who lets himself be filled with the Christ-Impulse can overcome all disease by the powers he develops within him; for disease is an opportunity to overcome a hindrance, and this man can do through the strength of the Christ-power developed within him. One has to deal with the burden of old age in the same manner. And death is not sorrow, because through the Event of Golgotha death has been overcome. Can separation be sorrow? No! The souls that permeate themselves with the Christ-power know that love can form ties that cannot be severed, and there is nothing in the life between birth and death and between death and re-birth to which we cannot find the way through the Christ-Impulse; Christ brings us together with that which we love. In the same way, being united with what we do not love cannot be sorrow, because the Christ-Impulse teaches us to love all and when we find the way that leads to this, it can no longer be sorrow, for there is nothing else that we do not embrace in love. This is the case also with desire, for desire is so purified by the Christ-Impulse that one only desires what ought to come to one. If it is withheld, then it is for purification and the Christ-power gives one the strength to feel it as a purification. Therefore again it is no longer sorrow.

There is no greater impulse to anew becoming, and also to further development than the Event of Golgotha, which continues to work on and will positively have mighty consequences to the humanity of the future. Christ is the greatest Avatar and when such a Being descends, as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, something most profoundly important comes into evolution. We sow a grain of wheat in the earth; it germinates: the stalk and ears of wheat grow and the many, many grains are facsimiles of the one grain of wheat we sowed in the earth. It is exactly the same in the spiritual world, for ‘all things transitory are but symbols’ (as below, so above). When the Event of Golgotha had taken place, something happened to the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth: through the power of Christ they became multiplied and in the spiritual world there have been since that time many, many reproductions of this astral body and this etheric body, and these worked on. When a spiritual individuality descended, it clothed itself with an etheric body and an astral body; and when an individual’s karma allowed it, an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into him. This was the case, for example, with St. Augustine in the early centuries of our era; into his etheric body was woven a reproduction of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, but his astral body and ‘I’ were his own.

Thus that which had enveloped the God-Man of Palestine was transferred to other human beings who were then to carry the impulse further in humanity. As Augustine had his own ‘I’ and his own astral body, he was subject to all the doubts and waverings that he had such difficulty in overcoming; this came from these still imperfect parts of his being. When he struggled through, he came upon the forces of the image of Jesus of Nazareth in his etheric body and was thereby able to give out truths as a great mystic for some time—and there were many such. Hence the great archetypal ideas were able to flash out in them. These originated from the interwoven copy of the sacred etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth in certain people of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries a.d. In addition to the contents of the teaching of Christ they received interwoven into them an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth; therefore they knew from inner enlightenment that Christ lives. It was the same with Paul when he saw. Was it possible for him to have been converted before then through what could be told regarding the Event of Palestine? No one had been able to make a Paul out of Saul and yet the most important impulse went out through him who at that time became a believer through an occult event. Those who wish to have a Christianity without spiritual enlightenment have a curious idea of it!

Again, reproductions of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth propagated themselves in inner enlightenment in other human beings. They could experience Christ, for they bore within them something which came from the historical Christ. Later, in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, people who through karma were ready for it had interwoven into them images of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Such, for example, were Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth of Thüringen, and others. Many, many were called through the continuous activity of Christ to carry it to posterity.

But something else was preserved for later times, viz., the copy of the I or Ego of Jesus of Nazareth. His I or Ego indeed disappeared from the three bodies when the Christ entered into them, but, through Christ, a still higher image remained and still exists to-day. It can be found in human beings who have made themselves ready for this and thereby at the same time for the splendour of the Christ-power and the Christ-Impulse which it bears within it. The physical expression for this is the blood. It is a great mystery. But there have always been those who knew this, who throughout the centuries since the Event of Golgotha have had to take care that humanity gradually matured to receive images of Jesus of Nazareth in the same way that images can be received in the etheric body and astral body. To this end a Mystery had to be founded, so that this ‘I’ could be preserved in secret. A brotherhood was formed, the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, which guarded this Mystery. This society has always existed, and in it it is said that its Founder took the cup which Christ Jesus used at the Holy Supper and in this cup he caught the blood of the Redeemer which flowed from the cross and collected it in the Holy Grail; that is, he preserved the cup with the Mystery of the image of the ‘I’ or Ego of Christ Jesus in this holy place, in the Brotherhood which consists of the Brothers of the Holy Grail.

To-day the time has come in which, if the hearts of men are opened by a spiritual life, they can rise to the understanding of this great mystery, when looking upon that sacred cup, souls become mature enough to know the mystery of the Christ-Ego, or I that can develop in each human being. In order to receive the Christ ‘Ego,’ or ‘I’ in contemplation upon the Holy Grail one needs to understand that which has here happened as a fact and to take it as a fact. And when mankind has been prepared more and more, the Christ-Ego will develop in them more and more; they will understand in how far the Christ- Ego is the great ideal for humanity. And when humanity has understood this, it will begin to perceive that the certainty of life proceeds from the death upon the Cross of Golgotha. The Christians of the future will understand Christ differently—Christ Who underwent death. They will understand Him as the triumphant Risen One of the Apocalypse, as the Uplifted One Who raises all mankind with Him to the right hand of the Father.

Thus the symbol of Easter points us to the perspective of the whole future of the earth and it shows us that the whole of Christendom will one day from being a Saul become a Paul.

Christ made Himself known to Moses in the material fire on Sinai; He will appear to us in a spiritualised fire. He is with us all the days, even to the end of the world, and He will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have cleared their vision through the Event of Golgotha. They will see Him. Formerly they saw Him differently, but in future they will see the true form of Christ in a spiritual fire. Through Christ having worked down so deeply, even into the physical bony structure or skeleton, He has so purified this physical matter that it will never become what the Enlightened Ones of the East supposed it would, when they thought that the Enlightened One of the future would not find human beings on the earth who would understand Him. Christ was led to Golgotha in order that the fire should not become dross, but that it should be spiritualised. Human beings will understand the fire when they themselves are spiritualised; and thus Maitreya Buddha will find understanding, and humanity will understand the primeval Cosmic Wisdom.

Whither will Kashiapa’s remains be taken and through what will they be rescued? We are told that Maitreya Buddha will touch him with his right hand and he will be withdrawn in a fire.

In Paul’s fire we have to see the spiritualised fire in which will be hidden the body of Kashiapa. In this fire will be hidden all the greatness of the future. We shall see it stream into that which man will become through the Mystery of Golgotha.

A Redeemer meets us in the symbol of the Easter bells; they give us to understand how man ascends or swings himself up to spiritual heights through the Mystery of Easter.

Faust became blind, yet clear light shone within, so that he could work upwards into the worlds where man’s more noble principles will be saved, in the purified spirituality which has flowed into humanity from the Event of Golgotha.

On this day when we meet to celebrate our Christmas festival, it may be seasonable to depart from what has been our customary routine and, instead of seeking after knowledge and truth, to withdraw inwardly, foregathering for a time with that world of feeling and sensations which we are endeavouring to awaken by the aid of the light we receive through Anthroposophy.

This festival now approaching, and which for countless persons presents a time of joyousness—joyousness in the best sense of that word—is, nevertheless, when accepted in the way in which it must be accepted in accordance with our anthroposophical conception of the universe, by no means a very old one.

What is known as the ‘Christian Christmas’ is not coeval with the dawn of Christianity in the world—the earliest Christians, indeed, had no such festival. They did not celebrate the Birth of Christ Jesus. Nearly three hundred years went by before the feast of His Nativity began to be kept by Christianity.

During the first centuries, when the Christian belief was spreading throughout the world, there was a feeling within such souls as had responded to the Christ Impulse inclining persons to withdraw themselves more and more from contact with the external aspects of life prevalent in their day—from what had grown forth from archaic times, as well as from what was extant at the inception of the Christ-Impulse. For a vague instinctive feeling possessed these early Christians—a feeling which seemed to tell them that this Impulse should indeed be so fostered as to form anew the things of this earth—so forming them that new feelings, new sensations, and, above all things, fresh hopes and a new confidence in the development of humanity should permeate all, in contradistinction to the feelings which had before held sway—and that what was to dawn over the horizon of the vast world-life should take its point of departure from a spiritual germ—a spiritual germ which, literally speaking, might be considered as within this Earth.

Oft-times, as you will be aware, have we in the spirit transported ourselves to those Roman catacombs where, removed from the life of the time, the early Christians were wont to rejoice their hearts and souls. In the spirit have we sought admittance to these places of devotion. The earlier celebrations kept here were not in honour of His Birth. At most was the Sunday of each week set apart in order that once in every seven days the great event of Golgotha might he pondered; and beyond this, there were others the anniversaries of whose death were kept during that first century. These dead were those who had transmitted with special enthusiasm the account of that event—men whose impressive participation in the trend thus given to the development of humanity had led to their persecution by a world grown old. Thus it came to pass that the days upon which these Martyrs had entered into glory were kept as the birthdays of humanity by these early Christians. As yet there was no such thing as a celebration of the Birth of Christ. Indeed we may say that it is the coming—the introduction—of this Christ-Birth Festival, that can show how we in the present day have the full right to say: ‘Christianity is not the outcome of this or that dogma, it is not dependent upon this or that institution—dogmas and institutions which have been perpetuated from one generation to another—but we have the right to take Christ’s own words for our justification, when He says that He is with us always, and that He fills us with His Spirit all our days.’ And when we feel this Spirit within us we may deem ourselves called to an increasing, never-ceasing development of the Christian Spirit. The anthroposophical development of the Spirit bids us not foster a Christianity which is frozen and dead, but a new and living Christianity—one ever quickening with new wisdom and fresh knowledge, an evolution from within, stretching forward into the development of the future.

Never do we speak of a Christ Who was, but rather of an eternal and a living Christ. And more especially are we permitted to speak of this living and ever-active Christ—this Christ Who works within us—when the time is at hand for dwelling on the Birth-festival of Christ Jesus, for the Christians of the first centuries were alive to the fact that it was given to them to imbue what was, as it were, the organism of the Christian development with a ‘new thing’—that it was given to them to add thereunto that which was actually streaming into them from the Spirit of Christ.

We must therefore regard the Christmas Festival as one which was not known prior to the fourth century; indeed, we may place the date of the first ‘Christ-Birth’ Festival in Rome as having taken place in the year 354, and it should, moreover, be particularly borne in mind that at a time less critical than is the present, those who confessed themselves Christians were, imbued with the true feeling—a feeling which impelled them to be ever seeking and garnering new fruits from the great Christian Tree of Life.

This perhaps is the reason why we too feel that at such a season we may do well to rejoice in an outward symbol of the Christ’s Birth—in the symbol of the Christmas-tree now before us and around which through the coming days countless people will gather, a symbol whose true meaning it is the mission of Anthroposophy with ever deepening seriousness to impress upon the hearts and souls of men.

We should indeed almost be coming to loggerheads with the evolution of the times were we to take our stand by this symbol—for it is a mistake to imagine it to be an old one. It would be, however, quite easy to imagine that some such poetic belief giving credence to the Christmas-tree being a venerable institution, might arise in the soul of present-day humanity.

There exists a picture which presents the Christmas-tree in Luther’s family parlour. This picture, which was of course painted during the nineteenth century, perpetuates an error, for not only in Germany during Luther’s days, but also amid the surrounding European countries, there were as yet no such trees at Christmas.

May we perhaps not say, that the Christmas-tree of to-day is something which should be taken rather as the prophetic sign of times to come?—that this Tree may, as the years roll on, be regarded ever more and more as the symbol of something stupendous in its meaning—in its importance? Then, indeed, being trammelled by no illusions as regards its historical age, we may let our eyes rest on this Christmas-tree the while we call before our souls an oft-repeated memory—that of the so-called ‘Sacred Legend.’ It runs as follows: When Adam was driven forth from Paradise (this Legend, I should add, is told after many fashions, and I shall here only put the matter as shortly as possible)—when therefore Adam was driven forth from Paradise, he took with him three seeds belonging to the Tree of Life—the tree of which man had been forbidden to eat after he had once eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And when Adam died, Seth took the three seeds, and placed them in Adam’s grave, and thus there grew from out the grave a tree. The wood of this tree—so runs the legend—has served many purposes: From it Moses is said to have fashioned his staff; while later on, it is said, this wood was taken to form the Cross which was raised upon Golgotha.

In this way does a legend significantly remind us of that other Tree of Paradise, the one which stood second. Man had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge: enjoyment of the Tree of Life was withheld from him.

Yet within the heart of man has remained for evermore a longing, a desire for that Tree.

Driven forth from the Spiritual Worlds—which are signified by ‘Paradise’—into an external world of appearances, men have felt within their hearts that yearning for the Tree of Life.

But what man was denied unearned and in his undeveloped state, was nevertheless to be his through the struggle of attainment when with the aid of cognition he should in the course of time and through his work upon the physical plane, have made himself ripe to receive and capable of using the fruits of the Tree of Life. In those three seeds we have presented to us man’s longing for the Tree of Life.

The Legend tells us that in the wood of the Cross was contained that which came from the Tree of Life, and through the entire development there has been a feeling, a consciousness that the dry wood of the Cross did nevertheless contain the germ of the new spiritual life—that there had been ordained to grow forth from it that which, provided man enjoyed it in the right way, would enable him to unite his soul with the fruit of the Tree of Life—that fruit which should bestow upon him immortality, in the truer sense of the word, giving light to the soul, illumining it in such manner as to enable it to find the way from the dark depths of this physical world to the translucent heights of spiritual existence, there to feel itself as indeed participator in a deathless life.

Without, therefore, giving way to any illusion, we—as beings filled with emotion (rather than as historians)—may well stand before the tree which represents to us the tree of Christmas-tide, and feel the while we do so, something in it symbolical of that light which should dawn in our innermost souls, in order to gain for us immortality in the spiritual existence; and turning our gaze within we feel how the spiritual tendency of anthroposophical thought permeates us with a force which permits of our raising our eyes to behold the World of the Spirit. Therefore, in looking upon this outward symbol—the tree of Christmas-tide—we may indeed say: ‘May it be a symbol to us for that which is destined to illumine and burn within our souls, in order to raise us thither—even to the realms of the Spirit.’

For this tree, too, has, so to speak, sprouted forth from the depths of darkness, and only such persons might be inclined to cavil at so unhistorical a view, who are unaware that the thing which external physical knowledge does not recognise has nevertheless its deep spiritual foundations. To the physical eye it may not be apparent how gradually this Christmas-tree grows, as it were, to be a part of the outward life of humanity. In a comparatively short time, indeed, it has come to be a custom that brings happiness to man, one which has come to affect the world’s intercourse in general. This, as I have said, may pass unrecognised, yet those who know that external events are but impressions of a spiritual process, are bound to feel that there may possibly have been some very deep meaning at work, responsible for the appearance of the Christmas-tree upon the external physical plane; that its appearance has emanated from out the depths of some great spiritual impulse—an impulse leading men invisibly onward—that indeed this lighted tree may have been the means of sending to some specially sensitive souls that inspiration of the inward light whereof it furnishes so beautiful an external symbol. And when such cognition awakens to wisdom, then indeed does this tree—by reason of our will—also become an external symbol for that which is Divine.

If Anthroposophy is to be knowledge, then it must be knowledge in an active sense and permeated with wisdom—that is to say, it must ‘gild’—external customs and impressions. And so even as Anthroposophy warms and illumines the hearts and souls of men, present and future, so too must the Christmas-tree which has become so ‘material’ a custom recover its ‘golden glint,’ and in the light of this true knowledge rise once more to illustrate its true symbolical meaning in life, after having spent so long a time amid the darkened depths of men’s souls in these latter days.

And if we delve down even a little further and presuppose a deep spiritual guidance to have placed this impulse within the human heart, does this not also prove that thoughts bestowed upon man by the aid of the Spirit can attain to even greater depths of feeling when brought into connection with this luminant tree?

It used to be ancient custom common in many parts of Europe to go t into the woods some time before Christmas and collect sprigs from all kinds of plants, but more especially from foliage trees, and then seek to make these twigs bear leaf in time for Christmas Eve. And to many a soul the dim belief in ‘Life unconquerable’—in that life which shall be the vanquisher of all death—would thrill exultantly at the sight of all this sprouting greenery, branches artificially forced to unfold their tender leaves over-night at a time of year when the sun stands at its lowest. This was a very old custom—our Christmas-tree is of far more recent date. Where, then, have we in the first place to look for this custom?

We know how earnest was the language used by the great German mystics, more especially the impression created by the words of Johannes Tauler, who laboured so assiduously in Alsace; and anyone who allows the sermons of Johannes Tauler to ‘work upon him’ with the sincerity so peculiar to them will understand how at that time—a time when Tauler was more especially concerned in deepening the feeling of men for all that lay hidden within the Christian Belief—a peculiar, unique spirit must have prevailed, a spirit which of a truth was suffused with the Mystery of Golgotha. In those days when Johannes Tauler was preaching his sermons in Strasbourg, the passionate sincerity with which he delivered his ‘words of fire’ may well have sunk into the soul of many a listener, leaving there a lasting impression, and many such impressions may well have been caused by what Tauler was wont to say in his wondrously beautiful Christmas sermons. ‘Three times,’ said Tauler, ‘is God born unto men: Firstly, when He descends from the Father—from the Great All-World; again, when having reached humanity He descends into flesh; and thirdly, when the Christ is born within the human soul, and enables it to attain to the possibility of uniting itself to that which is the Wisdom of God—enabling it thus to give birth to the higher man.’

At all such seasons when the gracious habit of celebrating the Festivals prevailed, Johannes Tauler might be found round about the neighbourhood of Strasbourg dwelling earnestly upon the meaning of these deep verities, and more especially did he do this at the Christmas season. Indeed the words sinking at such times into receptive souls may have echoed on—for feelings, too, have their traditions—and what was felt within some soul’s depths in the hush of such an hour may—who knows?—still stir responsive chords from one century to the other. And so the feeling once possessing souls passed to the eye, and gave to this a capability of perceiving in that external symbol the resurrection—the birth of man’s spiritual light.

Taken from the point of view of material thought the coincidence may be deemed a pretty one: but for those who know the manner in which spiritual guidance permeates all that is physical it becomes far more than a coincidence to learn that the first record of a Christmas-tree having stood in a German room comes from Alsace, and indeed from Strasbourg in Alsace, while the date may be given as 1642.

How ill German Mysticism has fared at the hands of a Christianity wedded to outward forms may be seen in what happened to the memory of Master Eckhard, the great forerunner of Johannes Tauler, since posterity branded him a heretic after death—having omitted to do so while he lived!

Nor did the burning words of Johannes Tauler, words which flamed up from a heart fired with Christian passion, meet with much response; the outward Christianity of the times lacked the spiritual depth of the teachings proclaimed by these men, and this may fully account for the fact that in recording the news of this first Christmas-tree the ‘eye-witness’ alludes to it as ‘child’s play,’ and observes that ‘people would do better by going to places where the right Christian teachings could be proclaimed to them.’

The further progress of the Christmas-tree was a slow one. We see it figuring here and there about Middle Germany during the eighteenth century, but not till the nineteenth century did it become practically a regular ‘spiritual’ decoration intimately associated with the Christmas season—a new symbol of something that had survived throughout the centuries of time.

In such hearts, therefore, where the glory of all things can be truly felt—not in the sense implied by a Christianity ‘made up of words,’ but by the force of a true, a spiritual Christianity—sentiments of the highest human kind were ever prone to kindle in the tree’s illumined presence.

Another reason for placing the advent of the Christmas-tree at so recent a date may be seen in the fact that Germany’s greatest poets had left it unsung: had it been known in earlier times we may be sure that Klopstock, to mention only one, would have chosen this symbol for poetic treatment. And we may, therefore, gather additional certainty from this omission to strengthen our statement as to its being a comparative innovation.

More especially might we then dwell upon this symbol when the feeling of the spiritual truth of the awakening Ego wells up within our souls—that Ego which senses the spiritual bond ’twixt soul and soul, feeling it with intensified strength where noble human beings are striving in a common cause. And I will but mention one instance of how the fight of the Christmas-tree has streamed in to illumine the soul of one of humanity’s great leaders.

It was in the year 1821 that Goethe (whom we so often meet wherever we regard the life of the spirit in the light of Anthroposophy) was bringing his Faust to its close, and in so doing he came to find how essential the Christian symbols were in order to present his poetic intentions—that, in fact, they became the only possible ones. Goethe, indeed, experienced at this time most intensely the way in which Christianity weaves the noblest bond for joining soul to soul; and how this bond has to lay the foundations of a brotherly love not dependent upon the tie of blood, but on that of souls united in the spirit. And when we dwell on the close of the Gospels we are able to feel the impulse yet dormant within Christianity.

Gazing downward from the Cross upon Golgotha, Christ beholds the mother—beholds the son; and in that moment did He found that community which hitherto had only existed through the blood.

Up to that time no mother had had a son, no son a mother, without the tie being that of blood relationship. Nor were blood ties to be eliminated by Christianity; but to these were to be added spiritual ties, diffusing with their spiritual light those ties created by the blood.

It was to these ends, then, that Christ Jesus on the Cross spoke the words: ‘Woman! behold thy son!’, and to the disciple: ‘Behold thy mother!’ What had been instituted as a blood-tie became through the mediation of the Cross a bond of the spirit.

Wherever Goethe perceived a noble effort in furtherance of this spiritual union being made, he was moved to turn towards the true Christian spirit, and what possessed the heart soon yearned for outward expression. The year 1821 gave him a special opportunity for giving utterance to this desire. The residents of the little Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to the interests of which Goethe dedicated so great a measure of his powers, had united forces in order to found a ‘Bürger-schule’. The undertaking was, in fact, to be a ‘gift,’ as it were, to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Goethe, desirous of celebrating in some suitable manner the spiritual impulse that had led to so progressive a step, called upon various members to give poetic expression to thoughts respecting this undertaking they all had at heart. These verses Goethe then collected in a volume for which he himself wrote an introductory poem which was recited by Prince (later Grand Duke) Karl Alexander, then three years old, who presented the book to his father, Grand Duke Karl August—this little ceremony taking place beneath the Christmas-tree. So we see that the tree was, by the year 1821, already a customary symbol of the season and by this act did Goethe indicate the Christmas-tree as being the symbol of a feeling and sentiment for spiritual progress in things both great and small. His introductory poem written for this little volume is still preserved in the Weimar Library and runs as follows:

‘Bäume leuchtend, Bäume blendend,
Uberall das Süsse spendend,
In dem Glanze sich bewegend,
Alt—und junges Herz erregend—
Solch ein Fest ist uns bescheret,
Mancher Gaben Schmuck verehret;
Staunend schaun wir auf und nieder,
Hin und her und immer wieder.
Aber, Furst, wenn dir’s begegnet,
Und ein Abend so dich segnet,
Dass als Lichter, dass als Flammen
Vor dir glänzten allzusammen
Alles, was du ausgerichtet,
Alle, die sich dir verpflichtet:
Mit erhöhten Geistesblicken
Fühltest herrliches Entzücken.’¹

The above verses of Goethe are the first of what we might call Christmas poems, and when in connection with Anthroposophy we speak of ‘symbols’ we may well say that such symbols, which in the course of time surge up involuntarily within men’s souls, are indeed gilded over with the gold of wisdom.

We have seen that the first Christian Christmas was celebrated during the fourth century in Rome. It would seem, furthermore, a matter of divine dispensation that this Feast of Christ’s Birth has—as far as Middle and Northern Europe are concerned—been introduced at the very time when a most ancient feast—that of the Winter Sun, when the shortest days are chronicled—was also wont to be celebrated.

Now it must not be imagined that this change of the old time-honoured Festival into the new Feast, the Christmas Festival, was brought about in order, as it were, to conciliate the nations. Christmas was born purely and simply out of Christianity, and we may say that the way in which it became accepted by the more Northern lands was a proof of the deeply spiritual relationship connecting these peoples as well as their symbols with Christianity.

In Armenia, for instance, the Christmas Festival has never become customary, and even in Palestine the Christians were for a long time averse to its celebration, and yet it soon found a home in Europe.

And now we will try to understand in the right way the Christmas Feast itself when taken from the anthroposophical view—doing so in order that we may also be enabled to apprehend the Christmas-tree in its symbolic sense.

When, during the course of the year, we meet together, we allow those words—which should not be mere words, but rather forces—to permeate our soul in order that the soul may become a citizen of eternity. Throughout the year do we thus assemble allowing these words—this Logos—to sound upon our ears in the most varied manner, telling us that Christ is with us always, and that when we are thus assembled together the Spirit of Christ works in upon us, so that our words become impregnated with the Spirit of Christ. If only we enunciate these things being conscious that the word becomes a ‘carrier on wings,’ bearing revelations to humanity, then indeed do we let that flow in upon our souls which is the Word of the Spirit. Yet we know that the Word of the Spirit cannot entirely be taken up by us—cannot become all it should be to us if we have only received it as an outward and abstract form of knowledge. We know that it can only become to us that which it should be if it gives rise to that inner warmth through which the soul becomes expanded—through which it senses itself as gushing forth amid all the phenomena of world-existence—in which it feels itself one with the Spirit—that Spirit which itself permeates all that is outwardly apparent.

Let us, therefore, feel the Word of the Spirit must become to us a power—a life-force—so that when the season is at hand at which we place that symbol before us, it may proclaim to our souls: ‘Let a new thing be born within you. Let that which giving warmth can spread the Light—even the Word—rising from those spiritual sources, those spiritual depths—be born within you—born as Spirit-Man!’

Then shall we feel what is the meaning of that which passes over to us as the Word of the Spirit. Let us earnestly feel, at such a moment as the present, what Anthroposophy gives to us as warmth, as light for the soul, and let us try to feel it somewhat in.the following manner:

Look at the material world of to-day with all its perpetual activity, consider the way in which men hurry and worry from morning till evening, and the way in which they judge everything from the materialistic standpoint, according to the measure laid down by this outward physical plane—how utterly oblivious they are that behind all there lives and works the Spirit. At night people sink to sleep oblivious of aught else than that ‘unconsciousness’ enwraps them, and in the morning they similarly return to a sense of the consciousness of this physical plane. Thoughtlessly, ignorantly, man sinks to sleep after all his labours and worries of the day—never even seeking enlightenment as to the meaning of life.

When the anthroposophist has become imbued with the Words of the Spirit he knows that which is no mere theory or dogma: he then knows what can give warmth as well as light to his soul. He knows that were he day by day to take up naught but the presentments of the physical life, he would inevitably wither—his life would be empty and void. All he came by would die away were he to have no other presentments than such as the physical plane is able to place before him. For when of an evening you lie down to sleep you pass over to a world of the Spirit—the forces of your soul rise to a world of higher spiritual entities, to whose level you must gradually raise your own being. And when of a morning you wake again, you do so newly strengthened from out that spiritual world, and thus do you shed spiritual life over all that approaches you upon this physical plane, be it done consciously or unconsciously. From the Eternal do you yourself rejuvenate your temporal existence each morning.

What we should do is to change into feeling this Word of the Spirit, so that we may when evening comes be able to say: ‘I shall not merely pass over to unconsciousness, but I shall dip into a world where dwell the beings of eternity—entities whom my own entity is to resemble. I therefore fall asleep with the feeling, ‘Away to the Spirit!’, and I awaken with the feeling, ‘Back—from the Spirit!’ In doing this we become permeated with that feeling into which the Word of the Spirit is to transform itself, that Word which from day to day, from week to week, has been taken up by us here. Let us feel ourselves connected with the Spirit of the Universe—let us feel that we are missionaries of the World-Spirit which permeates and interweaves all outward existence—for then we also feel when the sun stands high in summer and directs its life-giving rays earthward that then too is the Spirit active, manifesting itself in an outward manner, and how—in that we then perceive His external mien, His outward countenance, mirrored by the external rays of the sun—His inner Being may be said to have retired beyond these outer phenomena.

Where do we behold this Spirit of the Universe—this Spirit whom Zoroaster already proclaimed—when only the outward and physical rays of the sun stream in upon us? We behold this Spirit when we are able to recognise where it is He beholds Himself. Verily does this Spirit of the Universe create during summer-time those organs through which He may behold Himself. He creates external sense organs! Let us learn to understand what it is that from Springtime forward decks the earth with its carpet of verdant plants giving to it a renewed countenance. What is it? ’Tis a mirror for the World-Spirit of the sun! For when the sun pours forth its rays upon us, it is the World-Spirit Who is gazing down on earth. All plant-life—bud, blossom and leaf—are but images which present the pure World-Spirit, reflected in His works as they shoot forth upon this earth:—this carpet of plants contains the sense-organs of the World-Spirit.

When in the autumn the external power of the sun declines, we see how this plant life disappears—how the countenance of the World-Spirit is withdrawn—and if we have been prepared in the right manner we may then feel how the Spirit which pulsates throughout the universe is now within ourselves. So that we can follow the World-Spirit even when He is withdrawn from external sight, for we then feel that though our gaze no longer rests upon that verdant cover, yet has the Spirit been roused in us to so great a measure that He withdraws Himself from the external presentments of the world. And so the awakening Spirit becomes our guide to those depths whither Spirit life retires and to where we deliver over to the keeping of the Spirit germs for the coming Spring. There do we learn to see with our spiritual sight, learning to say to ourselves:

‘When external life begins gradually to become invisible for the external senses, when the melancholy of Autumn creeps in upon our soul, then does the soul follow the Spirit—even amid the lifeless stones, in order that it may draw thence those forces which in the Spring will once more furnish new sense organs for the Spirit of the World.’

It is thus that those who having in their spirit conceived the Spirit come to feel that they too can follow this World-Spirit down to where the grains of seed repose in winter-time.

When the power of the sun is weakest and when its rays are at their faintest—when outer darkness is at its strongest—it is then that the Spirit within us united to the Spirit of the Universe feels and proclaims that union in greatest clearness, by filling the grains of seed with a new life. In this way we may indeed say quite literally that by the power of the seed we also live within and permeate—as it were—the Earth. In Summer-time we turn to the bright atmosphere about us, to the budding fruits of the earth, but now we turn to the lifeless stones, yet knowing that beneath them reposes that which shall in its turn again enjoy external life, and our soul follows in the spirit those budding germinating forces which, withdrawing themselves from outward view, lie dormant amid the stones in Winter-time.

And when Winter-time has reached its central point—when the darkness is deepest—then is the time at hand when we may feel that the exterior world is nevertheless not capable of counteracting our union with the Spirit—when within those depths to which we have withdrawn we feel the flashes of the Spirit-light—that light of the Spirit for which the greatest Impulse received by humanity was given by Christ Jesus. In this way we are enabled to sense what the Ancients felt when they spoke of descending to where the grain of seed lay dormant in Winter-time in order that they might learn to know the hidden powers of the Spirit.

We then come to feel that Christ has to be sought for amid that which is hidden—there where all is dark and obscure, unless we ourselves kindle the light in the Soul—that Soul which becomes clear and illumined when penetrated by the Light of Christ. At Christmas-tide, therefore, we may well feel an ever-increasing sense of strength—strength due to that Impulse which, grace to the Mystery enacted on Golgotha, has permeated the human race. If truly experienced in this way the Christ Impulse becomes for us indeed the most powerful incentive, strengthening year by year this life which is leading us into the Spiritual Worlds where death—as known in the physical world—does not exist.

It is in this way that we are enabled to spiritualise a symbol which to present-day materialistic-thinking persons is no more than a token of material joy and pleasure, and we thus may also feel within our hearts what Johannes Tauler really meant when he spoke of Christ having to be born three times: once as God the Father Who permeates the world—once as Man, at the time when Christianity was founded—and since then again and again, within the souls of those who can awaken the Word of the Spirit within their innermost being. For without this last birth Christianity would not be complete, nor would Anthroposophy be capable of grasping the Christian Spirit did it not understand that the Word brought home to us year after year is not intended to remain theory and dogma, but is to become both Light and Life—a force, indeed, by which we may contribute spirituality to life in this world as well as gather spirituality for ourselves—and so be one with the other—incorporated with the Spirit for all Eternity.

No matter the step of evolution upon which we stand—we can nevertheless feel what was felt at all times by those who had been initiated and who therefore really did in this Holy Night descend at the midnight hour to gaze upon the spiritual Sun in the darkness of the Christmas Night—when that spiritual Sun could call forth from apparently dead surroundings and waken into life all budding nature, bidding it burst forth and proclaim a new Springtide.

This is the Christ Sun we should feel behind the physical sun: to it we ourselves must rise—rise to experience and see that which, by grace of those new forces man may develop, shall unite him with the Spirit—then shall it also be for us to

See the Sun
About the midnight hour,
And build with stones
Amid the lifeless clay,
Finding that as we pass
To the dark night of Death
Creations new come forth—
Young morns arise to power—
The heights above reveal
The Gods’ eternal Word,
And depths below shall guard
The peaceful Place of Rest.

Dwelling in Darkness,
Oh! create a Sun!
And while ye weave the web,
Oh I recognise
The blissfulness of Spirit.

• 1. The first verse is descriptive of the earthly joys—the union, of friends and the gifts interchanged at Christmas; while the second hints at the spiritual significance of the ceremony, the flames of light giving rise to feelings and sentiments which respond to Higher Planes.—Translator's Note.