The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Dear attendees:] During their beautiful friendship, so significant for the newer intellectual life, Goethe and Schiller exchanged the works they were working on during the time of their friendship, and when Schiller received some parts of the “Wilhelm Meister” from Goethe, he wrote him strange, one might say, at first, peculiar words. Overwhelmed by the impression of the chapter he received at the time, he wrote:

The poet is the only true human being, and the best
philosopher is only a caricature compared to him.

These words may seem strange, but they will no longer seem so strange once we have delved a little into Schiller's soul and examined how he actually meant this saying. We will gain insight by comparing these words with the content of that famous letter that Schiller wrote to Goethe shortly after the two had formed their friendship, the letter that I have mentioned many times before. There Schiller wrote:

For a long time now, [although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. ...]

And now he is spreading it across the way in which Goethe views the world. He says that Goethe directs his gaze freely and openly and objectively over the things of the world and that he tries to gain an insight not by speculative means, but by seeking what is necessary in the totality of the world's phenomena. A “heroic” undertaking, as Schiller calls it. And then he explains in his own way why he finds this undertaking so heroic, and then he says: All your powers, your powers of mind, work together harmoniously and ultimately align themselves with the unifier of all powers of mind in your soul, with imagination.

So we see from this that Schiller sees something in Goethe's way of looking at the world, and indeed in the soul activity of Goethe, from which his artistic works have flowed, that it can lead people very deeply into the secrets of existence. Schiller therefore sees something special in the way Goethe developed his imagination, his fantasy, and if one examines what thoughts and opinions were actually exchanged between Goethe and Schiller, one finds that Schiller absorbed a meaningful concept of fantasy in the contemplation of the highest spiritual, and that is what one could call the “inner truth of fantasy”.

Schiller strove, and this can be seen again from his letters, to recognize how man, through development, can become a complete human being. In every human nature, he saw a higher human being, a representative human being, whom the ordinary everyday human being must increasingly approach. In Goethe's way of letting the powers of the mind work together in the imagination, of letting the imagination radiate what assigns each other soul power its place — in this kind of soul activity Schiller found something that makes man a complete human being, that best brings him to unite with the very foundations of the world from which man and things have flowed.

When we hear our great minds talk about imagination, it looks a little different than when, not only in everyday life, but also in many circles close to or even devoted to science today, imagination is talked about. Today, imagination is contrasted with the objective pursuit of truth as if it were directly opposed to the mental faculties that lead to the investigation of truth, as if it only served to combine things in an arbitrary way. If we can bring ourselves to understand Goethe and are convinced that Goethe was an expert in these matters, then perhaps a Goethean saying will be enlightening for us:

Man strives to fathom the secrets of nature and longs for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Yes, Goethe addresses the beautiful, that is, the creations of the imagination, the content of artistic creation, in such a way that he says: art, the beautiful, and thus the children of the imagination, are a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be fathomed without their activity.

Now, however, we have to agree with common sense, which describes imagination as a capacity for association that works according to the desires of the soul, that is, out of pleasure and other impulses that have nothing to do with objective knowledge. We have to admit that imagination often leads people away from the truth. Where would it lead us if we were to admit that imagination plays a role in external scientific research? Admittedly, no one will deny that imagination may play a preliminary role in scientific research. Those who are able to work with combining imagination are able to recognize hidden connections that others do not see, who work in the laboratory or in the physics cabinet and structure experience upon experience. But of course it must be fully admitted that for certain areas of research, of life, it is absolutely necessary that when someone makes such combinations through their imagination, they prove what they have combined in strict external evidence through experience. Thus imagination can be a guide to this or that connection, but it must be verified by the means of external, objective research; we are willing to concede that.

Nevertheless, a word such as Goethe's – or a position on the matter such as Schiller's – indicates that Goethe sees something in the works of imagination, in the creative activity of imagination, that also contains a truth, in contrast to the arbitrary, unfettered play that we might better call a fantastic play of ideas. But anyone who speaks of fantasy in such a way that it contains something of truth, you will readily admit, cannot speak of being forced by the external world to recognize this truth.

When we string fact after fact and seek to fathom the laws, then the results of our observations force us to our judgment. When we let our imagination speak, then there is no such external compulsion. That which underlies imagination, that which imagination brings forth, would therefore be something that, as truth, permeates imagination. Accordingly, an inner lawfulness would have to prevail in such a way that certain thoughts, brought together by imagination, appear before a higher forum as real, that certain conclusions of imagination, through an inner necessity, present an expression of truth.

Therefore, if creative imaginative activity is to have true justification, there must be something at work that acts as an inner guide to direct a person in their imaginative work, that does not allow him to fertilize his thoughts at random, according to his desires and pleasures, but rather what guides him to stringing thought to thought with a sure inner direction and thereby obtains something that is, in a certain sense, an expression of truth.

When we hear a true and great poet speak of imagination as a means of unraveling inner truths, then it is certainly permissible to measure this creative soul activity, this imagination, against that soul activity, that soul capacity, which, in the sense of spiritual science or theosophy, is suitable for leading into the foundations of existence.

Over the years, we have spoken at length about this spiritual world that underlies the material world. The methods that lead to the results we have so often discussed are – as terrible as the word may sound to some modern people – the so-called clairvoyant methods. Spiritual science offers information about facts and beings of the spiritual world, and these facts and beings are found through clairvoyance. It will not be my task here to discuss certain lower forms of clairvoyance – they can only be touched on – because these lower forms can never lead to any real results of spiritual science. On the other hand, it will be my task, in accordance with the time allotted to us, to discuss the method and scope of so-called higher clairvoyance, that is, clairvoyance achieved through genuine, truly appropriate training.

Many people today only know clairvoyance in the form of so-called lower clairvoyance, where it occurs to us as an accidental gift or disease, in somnambulism and other forms. There are conditions in human nature through which a person does not relate to his environment in the usual way, but in which he has filled his soul life, we might say, with images from another world. For the outside world, the somnambulist is in a kind of sleep. This sleep may be present to such a slight degree that the layman will always reply: Yes, he is indeed completely awake, he just sees differently than the ordinary person in his waking state. And such a person who sees differently is called a clairvoyant. When he perceives images in this more or less sleep-like state, these images sometimes form strange content, sometimes quite meaningful content. He can communicate these images and amaze those around him with the things he sees. In this somnambulistic state, he himself knows certain things through prediction, which then come true despite all objections. Such a person, who has tuned down his external daytime consciousness, can make statements about certain conditions that lie ahead of him, which appear astonishing. Such a patient can indicate exactly what can help him and how he is to be treated. In such states, the human soul does indeed penetrate through the shell of the external sense world and has another world before it. This cannot be denied, and anyone who denies it has simply not done any research in this field.

But all these forms are not what really interest us. That which is gained through such lower clairvoyance cannot be the subject of the spiritual science we are talking about here. The subject of this spiritual science is only that which is gained through the path of trained clairvoyance, the clairvoyance that man has acquired through the fully conscious application of the methods given to him by the corresponding schools. The aspiring clairvoyant performs each step with strict self-control, in complete awareness, just as other people behave in relation to the external world that they perceive with their senses. The only question now is this: how do we visualize the process of becoming such a clairvoyant?

If we want to define its nature, we can say: In terms of scientific methodology, it can be compared to what we call external research in the modern sense of the word. The researcher makes use of all kinds of instruments and tools to explore what is within the sensory world. He invents scientific methods by which he can systematically see things in such a way that they reveal their secrets to him, so to speak. Thus the scientific researcher surrounds himself with instruments, he equips himself with methods that enable him to arrange things in such a way that they tell him something. The spiritual researcher also works with his instrument, with a very complicated one at that, and he cannot explore anything without this instrument. What is this instrument?

It is himself. But he is not himself in the state in which the soul is in everyday life. Man only becomes this instrument when he has so transformed his entire capacity for knowledge, his soul constitution, through the methods that can be given to him, that he has acquired other, indeed now spiritual organs. He must have experienced the moment when he can say from his own experience: Now, every reasonable person says to himself, it cannot be that what surrounds us is exhausted by the tools of our five senses, because if someone does not have one of these senses, he lacks the possibility to see with seeing eyes, so the world of light is not there [for him]. It is there when the organ is there. With each new organ, a new content of the external world presents itself, so we must not limit reality. There must therefore be or be able to be hidden, invisible supersensible worlds around us, and insofar as one expresses this in this cautious way, 'they can be there', logically there is no objection to it.

Someone who becomes clairvoyant in the sense just described reeducates themselves in such a way that this hidden world becomes as perceptible to them as the world of light and color is to ordinary eyes. And just as a new world, the world of light and color, opens up for the one born blind, so a new world streams in from the surroundings of the thus awakened clairvoyant, which then becomes their world of observation. But one must not believe that this is achieved by any means that could be described as superstitious or prejudiced. It is accomplished by a strict transformation of the human cognitive faculty into an instrument of higher perception. Of course, I can only hint in general terms at how this happens. But we also want to go to such, so to speak, higher chapters, also in public lectures, and at least sketch out how research is done.

Man, when he perceives the surrounding world, will be most true to that surrounding world if he lets it tell him what it has to say to him, as far as possible without the interference of arbitrariness. Therefore, we see that the scientist is rightly endeavoring, and carefully endeavoring, to ensure that nothing of subjective arbitrariness of any kind is mixed into what he strives for as a result, that everything is dictated by the things themselves, that man, through his methods, only gives nature the opportunity to express itself. The less arbitrariness we apply in doing so, the better it is. But man cannot help reflecting on the things of the external world, and a little consideration will show you that you gain your perception, your sense impressions, from the external world, from observation; that you let the individual things of external life flow in; but you will also understand that what is called the concept does not flow into us from the external world. Even an external fact can provide you with the proof that, where man investigates the external world, he actually brings the concepts from his inner being; and modern thinking in particular will have to admit this. If this thinking looks back a few millennia and considers the concepts about the structure of our solar system, it must say to itself: When the eye looked up, external perception saw the same as Copernicus and Galileo saw; but the laws that govern it, the concepts and ideas about the structure of the world, have only been acquired over time. How did Copernicus, for example, come to his view of the starry sky? By combining the same observational material that his ancestors had in a different way, by applying the mind, the world of concepts that ruled in him, in a different way than his ancestors. Through what he added to the observation, he saw the essential for our century.

We could show this for all fields. The most orthodox Darwinian must admit: people looked at the facts of the world before Haeckel, too. That they came to their theory does not depend on Haeckel experiencing the environment in a different way, but on his approaching things in a different way. So it is essential what the person brings to it.

And there is another example that shows how concepts and ideas are not something that flows into the human being from the outside, but something that he himself must bring into the world. Try to think about it when you go out to sea to a point where you only have sea, sea, on which the vault of heaven seems to rest all around you. You will then say to yourself: the vault of heaven seems to rest on the surface of the sea in the form of a circle; but you will not understand the circle through such observations. You will only understand it when you disregard the external observation and are able to construct the circle in your own mind, independently of the observation, when you are able to draw the picture mentally, in which all points are the same distance from the center. To have this image in your mind, to understand the [circle], you do not need chalk, no external observation. You can construct it in your mind and realize all the laws in your mind. And when you step out into reality and see arrangements that are in a circle, then it must correspond to what you have thought up in your study as the laws of the circle. The great Kepler would never have been able to discover the laws governing the movement of the planets if the orbit of the planets had not first appeared to him in his mind and he had then realized that when he looked out, the stars moved in the lines that he had first constructed in his mind.

Thus we carry the world of concepts and ideas within us in the higher sense of the word. We bring them to the external things, and these tell us: What you have thought, we carry out. The star says, as it were: You have conceived a line in your soul; but I move in the sense of this line. And so you come to realize that what lives in your soul, without you taking in an external sensory observation, that this underlies the spiritual basis and laws of this sensory world; but you have to get the confirmation from this sensory world. You can only make a statement about this sensory world when it offers you phenomena that correspond to what you have thought.

Now imagine that a person — and in this case I am indeed quoting the simplest things from the so-called school of esoteric science — tries to hold on to a thought that is constructed in his own soul, such as a circle, without going out into the world of observation with the image in his soul. If a person can now manage to refrain from all external observation for a while and is able to hold the attention to such an inner image, if he makes himself blind and deaf to his surroundings and remains attached to such an image, if he concentrates his soul on this image, then he is practising the first elementary activity on the way to clairvoyance – that which is called concentration.

Everything assumes that the human soul initially clings to something that lives within itself alone, for which it is initially unimportant whether or not there is something external to which it corresponds. What matters is the activity of the soul, to hold fast in strict inner direction such activity that is directed towards a soul image. That is what matters. Now, of course, a single such activity is not enough; it must be repeated often; and even if it is repeated over and over again, what is actually effective is not what the person can gain in terms of mental images, when he is actually still completely dependent on the stimulation of the external sense world.

There are thousands of years of experience in relation to clairvoyance, experiences of people who know and give their advice to develop inner soul forces. Above all, I just want to point out that there are certain truths, core statements. One need not be convinced of the truth of such sentences, which in a certain sense are the possessions of researchers in this field. Suppose someone says: I cannot be convinced from the outset of the truth of such sentences, which perhaps relate to an eternal. That is not necessary; that is not the beginning. The greater the impartiality, the better. When the teacher gives the student something and says, “Fill your soul so that during the time it lives in your soul, you perceive nothing around you and give yourself entirely to this soul content,” then you do not need to believe in this soul content. The teacher can even say, “Don't believe in it, but let it work in you.” That is what matters. Focus on that and you will see that such a resting of the soul on that content has an effect. Not that you gain a conviction, but that this content works in your soul, that is what matters. — If someone says that the teacher gives his student something that is not true at all, it can be calmly retorted: It may be that it is not true, that the external truth is not applicable to such a sentence; but that is not the point, but rather that it becomes a working force in the soul, that out of the soul comes forth what was hidden and of which the soul was not previously aware. One will see that with constant repetition of such instruction one can have inner experiences.

Certain symbols and symbolic representations are particularly effective for bringing hidden soul abilities to the fore. And a symbolum will be used to characterize how something like this actually works. I would like to speak of the symbolum that I have often referred to, the black cross surrounded by red roses. Let us first consider the abstract meaning, which is not of great importance for the training of clairvoyance. It will be best if we recall Goethe's words:

He who does not have
this dying and becoming,
is only a gloomy guest
on this dark earth.

Die and become – what does that mean? It means nothing other than that in the development of our soul we must rise above the things of our sensory world, that these things must first disappear around us, so to speak, so that we find ourselves in a state in which we are unconscious of the sensory world, which can be compared to the process of battle and death. The sensory world must first die. But whoever remains without content, whose soul remains empty when the content dies, is a dull guest. This is more or less what Goethe means: when you succeed in diverting your attention from all external things, when you are certain that nothing from the external world is flowing in, when you can then draw something out of the hidden depths of your soul that fills the field of vision of your soul, that is different from the external, then you have risen anew in another world, then you have “become”. Die and become – the dying of the lower nature, of outer sense perception, is characterized by the black cross. The dawning of a new world out of this death of the sense world is characterized by the red roses on the cross. And if we then interpret this rose cross in a comprehensive cosmic sense, we must say: in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in what is called unconscious nature, there is a spiritual element. This underlies everything. The human being directs his gaze to his environment, he perceives it. To those who have an inkling of the spiritual, this environment appears only as an external expression of the underlying spiritual. They say to themselves: The whole unconscious nature is based on a divine-spiritual; but it is as if it were in a grave, it is as if it were dead. The human soul is like steel on flint; when it strikes it in recognition, what lies hidden within it shines forth. In the human soul, divine spiritual content arises; it comes to life. Thus, the spirit must first pass through the death of the unconscious world in order to come to new life.

And I could tell of all possible areas of spiritual life. I could cite what could serve as a first intellectual explanation of this symbol. But that is not the point at all. The only point is that we do not entertain the thought that it was invented arbitrarily. For the budding clairvoyant, it is not a matter of what it might mean. Someone might say: Well, you may talk about the Rose Cross all you like, but to the objective researcher it makes no difference, because he gains nothing about the secrets of nature by imagining a black cross; that tells him nothing. When we carry out experiments with the falling-body machine or other apparatus, we discover a law. This, expressed in words, means something to us; it corresponds to an objective truth; a rose cross means nothing to me. That is how the person concerned can say. He who has undergone clairvoyant training may reply: That does not matter, it is not the point. The images in question are not meant to depict anything in external reality, so they are most effective when they are symbols that are open to multiple interpretations. What matters is not that one wants to express in such a symbolum the things of the outer world as they are, but that one forms such a symbolum in purely inner soul activity, initially in dependence on the outer expressions, that one contemplates such a symbolum in the soul in a way that is as concentrated as possible and excludes outer things. What this symbolum brings about in the soul is what matters.

When a person allows something like this symbol to live in his soul with ever-increasing inner concentration – and many other things as well – then these are the means to awaken the forces slumbering within him. Something very special happens to the person. He can experience – and these are real experiences – that the proofs, the real guarantees of this matter arise within him. In the end, the human being will experience the following feelings, which I ask you to observe carefully. He will say to himself: What I imagined was really only a kind of bridge; this rose cross is a bridge. Now I have received something that is not connected with it, to which the rose cross has only helped me, which rises in my soul and which is first of all an experience that cannot be obtained through external stimulation. At first, the student does not know whether what is arising within him is a bubble, a mirage, a fantastic construct, or whether it corresponds to some kind of reality. He does not know, but what matters is that he acquires the ability to experience and see such things within himself. For even that is still a detour for higher clairvoyance. What occurs at first are images.

But now, when the student continues to do such exercises, a further feeling arises for him that can be proven by nothing more than by the experience, the feeling that tells him: It now also does not depend on the images, but on what is expressed in these images. And now he knows that it is with these images, which he experiences in his innermost being, something like this: If you press on your eye or let an electric current pass through it, then any light impulse can pass through the eye, a light can shine within you. In this case, you have a light impression that is caused by the constitution of the eye. It is the same when the images first appear, which are evoked by following the appropriate advice. Then, like spiritual flashes, things flash through the soul that are indeed new, but they really appear the same as the light that you generate in the eye through a blow or an electric current. But you know very well when you are confronted with an external object that although the nature of the eye enables you to perceive light, you can say to yourself through experience, through a certainty gained in the experience: that which has been evoked only by my eyes is nothing, the real thing is the object. I stand facing the object, it communicates itself to me through my eye as an object.

This moment occurs for the clairvoyant person. These images ultimately become a means by which a new reality is expressed. Just as surely as the person who faces an external object with his eye knows that the object is expressing itself, so the clairvoyant knows that although it depends on his nature whether such images arise, he also knows quite precisely: in the way these images are now experienced by him, objective entities and facts of the spiritual world are expressed.

This can only be attained through strict inner schooling in a completely natural way. Just as one can distinguish fantasy from reality in outer experiences, so it is necessary for the pupil to maintain a sound judgment and a sound mind in this area, for here it is much easier to mistake illusion for reality than in outer life. Therefore, in such schooling for real higher clairvoyance, something else must go along with it.

If the student were to allow only what has been described to approach him, then he would be exposed to the danger of becoming a madman in a sense, and that is because in this realm of changing images of the higher spiritual life, he can conjure up appearances for reality through his subjective feelings, through his personality. This training must go hand in hand with the fact that the person, through certain instructions given to him, learns to renounce everything in this higher spiritual world that is connected with his desires, that is connected with his personality.

Here we come to a chapter where it is very difficult to be understood. For what do all contemporary psychologists say? They are not familiar with what has just been described and what is experienced as reality by hundreds. They therefore say: When a person is confronted with the external world, the sensory world corrects him by giving him realities; but when a person abandons himself to his inner activity, then, of course, feeling and subjective inclination are involved, and then feeling is transformed into such images; this can never claim to be objective. In the area where these gentlemen think they are right, they are right, because they have no concept of what must take place in terms of the actual eradication and obliteration of subjectivity, subjective opinions and inclinations. These must be completely eliminated. One must learn to renounce any preference or sympathy.

There are again very special exercises for this, so that what our popular psychologists rightly describe for ordinary human life does not occur, namely, that the arbitrary interferes. Man must have thrown out everything that could conjure up appearance for him as reality. But then he can keep the objective spiritual in its true form.

Something else needs to be said. Where clairvoyance is prepared in this way of training, where expertise prevails in this field and not dilettantism — the latter of which is terribly rife in the world — great importance is attached to not starting the path without certain prerequisites. For there is a great difference between setting out on this difficult path as an ignorant person, equipped only with the ordinary concepts of the world, and setting out after having absorbed higher concepts about certain secrets of existence, which can be explored and tested. There is a great difference whether one advances in this or that way. One can also go through this path with a small amount of outer experience. But then the soul's content is poor, and everything that can be seen is compressed into a few images. And then the incorrectly trained clairvoyants come into being, whom you will find again and again, who present in their writings: Now I have come so far that I have united with God through concentration, through the expression of my soul; and then they express God as a diamond illuminated by light or something like that. This is a mistaken idea, an idea that is basically no different from the usual description of an external thing of the senses, except that the person concerned calls it God.

When such “clairvoyants” repeatedly discuss their higher world and express all the glories of the higher world through nothing but such trivial descriptions, it is because they have not approached this training properly prepared. But when someone approaches these things with a proven teacher, then what he achieves, what flows into the images he has prepared, is a diverse world view, and everything that the surrounding external nature can offer people, with all its beauties and glories and secrets, is only a small part of the whole world that surrounds them. Much more magnificent and glorious is that which lies as the unknown world behind the known and which shines forth as the primal source of all that is visible. But it is also the case that the person who experiences this knows that he is not deceiving himself, that he is not, for example, projecting external impressions into this realm; he knows full well that what he experiences there, he can never experience in the external sense world.

This is the path of calm development by which man comes to truly see into the spiritual worlds. This is trained clairvoyance.

Now, what objectively happens to a person when he applies such methods? We remember that for spiritual science, the human being is not limited to what the senses can perceive, but that this external, this physical body, is merely one part of the whole human nature. For spiritual science, this physical body is permeated by supersensible parts, first of all by the etheric body, and the astral body is incorporated into the physical and etheric bodies. In the astral body we have the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, of drives, instincts, desires, of all inner experiences. Integrated into this is the fourth link of the human being, the carrier of self-awareness.

What sleep actually is in the sense of spiritual science has already been characterized here before you. What happens then when, in the evening, for the human being's subjective perception, all the impressions of the day sink down into the sea of forgetting, when, so to speak, forgetting or unconsciousness spreads around the person? What has happened to this person? The physical body and ether body remain in bed; but the astral body, together with the ego, has moved out and now acts on the physical and ether bodies from the outside. Our inner worlds sink into oblivion because the astral body does not make use of the external sense organs during the night. In the morning, the astral body with the ego then descends again into the physical and etheric bodies; it makes use of the senses again, and the world of the senses emerges for the human consciousness. How can a person perceive the external world of the senses? Because he has eyes and ears and the other sense organs. If these organs did not exist, the environment would be silent and lightless for the human being. When the astral body is externalized at night, it is also in a world, a spiritual world. But it has no organs to perceive it. In its fine substantiality, it has no organs like those that the human being has today in the coarse physical substance. Only through organs can a world around the human being be perceived. If the astral body had organs, then it would be able to perceive its environment just as well when it is outside the physical and etheric bodies as it can perceive what surrounds a person in the physical world with the help of the physical senses.

Now the question is: if a person is to perceive the spiritual world, then his astral body must be given organs, spiritual ears and spiritual eyes. How does this happen? This happens through the methods that have been mentioned, through concentration, through living in certain ideas and images. When such a person's astral body goes out at night, this astral body is quite different. This is known by those who have attained clairvoyant consciousness. It is as if you were to imagine that in the physical body the organs begin to differentiate and perceive the environment. What was a disorderly mass is divided into organs. It takes a long time for the organs to form in the astral body, until what was once like an undifferentiated mist begins to emerge in beautifully formed organs. But then what was possible for man before, to have these images in his soul, which were characterized earlier, occurs. This world of images arises from the fact that the human being integrates such organs.

Since ancient times, the process that occurs for the human being has been called purification, cleansing, catharsis, for the reason that the human being thereby learns not only to sense the spiritual world through the veil of external sensuality but because he then looks into this spiritual world in such a way that his vision is purified from the outer sensual world, that the outer sensual world is blurred and yet unconsciousness does not occur. Catharsis, purification, cleansing has always been correctly described as the first stage of trained clairvoyance.

Then a later stage occurs for the clairvoyant. At first, when the person returns to the physical and etheric body in the morning, the external organs are working again and have more power. He cannot, so to speak, handle the internal, still fine and mobile organs; the external impression of the eye and ear drowns out what the internal astral organs can see. It is always present, because the spiritual world is within the sense world — but as long as the human being still has these organs weakly developed, as long as they are only in the astral body, they are drowned out by the sensory organs and the powers of the etheric body. By working diligently in this way, the human being develops organs so strong and capable of being controlled internally that when he enters his physical and etheric bodies in the morning, he can see through these organs not only sensory perceptions but also the spiritual. At that moment, the person has attained what has always been called enlightenment or photism within the schools that work in this field.

These are all very real processes that can be experienced, and they do not arise from something happening to the person that is beyond his control. Step by step, the person applies the methods used in the corresponding schools to transform himself into the instrument through which he can perceive the spiritual world. What is it that enables a person to become clairvoyant? It is the organization of his inner invisible being, the transformation of the chaotic structure of this inner being, which otherwise only has an experience when the outer world is affected, into an organization that is just as regular as the outer physical body has become through outer nature.

Exactly the same path of development that nature has taken with man, to transform him from a lower stage to today's being with perfect organs, the same path of development is taken up by man himself, is continued by him. Where nature leaves man, he himself continues to work. Whoever reflects on this will not find the slightest illogicality in the fact that the one who sets out on the path can have real experiences.

When man gains insight into the spiritual worlds in this way, he owes it to the fact that he has made his inner man so strong that he is an independent being in relation to the external organs. Man has become his own master. This is a principle that is expressed in all such schools as an abstract characteristic of this matter. If man has come to this stage, he owes it first of all to the control over his etheric body. In the undeveloped human being, the life body is, so to speak, somewhat inelastic, following only the forces of nature. In the clairvoyant, it is something that the astral body adapts to its forms. It has become elastic because the stronger power is at work in it.

If we now touch on the kind of clairvoyance that is evoked by lower states, which we generally characterize – and this is of course speaking in a laymanly way – as human states of weakness, then we have to say: this comes from something quite different and can never be controlled, but it is based on the same laws. Whenever a person becomes somnambulant of their own accord, or when a person is influenced by unlawful means, or when a person is going through this or that illness, it may happen that their etheric body is dissolved in the physical body, so that the compact connection between the physical body and the etheric body does not exist, as it does in the normal state. This can actually happen as a result of disease processes, and basically most of what is seen in the field of low-level clairvoyance can be traced back to pathological conditions. Then the person has an etheric body that is not so firmly bound. While in the trained clairvoyant the loosening occurs because the astral body strengthens and gains control of the etheric body, in the case of low-level clairvoyance it occurs because an organ becomes diseased. Through the illness, it is released from the etheric body to a certain extent; the etheric body becomes free for such people.

As long as the physical brain is still in a normal, intimate connection with the etheric, the astral body cannot do anything with the etheric; the physical brain holds the etheric body. If an abnormality occurs, a larger or smaller piece of the etheric body will separate from the physical body; it can be handled more easily, and it is handled by the astral body so that a kind of natural enlightenment occurs, but which in its content cannot offer any higher world, cannot lead to higher results, because all control, all certainty, all conscious pursuit of things is excluded. People who have become clairvoyant in this way can, because their condition is based on the same principle as that of the trained clairvoyant, namely, on the control of the etheric body by the astral body, can have unordered insights into the higher worlds; what they relate may be fact, but a real result of spiritual science can never arise from it. What has been said here is not a denial of the reality of what such people see, but an alerting to the fact that the strict results of spiritual science can only be achieved through the path of trained clairvoyance.

I would just like to touch on one possible objection. Someone might say: So lower clairvoyance is always based on pathological conditions; how can a disease process produce real insight? — That is a shortsighted view. Health and insight do not go hand in hand. A person can become ill, and precisely through this process of illness the supersensible world can be opened up for influences from the higher world; there is nothing contradictory about this. Nor does it imply that a person should be made ill in order to become clairvoyant.

Thus we see what it is that brings the facts and beings of a higher world into the field of consciousness in the same way that the world around us is brought into this consciousness through sensory observation. It is exactly the same thing, only in a different field of vision. And just as we perceive plants and minerals in the world of the senses, so in the spiritual world we have around us that which makes this world of the senses explicable to us in the first place, because it has emerged from the spiritual world. And when the clairvoyant makes statements about what he has seen, he does so in order to tell. He does not want to prove anything, he wants to tell what he experiences by applying strict methods to his own soul development. And by telling, he imparts a world that can be logically understood, that can be grasped by the ordinary mind.

If we express the experiences of the clairvoyant in a different way, we have to say: our inner world, our soul world, is determined in ordinary life by what is going on outside. That I, for example, imagine a green stem with leaves on it, that I assert this image, comes from the fact that I am organized in a certain way. The rose out there determines me, its forces stream into me, by conveying to me the idea of its outer being.

It is the same in the spiritual realm. These spiritual entities reveal themselves to the developed person, they are reflected in his inner soul life, just as external sense perceptions are reflected in ordinary thinking. Thus the clairvoyant experiences the spiritual external world in his soul life and says to himself: When I look at the sense world, I know that this sense world is created, ordered and determined by the beings whose activity and rule is revealed to me when I direct my clairvoyant gaze to the sense world. He says to himself: The fact that the sensory world appears to me in an organized way is because it has been shaped by the beings I see. The flower before me, a crystal, a mountain range, it is all worked out of the spirit. I see the spiritual foundations. I would see nothing of them if I left it to my own discretion. I must, so to speak, sacrifice my soul life and let the world of the higher spiritual self flow into my soul; it must have an effect on me, it is the determining factor.

And now imagine something: Imagine that this world is there, that it is at work, that it is always at work on people, even if not on their consciousness. Imagine that a person is standing in the world; around him is the world that the clairvoyant sees; it has an effect on every person. On the merely sensual observer it has an effect in that it presents an external face; on the clairvoyant it has an effect in such a way that he does not see this spiritual world at first, but that it works as a determining force, that he cannot look up to a world of spiritual forces, but that the forces of these entities flow to him in an unconscious way. He does not see them, but they send forces, order his life of ideas, determine what his soul experiences. A person sees another person; if he saw nothing more, he would only receive a picture of the external world. Now the spiritual world works by sending him its forces. Now he is not satisfied with the ideas of the external, sensual world. He is transforming himself, in order to gradually make himself into the sublime image that the Greeks, for example, represented in the statue of Zeus. The same power and essence that the clairvoyant sees works, as it were, on the person endowed with true imagination, so that it stands by his side, guiding and leading him, combining the images.

And so imagination works like a soul force that is fertilized by the worlds into which the clairvoyant looks, a soul force into which the higher worlds send their laws, so that the person gifted with imagination transforms the external things so that the truths of the spiritual worlds live in them. There we have the real basis of imagination, and there we understand that Schiller could say of Goethe, how with him understanding and reason and feeling and all the soul powers work together harmoniously and are fertilized by imagination. We understand that he could say: What is created in this way characterizes the human being as the only true human being, because he does not work only through a single soul power, but takes everything together, and everything works towards the imagination — which does not have to agree with external truth —, towards the imagination. And so we can also understand that Goethe can be the view: There is a form of imagination that does not need to agree with external truth, but which has its own certainty. We have seen this. There is a form of imagination that does not yet lead to clairvoyance, but which is fertilized by the forces that the clairvoyant sees. It is understandable that Schiller finds all other human activities one-sided, but in the contemplation of Goethe it dawns on him: the artist who takes the individual soul forces together in order to allow the spiritual worlds to fertilize what he receives as an external new formation in the sense world; such an artist is the only true human being.

Of course, Schiller knew nothing of spiritual science, but he sensed what it was about. Likewise, what Goethe says about imagination is absolutely right. It is true when Goethe says that genuine art, that is, art that creates out of imagination, is the revelation of secret laws of nature that could never be discovered without imagination. While external observation may provide us with purely external sensory facts and truths, inner truth is something that the imagination, fertilized from above, is much closer to than the powers of reason.

And so we see how things are distributed in the world, so to speak. Man is predisposed to ascend into the higher worlds. The higher abilities lie dormant in every soul. Those who have the patience and endurance — perhaps through many lives — may hope to glimpse into the worlds that make the outer sense world understandable in the first place. But until then, until man achieves this, something is given him as a forerunner, a representative for insight into the higher worlds. He can allow himself to be inspired by these higher worlds and then, in the work of the artist, for example, transform the external world in such a way that it offers a reflection of the spiritual worlds.

And so, in art, we do not merely see the world of the senses as nature creates the world of the senses, but in great works of art we see the Creator Himself, Who has passed through the medium of the human spirit and human imagination. We see in the surroundings of the work of art an external reflection of that which, although not an immediate sensory reality, is an expression of spiritual worlds, insofar as spiritual worlds can find expression through the sensual-material. And so we see that in the spiritual life of humanity, imagination lights the way to the great goal of clairvoyance, of looking into the spiritual worlds. Individual people have already achieved this goal by using the means mentioned. This spiritual world appears to us as the ruler of all lower existence and clairvoyance as that through which the human being gains a share in the spiritual world; it calls the human being up into the spheres of a higher world. And imagination is the representative of clairvoyance in the world of the senses, so that a person can already have a reflection of the spiritual world, for example through art. And the deeper we look into this context, the more we recognize: Clairvoyance is the ruler of the human mind in the broadest sense of world knowledge and understanding; and imagination is the deputy of clairvoyance within the sensual world.

Dear attendees! At the beginning of today's lecture, I would like to present two images to your minds: one that you may know from the course of your life and the other that may arise on the basis of the lecture held here the day before yesterday. One of the images that I would like to evoke in your minds is Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which you all know well. We see this wonderful picture, the Madonna with the Christ Child, and we first try to intuitively place ourselves in what this picture wants, namely by looking at this picture more closely, we see how figures rise out of the mysterious mysterious cloudy sky that extends over the Madonna and Child, figures arise, let us say angelic figures, which appear to us as spiritual companions of the child, who is held by the mother.

And then the feeling can arise in our soul: the painter mysteriously wanted to depict something as a background from which the human riddle stands out, and not just this human riddle, insofar as the human being is placed in the universe, but also, through the fact that the child is added to the mother, insofar as the human being reaches out to create from within himself.

Let us first place this picture objectively before our soul and see if today's lecture, which is supposed to deal with the human riddle and the riddles of the world, could provide anything like a point of contact with what the artist has undoubtedly created here out of a deep feeling about the riddle of the world. And we realize that Raphael is picking up on something that has always occupied people like a riddle of the world when we consider that the whole configuration of this picture, everything that lives in this picture, is like a re-emergence reappearance on a higher artistic and religious level of what already confronts us in the ancient Egyptian land, born out of Egyptian feeling and thinking about the human riddle, in the form of Isis holding the child Horus in her arms.

And so we could cite many more examples of similar symbolisms, showing how the riddle of the world, the riddle of the connection between the human being and the world, is symbolized in the human mother with the child at different times. This is the first image that we want to paint for our souls to prepare us for today's lecture.

The other image should emerge from what we looked at the day before yesterday. Let us imagine a clairvoyant person who has developed his soul to such an extent by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant within the inner being of today's normal person that he can produce those images, those thoughts within himself that make it possible for the higher worlds to appear to him in their facts, in their essences, so that out of the twilight darkness, out of the bosom of the world's existence, a completely new world steps forth before his soul, new in relation to the outer physical world, a world that shows people that behind our physical things there are entities and forces that are the very foundations of this physical existence, and entities and forces that step out of this bosom of world existence and that truly have no less concrete, real existence than that which we can hear with our ears and see with our eyes. This is how we imagine the clairvoyant in relation to the world, stepping out of the twilight of spiritual existence into a new world of forms, of higher realities, created in knowledge through him, as it were, as a document of what the human soul is capable of in terms of establishing its relationship with the world.

Is it not something that we can describe in the clairvoyant as a spiritual birth, as something on a higher level, on a more spiritualized level, which we find so wonderfully symbolized on the physical level in the Madonna with the Child? For that is what we want to contemplate today, my dearest audience, how man enters into this world around him.

The most diverse minds in the development of humanity have always reflected on this, have examined how man's relationship to the surrounding world actually is. Today, because older ideas in this direction are rather far removed from contemporary human thinking and it is difficult to bring to life not only the concept of such older ideas but also the right nuance of feeling that these old ideas conjure up before us, I do not want to tie in with older ideas, for example, only with the idea that a man often misunderstood today, Paracelsus, had about the relationship between man and the world. Like many others, he regarded the human being as a microcosm, as a small world, in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm. But we only want to recall with a few words what all those who regarded the human being as a small world, as a microcosm, in relation to the great world, the macrocosm, actually thought.

They had the idea that all laws, all the various chains of facts that spread out into the world, not only in the physical world but also in the spiritual world, that all these chains of facts and laws are contained in man as if in an extract, as if in another form on a small scale, that man himself is, as it were, such an extract, such an essence of the existence of the world in all its individual forms. Everything that can be found in the world can be rediscovered in man. As I said, we don't have to go that far if we want to present this idea of the small world of man, of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, as one that the best minds have had.

We need only recall a personality who was close to us in relatively recent times, whom we were able to mention here the day before yesterday in a different context. We need only pick up where Goethe left off and that wonderful friendship between Schiller and Goethe. When this began, Schiller felt an intense need to rise to the peculiar way in which Goethe viewed the world, how he had shaped the relationship between man and the world for himself. So Schiller writes at the beginning of the beautiful, great friendship, so significant for intellectual history:

For a long time now, I have been observing, albeit from a considerable distance, the course of your intellectual life and looking up to it with ever-renewed admiration. What you saw in the face of a great nature is this: you endeavor to get to know all the details of nature, of the surrounding world, in order to build up spiritually, through the combination of these details from the totality of phenomena, the most complicated being that stands before us, man. Schiller calls this a truly heroic idea, as it had emerged from his contemplation of Goethe's genius.

What is Schiller thinking of? He is thinking of the fact that Goethe studies the whole world around him, finding the same law everywhere in this thing and a different law in that thing. And then, when you create a harmony in your mind, where these laws, which are distributed among the most diverse beings and things in the world, work together, then you can roughly have an idea, an idea, of what really lives spiritually in a human being. And Goethe himself sensed so rightly that in man, more or less externally and internally, the whole universe has created something like a mirror image of itself.

We see this when Goethe, for example, points it out in his beautiful book about Winckelmann: When man lives in all of nature and becomes aware of healthy nature as a whole, when harmonious pleasure gives him pure, free delight, then the universe itself, if it could contemplate itself through man, would exult as having reached its pinnacle and would admire its own becoming and essence. And in another passage, Goethe says: When man looks at the nature around him and takes everything around him, in terms of measure and number and order and harmony, he is able to create within himself a higher nature in nature, something that transcends nature and yet is the meaning of this world, of this nature. That is what Goethe had in mind.

Thus we see that even a spirit of the modern world, even if it expresses this only in such general ideas, is thoroughly imbued with the fact that everything that is scattered around in the world works together in man, and that out of man a new world is born, which, when we come to think of it, must appear to us as an essence, an excerpt, a small world compared to the great world.

In the most real conceivable way, the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view shows us the world of the supersensible, as explored by the methods mentioned the day before yesterday, in connection with the sensible that spreads out perceptibly before our sense organs. In the most real sense, this research shows us that everything that seems to answer the great riddles posed by the universe is indeed present in man. Man himself can be regarded as the magic key by which we can unlock the most intimate secrets of the world around us. To gain an insight into what has just been said, we must first consider some aspects of the human soul, as we have already discussed in another lecture.

Since we are always dealing with new listeners, we must first say a few words about the nature of man, and then show how this nature of man, when viewed so completely, in all its parts and members, as is possible through theosophy or spiritual science, appears to us as a true extract, as an extract of the whole development of the world according to physical and spiritual facts and entities.

If we look at the human being in the theosophical sense, in spiritual science, we see that he is not the single-membered being that external, sensory observation shows us, that only adheres to the outer organs of perception and to the mind, the intellect, which links the outer perceptions together.

But if we now ask ourselves: how does the physical body of man differ from the rest of physical nature? How does it differ from the mineral world, when we consider that this physical body of man, which in all its parts as a physical body contains nothing other than what the rest of physical nature contains outside? If we look at even the most beautiful form of a mineral, at some particularly wonderfully shaped mineral as a crystal, if we look at this mineral form! It exists as a form, as a whole, as it presents itself to us, through the physical and chemical substances and forces, and does not perish through these physical and chemical substances and forces. This form must be destroyed from the outside, whether by external intervention of some kind or other, or by the intervention of the world around it; the form of the mineral, held together by its own forces and laws of a physical nature, must be destroyed from the outside.

This is not the case with the human form, nor is it the case with the form of any living being. The human form of the physical body – we will not consider the other living beings, which concern us little today – does not follow at all the way man lives, between birth and death, these physical and chemical substances and forces that are in him. When does the physical human body follow the physical substances and forces? When? Then it follows the physical substances and forces when the human being departs at death, when the physical body is a corpse. Then they stir and emerge in their full validity – these physical substances and forces within him. According to the spiritual scientific view, between birth and death man has within him at every moment a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body.

Therefore, from the point of view of spiritual science, we speak of a second part of the human being that permeates this physical body and is a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body in each of us. The fact that the physical substances and forces between birth and death or between conception and death do not follow their own laws, but as it were contradict themselves, is because the etheric or life body, as the second link of the human being, is this constant fighter against decay. In terms of spiritual science, we have to imagine that at death the physical body is abandoned by the etheric or life body. As a result, the physical substances and forces become active and dynamic. But the etheric body enters its world.

For someone who relies solely on their intellect, this etheric body is, at best, a mere speculation, at most something that can be achieved through thinking. Today there are already many people who, based on pure scientific knowledge, have long since abandoned the view that one is dealing only with a conglomeration of physical substances and forces in a human being. These people speculate and think their way to something that is behind physical substances and forces, and instruct them in their particular organization in every living being. So for such thinking it remains speculation.

For the development of the human being that was unveiled here the day before yesterday, for what we can call the developed consciousness of the seer, this etheric or life body is a reality, something that belongs to him, that confronts him when, for example, he has developed imaginative thinking. Then he can perceive how a truly real being emerges from the physical human body in death. But no one should form an idea of this etheric or life body as if it were actually a kind of physical body, only very thin, very nebulous. No, in no way can it be perceived physically; it can only be perceived by the open eye of the seer, it is only visible and perceptible to spiritual eyes. This is therefore the second link of the human being, and it is of great importance that this double of the human physical body be regarded as a special real entity.

From the point of view of spiritual science, the objection may not be raised: One can indeed recognize that these life phenomena that occur in man are something special; but they are precisely functions, activities of the physical body, its complicated interaction. No! For spiritual science, the opposite is the case; that which occurs physically, which appears as a physical activity of the organism, is an emanation of the spiritual. Everything that occurs in the physical body, be it blood circulation, the regular activity of the respiratory system, or the activity of the digestive system, is the result of the forces that have developed out of this etheric body or life body. It is the higher part, and we will have to explain in more detail how we think of the next link in the human being, how we have to regard the higher links as the active, the doing part, so to speak.

Even in terms of the material, for spiritual science, the physical body is something that has crystallized out of the etheric body in the course of development, just as a piece of ice crystallizes out of water . It is thus, as it were, a condensation of the etheric body, and all the forces that keep the blood circulating, all the forces that are active in the physical body, are born out of the etheric body. This etheric body or life body – and I ask you not to confuse the term “ether” with what physicists call “ether”, because the hypothetical ether of physics has at most the name in common with it – is shared by humans and plants. Plants and every living being also has such a life body or etheric body.

But now we rise to the third link of the human being. We get an immediate idea of this when we imagine a person standing before us and ask ourselves: Is this person standing before us really nothing more than what the outer eyes can see and the ears can hear in his voice, what the hands can feel? Is there nothing else within these skin? Well, this person's soul can tell us that there is something quite different within these skin: a creature, a sum of desires, instincts and passions, a sum of pleasure and suffering, of ideas, of moral ideals, of intellectual ideas – all of this lives there before us.

And for primitive man, what has just been mentioned is truly a higher, more direct reality than what lives as muscles or bones or blood in his body, of which he may have only a very vague idea as a primitive man. Much closer to his soul, much more real to him is what has just been mentioned, as a sum of pleasure and pain, of instinct, desire and passion. We describe this sum as the third element of the human being, and we now want to use this third element to clarify how spiritual science must relate to what we are citing here as real elements of the human being.

The materialistic thinker or even the merely realistic thinker will say: Instinct, desire and so on are produced by the interaction of forces in the human body. What we call the third link would only appear as a result of physical activity, just as the advancing of the hand of a clock appears as a result of the mechanical arrangement of the movement. For someone endowed with clairvoyant consciousness, in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, this third aspect of the human being is what is called – please do not be put off by the term – the astral body. This is a fact. For while in death the etheric body is clairvoyantly seen to separate from the physical body, thereby leaving the physical body to the physical substances and forces, the developed consciousness of the observer sees the astral body of the evening when the person falls asleep, moving out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected during ordinary sleep, and this astral body, this third link of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts and pleasure and suffering, passes into a world in which the person cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

Now, of course, someone who only wants to rely on his senses may ask: Can you imagine that mere passions, mere desires, mere instincts are floating somewhere? Yes, that is precisely what humanity will gradually have to incorporate more and more into its thought habits if it wants to advance to a real knowledge of the supersensible world, that an existence of this soul-like being for itself is quite possible, just as just as we have seen earlier that the physical body appears as a kind of condensation of the etheric body, so too the etheric body appears as a condensation of this soul-spiritual structure, which we now address as the astral body.

You can form an idea from ordinary life, when you decide to think impartially and confidently, of how the soul and spirit affect the physical. We take two well-known inner soul experiences, we take what is called the sense of shame and what is called the sense of fear. Shame — the person blushes; fear — the person turns pale. What do these sensations mean in the first instance, in physical terms? The blood of someone who, as we say, blushes, has a very specific movement to fulfill; it is driven, so to speak, from the inside of the body to the surface; the opposite occurs when someone turns pale with fear.

Only those who engage in errant speculation could seek the causes of mental states in the physical. The unbiased and clear-thinking person will ask: What is happening in the soul? A sense of shame is a soul experience, something purely of the soul; a sense of fear is something purely of the soul. What do they do? They produce a physical activity, they produce an activity in the movement of the blood, it is a physical process, brought about by something of the soul. That is the natural way of thinking in this field, that is, so to speak, the last remnant of how we have to think about the soul in its effect on the material. Just as the movement of the blood and its location are truly changed under the influence of the soul, so we must now only imagine that basically all material events are caused and conditioned by their soul-spiritual causes, which lie behind them and which the human being only does not perceive as easily everywhere as in this primitive case, but which can serve as an example.

Now spiritual science shows, when you become more and more involved in it, that not only external activities and processes are caused by spiritual and soul forces, but that matter itself crystallizes out of the spirit, so that everything that physically confronts us in terms of substance and force appears to us, roughly speaking, as a condensation of the spiritual and soul. And so this astral body of man is that which we must hold fast in its independence, which we have to address as an independent link that creates means of expression in the physical and etheric bodies.

And within this astral body we then see the fourth link of the human being. When we look at the astral body, we can say that although it is not as developed in animals as it is in humans, the human being shares this body with the animal. Just as the human being shares their physical body with the mineral world and their etheric body with plants, they share their astral body with animals. But then there is a fourth element of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, whereby he differs from all the creatures and entities that are closest to him in the physical world. This is what we call the actual “Ichträger” in spiritual science.

I have already mentioned this here before; today it is only to be [referred to] so that we can treat the subject as we have posed it. There is a name in our language that differs from all other names. You can say “bell” to every bell, “desk” to every desk, “clock” to every clock - everything can be given a name from the outside. There is only one thing that cannot be named, and in our language this one thing bears for every human being the name, the simple name 'I'. The name 'I', if it is to describe the innermost part of your own being, can never reach your ear from the outside; no one can ever call out 'I' and mean you.

Here, in the very naming, you have something that can lead you to the character of this most human link of the human being, the fourth link, through which man is the crown of earthly creation. Those who have felt that the human inner being announces itself, that it must be experienced from within, through spiritual perception, have always seen in this I-being something like a drop from the ocean of divine substance. That is why this “I” or “I am” was designated by certain religions, which had an insight into these things, as the ineffable name of God in the human breast, ineffable to the outer world; it can only resound when the divine in man becomes aware of itself. What carries this “I” in man, this I, which, for example, is elevated to the divine by the God of the Old Testament in the famous word [Jehovah], we therefore also call the “I-bearer”, the innermost part of man, by which he differs from the entities and forces around him.

Thus, we imagine the human being as he stands before us today, as a four-part creature, as the Pythagorean school already imagined him, as a being that consists first of all of the physical body, which we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands, which physical science investigates. This physical body should not be belittled in any way by the great and admirable results of theosophy or spiritual science, but fully recognized. We then have as the second link of the human being the etheric or life body, as the third link of the human being the astral body and as the fourth link the I-bearer.

During sleep, the I-bearer leaves the physical body and the etheric body with the astral body, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed, the astral body and the I live in the world of the spiritual, gathering strengths to bring the phenomena of human life, which are expressed in fatigue, back into balance and to descend again into the physical or etheric body in the morning, in order to make use of the physical organs and to connect with the physical world outside through them.

In death, however, we see again how the physical body remains behind and the I, the astral body and the etheric body leave the human being. Later — this can only be told today — a large part of the etheric body detaches like a second corpse, so that the person only lives on with something like an essence of the etheric body, a spiritual existence, in which certain members of the astral body later detach themselves as a third, invisible corpse. This would now lead to a description of human life after death; today it should only be hinted at.

Thus, when we consider the human being in its entirety from a theosophical or spiritual scientific point of view, we have these four members before us. Now we want to weigh these four members of the human being a little in their mutual relationship, according to their values.

From a certain point of view, someone might say: The physical body is the lowest link in the human being, it is the external physical, the etheric body is already more spiritual and finer, the astral body even more spiritual, the I is the most spiritual. So we could say: the I is the most spiritual and perfect, the physical body is the most imperfect. But this is only true in one respect. In another respect – and this is what matters when we want to consider the human being in relation to the universe – the physical human body is precisely the most perfect link in human nature. If only we really look at it not with our mere intellect, but with our whole soul, immersing ourselves in its wonderful complexity, then we will see how this physical body is essentially more perfect in its way than the astral body.

Consider the astral body, the bearer of lust and suffering, of desire and passion, in its relation to the physical body only – one might say – in broad strokes, then you have to say to yourself: What a miracle this human heart is, what a miracle this human brain is, and the way all the individual physical organs of the human being strive together! What the human being's astral body, the seat of instinct, desire and passion, often does in the face of these wonderful harmonious voices of the individual physical human organs and their harmony! It is often the troublemaker, it is the thing that brings disorder and disharmony into the physical human body. Pleasure, desire - none of that adheres to the physical body, all of that adheres to the astral body.

And now consider what pleasures and passions the astral body urges people towards, how people actually perpetually attack their physical body through their passions, pleasures and desires, how many of the things people consume for pleasure are true poisons for the heart! How wonderful it is that this physical body has an organ in its heart that is so marvelously constructed that it can often withstand the attacks of the astral body for decades!

In its way, the physical body is the most perfect link that man has today, even if it is the lowest. Then comes the etheric body – it is one degree less perfect than the physical human body; the astral body is much less perfect, and the actual ego – oh, that is the baby among the links of human nature, is still the most imperfect part of human nature today, this ego, which man can hardly grasp, which for many is considered so incomprehensible that what was said the day before yesterday by the great philosopher Fichte applies: Most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an ego; it takes something to grasp this ego, to consider it real, it is actually a point - one might say.

Consider how much you can think when you see a person in their physical form, how much you can think when anatomy, physiology and so on present the person to you! How much content the physical build of a person has, how little content the I has for most people! In the distant future, these higher, supersensible aspects of the human being will certainly become richer and richer, and the time will come when the ego will be just as real as the physical body is today. But the ego is now in the very beginning of its development. It is, so to speak, only a baby and must become more and more substantial as the human being develops from the present into the distant future. The astral body is more developed, but it is still imperfect in some respects. The good and evil of human nature rests in the astral body, and only when evil is completely overcome by good will the astral body have the perfection that the physical body already has today.

Therefore, in the sense of spiritual science, we regard the physical human body as the oldest link in human nature, as the link in human nature that existed before the other human links were present, in a very, very distant past. But now comes the essential part. Back then, in the very distant past, it was not physical, it was spiritual. And just as, in the comparison made the day before yesterday, ice gradually crystallizes out of water as a solid, so the original spiritual, which was as spiritual as today's I, the human spiritual I, gradually became the present physical human body, the complicated body, differentiating itself more and more and structuring itself more and more.

Thus we go back to a very distant past, when man actually had only the physical body of what he now has, but this in a spiritual sense. And so we are originally in a completely spiritual world, there is still nothing of what we today call material and physical. The human physical body, as it is visible to our eyes and tangible to our sense of touch today, is a condensation of an originally spiritual substance that rested in a spiritual environment, just as today our physical human body rests in its physical environment, in the physical external world. Yes, spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual origin in relation to the physical human body; this physical human body has undergone transformations, metamorphoses, to its present stage.

The human existence in which the physical human body was spiritual in the most distant past, in its first stage, before an etheric body or an astral body had been added to it, not to mention an I, is called, however strange it may sound to you, because you immediately think of an external world body, the Saturn body of man. Spiritual science gave this name to that most ancient past of man when the physical human body developed out of the spiritual womb of the world. In this first stage of human existence, man's Saturn existence, the physical human body was still simple and primitive.

And now comes the second stage: the etheric or life body is integrated into the physical human body. For this, the physical human body must already have been raised to a higher level; it must be able to permeate the etheric or life body, so that we can say: At this second stage of human existence, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. He is roughly on a par with today's plants, but he is not a plant. The human being never passed through the plant existence as it is today. Rather, even when he consisted only of the physical and etheric bodies and when he was at the level of the plant existence, he was quite different. This stage of existence is called in spiritual science the solar existence. These are expressions that have to be accepted because the heavenly bodies do indeed have something to do with what we call Saturn, solar existence and so on.

Then there is a third stage of human existence, the astral body joins the physical body and the etheric body, and the human being rises to the level of animality. In spiritual science we call it the moon existence. So now we have the human being before us at the level of animality, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body.

But now something very peculiar occurs at each stage of this human existence. Originally, in the sense of spiritual science, only the human being actually existed. In the distant past, the human being, who has the most perfect physical body among the beings that surround us, developed this physical body, often transformed itself, and by transforming itself when it incorporated the etheric body, and again when it incorporated the astral body, it has reached ever higher perfection.

At each such stage, certain beings are left behind that cannot keep up with the development. At the time when man incorporated the etheric body into his physical body, certain human beings who previously had only a physical body remained at the stage where they had only a physical body. They did not acquire the ability to incorporate an etheric body, and so they remain, as it were, stuck in the cosmic evolution of the world. It is true that not only do young people in grammar school or secondary school have to repeat a year, but this concept of not keeping up applies to the whole of cosmic existence.

Those beings who remained at the first stage of human development, when the human being integrated his etheric body, are humans who are one step behind, they have been thrown out of human development, as it were, and have fallen into decadence. These beings are the ancestors of our present-day animals. Thus, at the beginning of evolution, of development, we have man as the firstborn of our creation and we have the animal world as the second-born creation, as that which did not come along and therefore always remained behind.

We must visualize very precisely how this lagging behind occurs in the course of development. The world view that adheres to the external substance will see the imperfect next to the perfect and, if it thinks correctly in a Darwinian-materialistic way, it will come to the conclusion that the perfect humans have gradually developed from the imperfect animal.

This conclusion is logically on the same level as if someone – it is only a comparison, but logically it is quite true – saw two people next to each other, one of whom is ragged and down-and-out, but the other is talented and applies this talent to the benefit of his fellow human beings, so that he has become a useful member of human society. He sees an imperfect and a perfect human being side by side and concludes: Since the perfect comes from the imperfect, the perfect man comes from the imperfect or at least from something similar. Facts can very soon refute him, can show him that the two people are brothers, that they perhaps have a common pair of parents, that one has risen by developing the abilities within him, while the other has descended.

This is how it is in all of creation. We have, so to speak, endowed the human being with the ability to integrate higher and higher members of his being in the very first, most original world design. He first received his physical body spiritually, in pure spirituality. This physical body became able, after some time, to integrate the ether body if it remained within the line of development. Those human ancestors, if I may use the term, of course in a different sense than in ordinary cultural history, who did not keep up, were still at the stage of the mere physical body at the time when man had already incorporated his ether body had already incorporated its etheric body, and always remained one step behind, so during the stage of the moon-being, the next stage, they first incorporated the etheric body when man was already incorporating the astral body. So they always remained one step behind. Those beings, then, who during the third stage of human existence, when man incorporated the astral body, still remained on the first stage, who therefore could not even take up an etheric body, were thrown out of the development and were later placed alongside humans as the plant kingdom.

Thus, when we look at the animal kingdom, we see, as it were, degraded humans who have not reached their developmental goal, humans who have fallen into decadence. Not does the present man descend from some animal creatures, but on the contrary, the animal creatures have descended in this way, in that they have not kept up with evolution, they have retained certain forms that man has progressed beyond, they have descended brothers of man. The entire plant kingdom contains within itself beings that are nothing other than what man has secreted from himself. So we see the animals as human beings and say: We have progressed beyond this stage, they have retained the stages by depriving themselves of the possibility of advancing to an ever higher stage, and in the same way we overlook the plant kingdom and say: It has been secreted from the human kingdom and descended. The fourth stage of human existence is when the physical body, after four transformations, the etheric body, after three transformations, and the astral body, after two transformations, has taken up the actual I. This is our present earthly existence. It is carefully prepared by four stages of the development of the physical body, which has become more and more perfect, so that it could become the carrier of the etheric body and the astral body, and these themselves have gradually become so perfect that they could become the carrier of that which now appears as the baby of human nature, as the spiritual that must be protected, so to speak, by its covers. It was only during this last pause that the I incorporated itself, although this also happened in the most distant past, to which no geology can lead today; only clairvoyant hindsight, achieved in the way described the day before yesterday, leads us back to where the other bodies, through transformation, could become protective covers for the I. It was at this same moment that the last supply, so to speak, arrived, which had remained at the very first stage of human existence; there the mineral kingdom appeared as the last of the realms. This was a tremendous moment in the ongoing development of humanity. When, within himself, man first saw his ego light up in a dull, dim consciousness, the mineral kingdom arose around him in its present form.

If we look at it spiritually, we must therefore imagine that the development was exactly the opposite of how it is usually imagined. Today it is of course easy to say from the point of view of a purely material world view: the plants need the mineral kingdom as a basis, the animals need the plant kingdom as a basis. Certainly, in their present physical forms they need this basis. But they did not need it in their spiritual stages of existence. When man was still spiritual, he did not need to eat and drink, nor did he need to breathe. When he began to breathe, the possibility of breathing already existed, even if it was different from today. When the plant kingdom was in its first stage, it did not yet need the soil of the mineral kingdom. It was only when the mineral kingdom was there that it formed the solid foundation, and then the other kingdoms also became more and more physical.

In their physical form, these realms emerged last. Our entire world was formed out of the spiritual, and now we see a wonderful affinity between the fourfold human nature and everything around us. We look at our physical body and then look out at the surrounding world of the mineral kingdom. We look at all crystals, at all minerals, regardless of whether they look back at us from the atmosphere above the earth, in cloud formations and air currents, regardless of whether these inanimate formations look back at us in the water waves of the stream or whether they come to meet us as a trickling spring, whether they face us as formed minerals or as plants and so on.

We see the whole physical world around us and ask ourselves: What are we related to? We are related in that what lives around us in the physical world is, in a certain sense, the stuff and substance of our organism when we look at it spiritually. What is around us outside has come about, so to speak, in such a way that it has separated out as the most incapable and coarse, which has not gone through all these stages of development from the physical body to the reception of the ether body and the astral body and so on. We can visualize this as if we have a substance in which some salt, for example a colored salt, is dissolved, and we bring the substance to cool. The salt falls down and covers the ground and is stored at the bottom as the coarsest. So we see how the mineral kingdom separates out from what, as spirit, forms the origin of all existence, as the coarsest - and this is related to our physical body. Then we see the plant body and look inside ourselves and know that we carry an etheric body within us; we know that the plant kingdom is the remaining etheric nature of man. We feel related to everything that is outside. We know from the animals: these are the remaining astral bodies, they are set aside from human nature. Finally, after this unusable material has been separated out, we have, as the beings who must be called the highest on the physical plane, rearranged and reshaped all these three ancestral stages of human development in such a way that, in the end, the I could be taken up into the protective sheaths as the actual spiritual being of the human being.

Thus we look around us and find everything that we have in our human existence in the realms of the world, the sensual and the supersensible, except for that which is our I, which we can only find in the spiritual itself. Thus, we see how, through this complete examination of humanity, we come to understand our relationship with the whole surrounding world in a way that, one might say, does not belittle but rather elevates the human being. Yes, we can even give a reason why this had to be so, why the other realms had to be singled out. Since time does not allow otherwise, we can only take a cursory look at our future.

We can ask: Why? Is there a reason why man has to separate the other kingdoms from himself in the course of development, and what is the significance of this? There is a significance that we can understand by making a comparison. Imagine that something coarse is mixed into a substance that has dissolved. If we want to have the substance in its pure form, we have to allow it to cool down. Thus, man had to bring himself up by separating out everything that was unusable to absorb an ego in the other realms; he had to create a foundation on which he could develop. In the future, of course, he will have the task of redeeming these other realms, he will have to gradually raise them to his own spirituality. This can only be mentioned today, because what should particularly come to our minds today is that in the human being before us, the whole physical and spiritual world, insofar as we can reach it at first, is not only reflected, but that he has this whole world around him because, basically, the other realms have been separated out of him, because, figuratively speaking, they are flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, even if this is meant in a spiritual sense.

And so man feels his way into the whole of his environment, and on a higher level he regards everything that lives in him as born out of the spiritual womb of the world, and just as the bark around the living core of the tree is structured and protects it, so the spiritual in man has protected itself through the coarser natural kingdoms, as it were, as the bark of human existence, and just as the bark is only the lignified soft parts of the tree, the other kingdoms, that which surrounds man, that which has developed out of the original human nature in the sense described today. Thus man learns that he is born out of the bosom of the whole existence of the world. It is not surprising that at the stage of clairvoyant consciousness he feels like a begetter of new worlds, for the worlds that surround us and on which we walk have developed out of us in the distant past.

The future world that will be around man will also be born out of man. Clairvoyant consciousness gives birth to it spiritually and has it before it, and then it is as if, out of the twilight darkness of the spiritual womb of the world, figures emerge before the clairvoyant consciousness, which are still spiritual today and will only descend into the physical world in the future. We see the spiritual that is around us populating itself with spiritual forms, and this spiritual will appear to us as a higher realm compared to what is already mysteriously hinted at on a lower level in human creativity today, and there the image is put together in a wonderful way from the artist's intuition. Raphael also did this partly out of tradition: what emerges as a feeling is what Raphael has secretly incorporated into his painting about human destiny; the twilight of the womb of the world – the spiritual figures are born above, and as the sensual embodiment, as the most important physical embodiment of what dawn of the universe and becomes more and more perfect in his physical form, appears to us in the mother with the child, who has the strength to shape within herself the mysterious laws that have come into being through all human evolution, so that he brings forth his repetition from within himself.

Anyone who can feel something like this will understand how the spiritual in the clouds and the physical in the Madonna with the child, as a great symbol of human destiny in this mysterious child, comes to us, and then one learns in front of this picture that, even if it is unconscious in the artist, it is born out of the feeling and sense of how man is a world in itself, but one that is intimately related to the greater environment, a small world, a microcosm, in relation to the greater world. One feels how the artist has incorporated this into his painting, and one then feels how what man receives through his position in relation to the surrounding nature can come to us again in human creations, as for example in true art, man brings us something like a solution to the riddle of the world in his own way. And when this riddle of the world speaks to us symbolically through Raphael's Sistine Madonna, we feel very strongly the words of Goethe, which we have already quoted and which lead us so well into the microcosmic human being and into the macrocosmic wholeness of the world. We feel what Goethe felt when he presented this human being as the actual solution to the whole mystery of the world, in that he said that when a person perceives the healthy world in its entirety around them, takes measure and number and order and harmony together and generates a new, higher world from this world, they thus give meaning to the outside world. And in all its details, down to the deepest feeling, theosophy or spiritual science shows us that in fact man contains within himself in a certain respect everything that we find outside in the world, that man himself is the solution to the riddle of the world, that man is the answer when we ask about the actual riddle of the world.

In the highest sense, my esteemed audience, the question can be put like this: let us look out into the world! It appears wonderful to us in all its fields, in all its realms, it presents us with nothing but questions. Where is the answer? Everything asks us – where should we look if we want the answer? The answer is always before us. We only need to be able to interpret this answer in the right way, through spiritual science. This answer to the riddle of the world is “man”. This was also in the mind of the ancient poet when, beholding the world around him, he spoke the beautiful words:

Many mighty things live here on our earth; but nothing is mightier than man.

More than in any other form of learning, however wise, it is often in simple myths and legends that we find deep, profound wisdom and truth. It seems as if an ancient truth from the human breast were speaking to our soul when we hear a very simple but deeply moving Mongolian fairy tale. This fairy tale goes something like this: There is an old woman. This old woman has only one large eye at the top of her head, and no other eyes with which she could see. She goes all over the world, and everything she encounters along the way, she picks up: every stone, every plant, everything, everything; and then she takes what she has picked up to her only eye to look at it, and when she has looked at it, something like a tremendous horror expresses itself on her face. Then she throws the object far away from her. This story goes on to tell us: This old woman once lost her only child, and now she searches the whole world for this only child, believing she will find this child in every stone, in every object she encounters. When she has raised an object to her eye and once again realized that it is not what belongs so deeply to her, disappointment paints itself on her face and she throws the object away.

Now, if we wanted to interpret fairy tales and legends, we could find a deep wisdom in this fairy tale, which is rooted in the most primitive folk minds. We don't want that now. In such fairy tales, one can find many, many interpretations; but it seems to us that this fairy tale expresses a yearning in every human breast. Every human being, when he becomes clear and distinct about his deepest soul values, feels that he must seek something in the whole world, something that is most deeply related to the innermost part of his soul, something that he must believe can manifest itself in every stone, in every being. And every human being feels that what he is actually seeking cannot be seen with the outer eyes and perceived directly. Every human being feels within himself a higher spiritual eye with which he walks through the world, and he senses that what meets the outer senses are only the means of expression for something that lives behind them, and so he walks around in the world like that woman, looking at every object. As long as he only looks at it with his external senses, it gives him something that, when he holds it up to the eye of his longing, deeply disappoints him. And he throws it away, saying to himself: Again, again not what I feel, what must live in all external things. For it is indeed the spirit behind all sensual physical beings that man seeks unalterably and perpetually, the spirit of which he knows that it lives within him, and of which he knows that he must somehow find it behind external objects as well. It is spiritual science that points man to what is behind sensual things and what can truly satisfy his spiritual gaze.

This spiritual science, if we look at things objectively, has, despite its short life, found a fairly wide distribution among the educated of our world in recent decades. Nevertheless, the strangest prejudices are in circulation among many people who only deal with this subject superficially. We always hear: This theosophy wants nothing more than to transplant some oriental worldview into Europe. We hear that it is a sect, that it leads to the most blatant superstition.

Not a single trace of this is true. However, it is true that if a person wants to see what this spiritual science can give them, they have to delve deeper and deeper into it. If it really gives the spiritual, if it satisfies the human longing that has been characterized, then it is more than what mere curiosity can satisfy. It is something that man needs for his life. It makes it clear to man again that in the spirit is the origin, the germ, the source of everything, including the physical, and if that is the case, then with the spirit it gives man strength at the same time, the source of life in general. Those who engage with it more deeply find this to the fullest extent.

Nothing is more fundamental, more significant for this spiritual science than the proposition that the spiritual in us, our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, are facts that have a deep effect and significance for our outer life. If we apply this specifically, if we single out one of these facts, we can say: true, genuine thoughts of the spirit give a person satisfaction, inner harmony. But inner harmony and contentment mean, if the spirit is really power, health in its effect on the physical organism, while doubt, the isolation from the spiritual world, gives man inner insecurity, hopelessness, inability to work. It gnaws at his deepest being. And because thoughts are facts, doubt and hopelessness affect his health in such a way that they weaken it. This is an assertion at first. But anyone who delves deeper will gradually be convinced of its validity.

Nowadays, there are many obstacles for people who want to approach this spiritual science. Anyone who is familiar with this spiritual science is by no means inclined to underestimate the serious obstacles that stand in the way of a person's understanding of spiritual science if he looks at things impartially. Among these manifold obstacles, there is something that is directly related to the greatest advances and most significant achievements of our age: natural science. But not to the facts of natural science! To claim that the humanities, or any kind of pursuit of truth, could come into conflict with the facts of science is madness. Facts are facts. And there can be nothing that somehow comes into conflict with the facts of science.

But when we talk about science today, for most people who lean on this science, it is not just about facts, but rather about a confession, a kind of belief that has been gained from science. And in particular, it has been the last 60s and 70s of the last century that have gradually produced a kind of scientific confession for many. This confession is expressed in the fact that there are many people who say that speaking of spirit, of a divine-spiritual background, is impossible for today's man; childish-fantastic ages spoke of spirit or soul. It is impossible for today's mature humanity to speak of these things, because scientific facts force us to do otherwise. And that which is spreading today as a kind of scientific religion and gaining more and more followers captures the imaginative life of many to such an extent that it is simply true that many who are caught up in this captivity must regard what spiritual science has to say as pure nonsense, as mere reverie.

The humanities scholar must understand what is at stake here. We can certainly experience the following. The humanities scholar comes forward with what he believes he can say based on his faithful observation of the spiritual world, with manifold teachings about what lies beyond the physically perceptible. These things have often been spoken of here, spoken of what we call the higher aspects of human nature, of the fate of man between death and rebirth, of worlds other than the physical. What is said here must seem like fantasy, if not something much worse, to many who today profess some kind of scientific doctrine. And today our consideration is specifically devoted to this fact, to the fact: What must someone who, over the last sixty years, has developed out of what is not directly given by the natural sciences, but what has developed on the basis of them and professes them, what must he think of Theosophy or spiritual science, or what can he easily think of them?

Before we go into the position of these contemporaries, who believe they have a scientific creed, we must characterize the essential point of the points of spiritual science in question. The point of spiritual science is to show in everything that the spirit is the original, matter is the derivative, that is, what appears as the effect of the spirit. So, for the spiritual researcher, substance, matter, sensuality is also spirit, but like spirit in another form. Take a child, for example. It comes to you with a piece of ice. You say to the child: This is water, real water, just in a different form. The child will say: Yes, but this ice is not water! — Then you will say: If you familiarize yourself with the nature of ice, you will understand it. Thus, when someone has matter, something sensory, before them, the spiritual scientist will say: This is spirit in another form. The materialist, on the other hand, will say: But this is matter. And the spiritual researcher will say, just as you would answer the child: You must first familiarize yourself with the extent to which matter appears in another form than spirit.

And this, which has been presented to your soul in a very abstract way, is what spiritual science seeks to explain in detail, for example, to show that what you recognize as a sensual person, see with your eyes, touch with your hands, that this outer material person is nothing more than the result of a spiritual person. Just as ice is water in a different form, so is the physical person a spiritual person in a different form.

Now, of course, when we present something like this in a few strokes today, we have to remind ourselves of what has been said in other lectures. It is difficult for those who have not heard these lectures. This spiritual science shows that if you go further and further back in time from the present, you will find other forms in the course of development, ever simpler and simpler outer physical human forms. These physical bodies of man would appear to you, if you go back far enough, more and more simple, until, if you go back far enough, you would find very simple, primitive human forms. But the further you go back, the more primitive the physical forms become, the more you find an invisible human form linked to this physical form. And if you go back even further into the times when the physical human being became smaller and smaller, the physical body becomes inconspicuous, but the spiritual human being is there, and that is the creator of this physical human form. And if you go back even further, the human form disappears altogether, and you come to the original human being, out of whom the physical one has concentrated. He is a spiritual human being.

Let us visualize how the formation of man happens now, through a comparison. Take a certain amount of water. In this, let a small amount of it freeze into ice. Then there is a small amount of ice in the middle and water all around. Now let more freeze. Then you have a more complicated ice shape. If there is already less water than before, then the water is combined into ice. The more water that freezes into ice, the less water remains. More and more ice should be created until we have almost allowed all the water to freeze into ice, so that what used to be water is now expressed in the hard, tangible form of ice.

This is roughly how we have to imagine the development of man if we stick to the comparison. We can only see the water, we can no longer see the spiritual man. Out of him begins to shine the first primitive, original form of man, which stands at the lowest level of organization. All around is this spiritual man, he condenses. This is how it continues to this day. Our present human being, as he stands before us, has been formed out of the spiritual man into the physical. The spiritual form has become more and more material. Today's human being is the expression, the revelation of the invisible man who has become visible.

Now we take up another train of thought, assuming that we had not allowed just one lump of water to solidify, but a number of them. We would have allowed the first one to solidify, then we would have taken it out. It now remains as it was and shows us the stage of development that existed at a certain phase. Now, if we had allowed a second lump to solidify at a higher level, we would have taken it out. It remains as it is. A third one as well. Finally, we can now present the whole long series of developments, where more and more water freezes into ice, until finally a point is reached where there is only one lump of ice. We have bits of ice that have lost the ability to attach other bits of ice because we have separated them from the water. This is how, in the sense of spiritual science, one imagines the development of man in his relationship to the animal world.

Once upon a time there was a spiritual man; he originally formed primitive bodies for himself. The part that retained and further developed the spiritual man reached up to today's humanity. But where a stage of development broke away, it stopped. Thus, on the first stage, when the spiritual man had developed the primitive form, a small gelatinous ball broke away, remained as that piece of ice and formed today's lowest animals. They lost their spiritual foundation. At a later stage, creatures remained behind that took the form of worms. Later still, others took the form of fish, then amphibians and so on, until finally, in a time that is not long for the spiritual researcher, the ape family emerged from the spirit, so that it could no longer keep up. Man has also progressed beyond this stage.

So you can never say that man derived from any form that now exists. Rather, it is the other way around: the forms outside, which surround you everywhere, these forms present us with developmental epochs that man has overcome because he retained the original spiritual human being within himself, because he did not tear out what had become physical from the spirit. When man looks out into his surroundings, he says to himself: I am the first in our evolutionary series; I was already there at the time when the most primitive animals had not yet appeared. I have gone through all these stages; I see my stages in my surroundings.

This is how the spiritual researcher thinks about the development of man, who, as a spiritual being, descended from the bosom of the Godhead, who has progressed while the animals crumbled away and had to remain at an earlier stage because they lost the source. When we look at any physical being, we see how it is formed out of the spirit.

But the spiritual researcher goes further. He sees in everything around him, not only in living beings, in all matter he sees, as it were, solidified spirit. Atoms are nothing other than solidified spirit. For him, the spiritual is the original, the material the derivative. When we see a stone outside, how should we think of it? That even this stone is condensed spirit.

This view has nothing to do with the extreme view that wanted to deny matter. By tracing all matter back to spirit, one does not deny it, because existence does not depend on not seeing spirit, but on becoming aware of the effect. Of course, the condensed spirits in matter have different properties than the spiritual beings themselves; that much is clear. It is only necessary to think these things through to the end. The confessions that have emerged from natural science since the 1960s are now directed against this basic fact of spiritual science. They only accept the sensual as the original and do not want to recognize the spiritual.

Who does not remember the two other trains of thought that confront one in today's world when what has been said is mentioned! Who does not remember what is emerging today as a monistic theory of evolution, whereby animals related to humans are not understood to have split off, but rather as if only the lower animals had originally existed, so that humans are the composite product of the individual building blocks of animals? It is pointed out: once only simple organisms existed. So now, according to the other theory of evolution, a higher being should have developed up to man. So man would then have simply arisen from the lower animal being in terms of his entire inner meaning.

And who does not remember the other thing that is said? Let us look at an object as it appears to us. What does it consist of? Of the smallest parts of matter, molecules, atoms, they say. And these smallest particles of matter are the only truly real things. All beings have come into being only through the interaction of these [particles of matter]. These two things are so certain for many people today, they are such suggestive concepts that many people cannot associate any sense with other things. They must be given their due. These two lines of thought are connected with the most fruitful lines of development in the nineteenth century.

We do not want to go back very far, but we will recall two fundamental facts of natural science, facts that are related to each other, the two great achievements of Schleiden and Schwann. Schleiden came to the conclusion in his studies of plants that they consist of the smallest parts, the cells, that every plant body is composed of cells, the smallest living organisms, and from there the thought takes hold: one has actually studied the plant when one has studied the nature of the cell, because these are the actual reality. The plant is only a composition of them. When Schwann found the same for the animal kingdom, this view that you can recognize a being by studying the parts of which it is composed, was also decisive for the animal kingdom. The wonders that opened up to microscopic research were admirable. What has been found through it is something great and powerful. But there were other things to come. The great discoveries in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology came.

I will mention just a few: Darwin made a great impression by showing the transformability of animal and plant life. With tremendous diligence and great scientific rigor, he compiled facts that revealed the relationship between animals and plants, all the way up to humans. We need only recall how, through spectral analysis, man was able to look out into the heavens to find that the substances of the heavenly bodies are the same as those of our earth. The discoveries of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which revealed the composition of the universe, are rightly called great. But these were also very much facts that bound these human minds to the material.

Those who can still look back a little on the development of intellectual life know how it happened, how, before Schleiden and Schwann, attempts were made to understand the whole plant by applying intellectual powers, and how it then became clear that the primeval organism was present in the cell organism that could still be perceived by the senses. The eye has conquered such wonders that man believed there was nothing more. Through such a thing as spectral analysis, the human mind had to be bound to the material. He had looked into the material events of the universe. It was not surprising that he forgot that there is also spirit in it, so that these conquests at the end of the nineteenth century in particular gave rise to atomism, the view that one only has to go to the smallest material and ever smaller, and find the explanation in the smallest material.

If this had remained a mere theory, it would not have had such a great significance for the spiritual path of humanity. But it could not remain that. With those bold minds of the nineteenth century, who unashamedly accommodated themselves to crass materialism, we see where such material thinking must lead. There we have minds such as Büchner's, Moleschott's and so on. Today they are already much maligned, but that is a half measure, not the whole. People say they have moved beyond them. They abandon the most crass assertions, but stand on the same ground as they did. They do not see that the ground has only been more consistently developed.

Only spiritual science is called upon to overcome this. We need only recall what Carl Vogt said, that thoughts are exudates of the brain, like any other metabolic process. Just as the kidneys exude certain substances, so the movement of the brain particles exudes thoughts. Something like that cannot remain a theory if it is believed. If that is the case, if a person's thoughts and feelings are products of the material movement of the brain parts, then with death, when the materials that make up the human being dissolve, all of the innermost essence of the human being disappears, and there is not the slightest possibility of speaking of spiritual and soul entities that outlast the human being. If the smallest material parts are the essence, then Vogt's way of thinking is consistent: when a person is buried, he disintegrates, and nothing should remain of him. These thinkers drew these conclusions and were basically much more consistent than some who wanted to be idealists at the time and who actually thought materialistically in their hearts. A dispute between Vogt and a Munich scholar who held on to soul and spirit and published articles in a Munich magazine in which he opposed Vogt was characteristic of the way in which the way of thinking was eaten away by materialism at the time. Wagner was the man's name, and Vogt wrote a spirited pamphlet against him. It was easy to refute the man with the spiritual doctrine and the materialistic way of thinking. For how did this Wagner roughly imagine the transition of the soul from parents to children? As if a measure is divided into eighths. That is, to believe in a soul substance, just as if one could weigh it. Something like that was easy to refute. That is what matters; not whether you have a spiritual doctrine, but whether you can really live in the spirit. Those who believed spiritually at the time could not do that. They were so firmly held in the spell of the material achievements of that time that, little by little, everything around us became an expression of the movement of the smallest material parts for people.

In the field of living beings, people were not satisfied with cells; instead, they were made up of atoms. From then on, life was nothing more than a complicated process of movement of the smallest parts. Complicated movement was then the movement in our brain; and that, as this movement presented itself, was human thoughts and feelings. And even those who only studied physics and physiology in this field twenty or thirty years ago experienced something that has now become rarer, what is called the reduction of all experiences to processes of moving atoms. They said: Besides us, there is only matter. What do you call color? It is nothing more than a certain movement of atoms that vibrate. The vibrations reach the eye. One form of vibration, one speed appears to us as red, the other as blue, the third as green. Red, blue and green are nothing more than subjective impressions of what exists outside. And out there are only vibrational processes in the smallest ether particles. If you turn your eye so that what vibrates outside can reach you, you become aware of it as the impression of red, blue or green. If you turn away, then nothing else is present but a vibrating process.

Then the students were tormented with the mechanical theory of heat. That which burns your fingers is nothing more than a subjective impression. Objectively present are the vibrating atoms. Imagine a container with billions of the smallest globules of a gaseous body. They vibrate in confusion, moving, bumping into each other, colliding with the walls and back again. This tremendous, structured form of motion is what manifests itself as a sensation of warmth when we put our hand down. Nothing of what we experience is external to us, but only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no warmth, there is no light, only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no electricity, only the motion of atoms. For those people, atoms had become the only reality, the absolute existence. If we dissect a human being, everything we see is a subjective impression. The human being before us is nothing more than an enormously complicated process of motion. What remains are the atoms, which, when a person dies, merge into other motion processes and form new groups. The eternal, the immortal, became the atom!

Now chemistry had found a number of substances, some 70. These substances were characterized by the fact that they could not initially be broken down into simpler ones. Water can be broken down; oxygen cannot, so it is a simple substance. What was such a simple substance? In their way, they were something eternal; but how eternal? Each element represents the cohesion of the smallest parts. These were jumbled up in the most diverse ways in the universe, here simpler, there more complicated. But the world was always only the jumble of the 72 different “eternal” elements. These were the only reality. At most, the forces were still accepted. For those who think in materialistic terms, the following must apply: an eternal thing is the individual atom. It must have existed since time immemorial and must remain in existence into time immemorial, that is the eternal. The indifferent atom, the unconscious atom, that is the original building block. And if everything is only the jumbled confusion of atoms, it is only logical to regard everything else as appearance and vapor, as something insubstantial that rises like a fog. This is a concept that has great suggestive power. There have always been people who knew what an enormity it is to assert the eternity of matter as the cornerstone of all worldviews. Du Bois-Reymond's “We cannot know” caused a certain stir when it was spoken at a natural science conference. What did he mean by that? He said: Yes, suppose you had got so far as to know, when you entertain a thought, how the atoms in your brain move. Have you grasped why certain atoms move one way and others another? What you experience inwardly: I see red, I smell the scent of roses? — He had taken up a saying of Leibniz: From a certain point of view, the brain is a material composition of atoms. — Let us assume, says Du Bois-Reymond, we could see its composition, let us assume that the brain were so gigantic that you could walk around in it, that you could understand the whole mechanism of the brain. Imagine that someone tries to understand: If there is such a movement, what this person, to whom the brain belongs, actually experiences in his soul during this movement, whether, when the parts move in one way or another, he has this or that sensation! We see movements, we see mechanical processes! We can never perceive the transition from this mechanical process to the inner experiences of the soul.

Du Bois-Reymond went even further. He said: If a person is sleeping and you examine the movements of his brain, the fact is not present in the person: I see red, I smell the scent of roses. You can understand this sleeping person, he said. But as soon as he wakes up, scientific understanding of the mechanism ceases.

This was something where theosophy or spiritual science looked in through the window of the natural world. The spiritual researcher shows that when we sleep, our physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and outside of them is the astral body with the ego, so that the spiritual and the soul-like human being are lifted out of the physical body. What remains, Du Bois-Reymond finds explainable. However, there is still an error in this: life was overlooked. You see, here you have the first outpost of theosophy, but at the same time something that expresses the desolation of such a scientific view: we will not know, says Du Bois-Reymond. Even if it is true that one cannot understand, there is never any other explanation than that which arises from the movements. This means renouncing any explanation of the mind.

There is another matter. A chemist, Ostwald, spoke at the naturalists' meeting in Lübeck about overcoming materialism from his chemical-physical point of view. He showed that there is no sense in speaking of matter. He made a rough comparison. If someone hits another person with a stick, it does not matter to the stick, because the stick is material. What you feel, he said, is the force that is acting on you. So Ostwald tried to establish the view that everything consists of individual forces. The force that we perceive is what matters.

What were atoms? In the past, they were the smallest parts. For Ostwald, they were a small combination of forces; when they crystallize, they become atoms, matter. There we have the first step away from atomism. A person like Ostwald is not capable of rising to the view that everything is spirit. He said that everything is force, the parts of matter clenched together out of force. That was speculation. But there were innumerable reasons for it. In those days one could remember something that had been said long ago. And it was precisely I who pointed out the following in the sharpest possible way: Goethe, who is as great a naturalist as he is a poet, said: If only people did not look for anything behind appearances! The phenomena themselves are the teaching.

For a view of the world that is held in the spirit of Goethe, the following applies: What we perceive is reality. What are atoms for such a view? What is an atom? Can we associate an idea with it? What we imagine are the properties of things. We perceive things through their properties. Does the atom have such properties? Does it have a color? According to the atomistic view: no. Color, after all, is only produced by motion. Do they smell, do they taste? No! Because this, too, is only produced by motion. Do they show a certain temperature? No. All the properties around us must be denied to the atom. What is the atom for healthy thinking without properties? A fantastic construction, nothing more. Every property is denied to that which lives in the environment. The atom is something imagined as a lump in space, but it is denied all the properties it would have to have. That is the characteristic of the atomistic theory, of this basic tenet of materialism, that this theory is the most fantastic thing one can think of, pure dreaming. What one has recognized as the eternal is invented; it contradicts all healthy thinking.

Materialism attempts to conjure up such a fantastic reality in space. Without realizing it, materialism has built up the most blatant superstition. There is no difference between fetishism, which worships pieces of wood, and materialism, which worships small material lumps. The “savage” at least sees his piece of wood; the materialists imagine billions of little idols that can never appear in experience. Atomism has set up the idolatry of the atom, built on pure fantastic thought. The 72 elements exist for us insofar as they have properties. If we imagine them as consisting of atoms, then this falls prey to the most blatant materialistic superstition. All those jumbled-up atoms, all those chess pieces are inventions, are the fantastic basis of a thought.

Now, as I said, a person like the chemist Ostwald had at least pointed out that it makes no sense to speak of a pure substance, that everything dissolves into energy. We perceive energy, we do not perceive substance at all.

That was the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, things have changed completely. Until then, despite all the efforts to overcome materialism, one had to rely on sound thinking. Now, although this is the surest way to overcome it, it does not help much in our age. Anyone who, like the person speaking to you, has had to think through all the big formulas with which, for example, the red light rays have been calculated – movement of the ether atoms – anyone who has had to watch as everyone believed that the waves of the ether move in such and such a way, and then you perceive red; when, as in a vessel filled with gas, the molecules are thrown back and forth, then this degree of warmth arises, and so on. Anyone who has seen this knows something about the physiology of these things and knows that it can be difficult to achieve anything with healthy reason and real spiritual science. That was the case in the early 1890s. Today it is different.

A saying made by an English thinker, a physicist, and a good one at that, Minister Balfour, is extremely curious. He is an extraordinarily astute physical thinker. He said: If we want to think about what an atom is according to the newer views, what is the atom? He saw in it something that solidified out of flowing electricity, similar to how ice solidifies out of water. Balfour saw something more in the atom than Ostwald did. He saw flowing currents of electricity in which the individual particles of matter arise out of condensed electricity. So atoms are actually condensed electricity. You see, we still do not have a healthy view of the physical as condensed spirit; but we are now at the point where we can hear that the physical is something condensed. Think of the tremendous progress! What was electricity just a short time ago? Atom! The little fetishes had movement and the expression of that was electricity. Now the atom had already become condensed electricity. This is the real thing. That is an interesting turnaround. What was this turnaround based on? It was not based merely on the experience of the spiritual researcher or on sound thinking, but on specific experience. Physics itself, in its progress, had forced people to think in this way. This includes the phenomena observed in glass tubes through which electricity is conducted after they have been pumped dry – Crookes tubes. These phenomena led to the realization that what flows in such a tube is flowing electricity; that electricity flows in space at all. What was previously only a property was now something real.

Of course, it didn't all happen in one go. For the humanities scholar, heat is just as real as electricity, and light as well. Matter comes into being just as much through the solidification of light and heat as through the solidification of electricity. In twenty years, it won't be nonsense to say this. They will speak of what heat and light are, they will no longer claim that these little fetishes of atoms are the original, but solidified properties, solidified perceptions. What is around us is an emanation, a manifestation of the mind. Today this is still nonsense to the physicist, in twenty years it will be a fact.

This is the way to gradually arrive at the realization that all matter is solidified spirit. Physical thinking is moving directly in this direction, which leads to seeing spirit as condensed matter. This direction continues in this way. It then causes materialistic thinking to rack its brains. But it must be said: today, for materialistic thinkers, spirit does not so easily break away from the atomistic way of thinking. People have noticed that when chlorine and copper are mixed, something strange happens. In their view, chlorine is an element consisting of vibrating atoms; and these atoms would be something original. The copper atoms would be something original again. When the compound is formed, the atoms are pushed into each other, and then chlorine copper is formed. But now something strange happens. When chlorine and copper really combine, it happens with a fire effect. Heat occurs. This is something just as real as copper and chlorine. That it is something very real is shown when we want to separate the chlorine copper again. Then we have to reintroduce the heat, the same amount that was taken out.

Certain people who cannot get away from materialistic atomism have considered this. They came up with the following: Now, if we have chlorine on its own and copper on its own, which consists of atoms, then we have to think of these atoms as sacks that are puffed up by heat; and now, when we bring chlorine and copper together so that they combine, the heat is expelled, and now the empty sacks are pressed together in a jumbled fashion. When the bodies are put together, the sacks are squeezed out. When the elements are driven apart, the heat inflates the sacks.

You see, the atom has already disappeared, heat has become something very real. If we don't want to talk about sacks – the materialists did that themselves, we might have used the image of a balloon – then we have to say: if you separate the shells again, they will be filled.

What we see here is that what actually makes up the atom has already melted down to a very small size, to the shell. What gives the atom size is the heat it absorbs. This is extremely interesting. We are not far from a time when the skins will finally have been removed. For why should we not be able to imagine that if heat can puff itself up, it can be dispensed with altogether? Why should it not be conceivable to imagine the atom as frozen heat? We will come to that. Let us consider further. Even more interesting is the next step that science has taken. After the point where the atom had literally dissolved into flowing properties, came what begins with Becquerel's discoveries, which led to the magnificent and powerful discoveries in this very field, to the discoveries about radium. What do we have before us with this? We do not want to decide whether the ideas to which the physicists have been led are correct. It is our responsibility to establish that the physicists were forced to a crossroads by the phenomenon of radium. Radium emits various types of rays, electrical and so on, the effects of which can be seen on a photographic plate. But above all, it emits what is called emanations. These emanations have certain properties, properties that differ from radium itself, but are similar to it again, that dissipate over time, so that the emanation merges into something else. It throws parts of its own substance out of itself. These lose their properties and become something else. Physics has even had to accept that it has been proven that this emanation transforms into helium. Oh, what do we have now! Something flows out of the element radium and has different properties, something flows out and turns into an element again. This led chemists to say: the atom itself decays, decays into something completely different, so that it can turn into a completely new atom, even into a different element!

Imagine what that means! The parts of an element, which are called atoms, should be the most solid. Now, however, the experiment shows that these atoms crumble under our hands and become something completely different. This is something like the realization of the alchemists' dreams, that one substance can be transformed into another! Today, all this is still in its early stages, but already scientists are forced to say to themselves: the atom is not something original, it has come into being and will dissolve again. Long ago, atoms did not exist at all, although people spoke of them as the smallest fetishes. Gradually they came into being and will pass away again, as radium shows by the way it gradually crumbles its atom. Today, the physicist's atom disintegrates at our very hands. We shall no longer be able to speak of the atom in the old way. This is something different from what Ostwald brought. He still relied on conclusions; today the facts already speak; today the world of facts itself destroys the fantastic structure of the “atom”.

This brings us to an important point. Imagine the consequences of the atom being scattered, this firm support. It dissolves not only in thought, but in appearance, in space, in fact. The atom ceases to be before our eyes what it has been presented as. As ice melts again, so does the atom. Today, materialistic thinkers cannot go far enough; they can imagine that electricity accumulates; but the path leads to seeing that the original is the spirit. That is what the first step taken today is towards.

Thus, today, natural science, if it wants to understand itself correctly, stands at the beginning of the way of thinking that leads directly into spiritual science. It cannot help itself. When the mantle falls, the duke falls after it. What has led to the materialistic theory of evolution are thoughts that could not get away from matter. It sees human beings as a composite of animal species. Once we can grasp that what happens outside in the physical world comes from the spirit, then we will also be able to comprehend the way of thinking that was discussed at the beginning, of the spiritual primeval man who has become denser. Comprehension depends on our thinking habits. Physicists will force people to see spirit condensed in all material things. Then, when it is known that the atom is not eternal but has come into being and is changing into spiritual substance, it will also be possible to understand that man comes from spirit and goes to spirit. All this will lead to such a conclusion. What is happening today in the world of natural science must be viewed from within. Those who speak of it cannot yet renounce this tendency of development, which is afflicted by materialistic ideas.

But the facts guarantee that natural science will lead to spiritual science, that both will celebrate reconciliation. Spiritual science is something that must be presented to people in order to proclaim the spirit as the cause of the physical. Spiritual science will be needed when natural science can no longer go forward on its own; then natural science will be ready to merge into spiritual science. The latter is the outpost that establishes what people will need to know when the facts are ripe to unite with the spiritual-scientific facts. By itself, natural science would lead to the incomprehensible. At most, one would see solidified electricity in the atoms. To understand the final consequences, spiritual science is needed.

When we look back over centuries of thinking and feeling, we have to say that a hundred years ago, what we call natural science was just on the way to descending into the coarsest materiality. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lowest level had been reached. In Vogt's saying that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, it had reached the point of extinguishing all spirit and explaining it as subjective appearance. Natural science was on this path; it was not ripe to turn its gaze up to spirit. Where was spiritual science a hundred years ago? It was immersed in abstractions, in concepts that shine deeply into the spirit. But there was one thing it could not do: bring down the great concepts of the spiritual world to the level of direct comprehension of what appeared externally.

Today we have a natural science that has plunged into the material, where the atom itself speaks, a natural science in which the atom disintegrates at our hands. We have spiritual science in theosophy, which descends to the most concrete facts, which shows that something has emerged in the physical body that the astral body, the etheric body, the I, has formed. We have natural science that reaches up to the boundaries of spiritual science, and we have spiritual science that has descended to the boundaries of natural science. That is the course of development.

A hundred years ago, looking at two currents – a natural science that did not reach up to spiritual science, and a philosophy that did not reach down to natural science – Schiller said: Oh, you are called to go one way, but for the time being you must still go separate ways so that each one becomes strong enough to help the other. This has been quickly fulfilled. In a way, natural science is strong through its weakness, in that it overcomes itself through its own facts. It will lead upwards. And spiritual science is strong because it can embrace the material. What Schiller recognized and hoped for seems to be coming true. Hopefully there will soon be many people who, with the one spiritual eye, like the woman in the fairy tale told at the beginning, no longer have to take the external beings and hurl them away because they tell them nothing, but there will be people who take every stone in their hands, lead it to a spiritual eye and recognize it as an expression of the spiritual world, because all matter is from the spirit and proclaims it. For materialism there was only matter; nothing was found there and things were thrown away. Spiritual science united with natural science will give man a spiritual aspect in every material thing. We will grow to love everything again because everything is an expression of the spiritual world.

Natural science is at a crossroads. It must either go to one side and be lost, or to the other, where it will stand united with spiritual science as the one world view; so that the two together lead man up to a way of life in which the spirit permeates life, so that in this union - which is brought about by facts themselves - a great goal for the good of humanity is achieved. We see it before us today. Let us try to visualize more clearly what we see before us by cultivating spiritual science. Then we will see that we are not doing it to satisfy mere curiosity, but to free ourselves inwardly from all doubts and to make us strong and vigorous and healthy for life. That will be the fruit of the union of natural science and spiritual science: health and strength and security in life!

Talking about the beginning and end of the earth seems like a very presumptuous undertaking at first. Only when you consider how infinitely important it is for humans to take a look at the whole place they live in can it become clear how important it is to take a look at the beginning and end of our planet.

Not only must we not forget this, but we must realize that it is not outdated; for all the thinking and feeling of our contemporaries in this field, which we will enter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, has grown out of the so-called scientific facts and only wants to accept scientific knowledge on this basis. Today we will have to discuss many things that one would probably think are not based on the solid ground of facts, which seemingly contradict what is considered scientific fact today.

But spiritual science can never limit itself to staying with what is today called the world of facts – what the human senses perceive around them in the external world or what our scientific methods can be combined through the mind, which is based on [what the senses grasp through the eyes, ears and hands], sensory research.

Spiritual science or, as it is called in the sense of a new current, theosophy, is by no means something that somehow comes into conflict with scientific facts. That would not only be presumptuous, but a nonsensical undertaking if one wanted to put forward any theory that contradicted firmly established, thoroughly researched facts.

But a distinction must be made between what human theory and hypothesis have built out of these facts like a confession; because, in addition to all other religious worldviews, in our time there is a kind of materialistic religion, or, since this is no longer a common word, , a kind of materialistic creed, which only wants to be in harmony and agreement with what the senses see, which only wants to accept what can be seen with the eyes, grasped with the hands, or similarly imagined as real sensual facts in the environment. This could bring Theosophy into conflict.

But [Theosophy] stands on two solid pillars, two insights – hypotheses, you may call them; for the Theosophist they are basic facts, not just convictions.

The one fact is that behind the sensual world there is a spiritual, invisible, supersensory world.

The other fact is that it is possible for man to penetrate into this invisible world through his knowledge and his research.

There are many people today who say: If there is a spiritual world, if there is something transcendental, we cannot explore it. What we know for sure, we know because we can open our eyes to visible things.

Spiritual science, however, says: [Of course] with the abilities of human nature, which such a world view speaks of, which is limited only to the sense world, we cannot penetrate into the supersensible world. But spiritual science, in a much stricter sense than any knowledge based on external facts, holds fast to what we call development. There is much talk of development today — it is also shown how man has developed through many stages to his present form. But when this view has arrived, it wants to stop at a certain point. It assumes that man has developed so far; but this view does not want to know anything about further development. It has a strange inconsistency, which may not be admitted theoretically, but which is expressed step by step in attitudes and feelings, in that one says: Man has developed, but there can be no question of further development.

One could call people with this view the Man- and We-people.

If we put ourselves in the place of popular newspaper articles or other popular writings, in which what appears to be established science flows into the world through a thousand channels, we often find this expression: “one cannot know”, “one cannot recognize” or “we cannot recognize”, etc.

Now, let us ask ourselves this: can a logic that truly understands itself, a thinking that truly understands itself, take such a point of view? Is this not the standpoint from which the blind would view things if the seeing were to tell him about light, radiance and color, and he were to reply: 'All you tell me is mere fantasy, mere imagination; you cannot know this'? Similarly, what our contemporaries — the man and woman in the street — say about a genuine spiritual doctrine of development is no better.

Spiritual science says: There are dormant abilities in every person, spiritual organs that can be developed and through which he can see and perceive more than through his sensory organs. Those others then say: This is fantasy, this is vain dreaming, we cannot know this.

But if you delve deeper into what is to come to humanity through Theosophy [in these times], you will see that in terms of spiritual development for humanity, there is an event that is much [higher and] more brilliant than what someone experiences who is born blind and undergoes an operation and gains their sight. When the man born blind undergoes an operation, he encounters light and color and clarity from the world that was previously shrouded in darkness for him, a world that he only knew through touch. A new world shines before him. If we transfer this to the spiritual life, we have what we call the awakening of the “spiritual eye”, as Goethe calls it. (Goethe says: Through what we know, we must not limit what is there.)

This awakening, this rebirth of man exists; this new world, which he just does not know, it is there. Never may we believe limited by what we know, everything that is here. With each new organ, a new world opens up for man. The development of man beyond the point to which nature has brought him, that is what spiritual science adheres to and where it begins. Theosophy leads us from what we have involuntarily become to what we are to become voluntarily. The sensual eyes have been given to us by nature around us, the spiritual eyes we awaken, acquire ourselves. Just as the sensual eyes perceive sensual light, so the spiritual eyes will take in a spiritual world.

Since Theosophy draws on completely different sources than the combining approach of our contemporaries [of building an event on solid facts], it may initially appear as if there is a bitter contradiction between what science is and what spiritual science has to say; but spiritual science does not deny anything that science says. But with a topic such as today's, where we combine the distant beginning of humanity and the goal of human development in the distant future, the contradiction between spiritual science and natural science will seemingly be there. In reality, spiritual science stands firmly on the ground of scientific facts. Let us first ask: What does science have to say about our topic, and by what means does it seek to recognize the gradual development of our earthly creatures?

Science is limited to sensory perception. It looks at what is around us in the present, as well as at the remains of a more or less distant past.

In the layers of our earth we find not only what our present life promotes and sustains, but also the remains of beings, the remains of beings that belonged to our earth in distant prehistoric times. If we dig into it, or expose it in some other way, the layers of our earth reveal primeval monuments of what took place in prehistoric times on our planet.

We first find the remains of a not-so-distant past in what remains of the graves and dwellings of our ancestors. This allows us to get a picture of these primitive ancestors, of their customs, how they lived, how they cooked, how they hunted.

Furthermore, we find the remains of animals that still exist today but which had a different shape in the past. Finally, we find the remains of animal species that are now extinct. It is easy to see that one layer lies on top of the other: what developed later, always upwards. If we look at all this carefully, we can reconstruct an image of how beings lived and developed on our earth.

Therefore, the natural scientist believes he is justified in saying: When we examine the layers, which, based on their position, are the oldest, it shows that at first no living creatures existed in our form, and then simple living creatures appeared; then increasingly complex ones, right up to humans.

We look back to a distant primeval time of the earth, when the earth was still much warmer, indeed, when it was still in a molten state. We then see how the earth gradually cooled, how the metals hardened, how the solid rock settled; we see how the first simple plants and animals emerged in a way that is unfathomable to science. We see the earth covered with simple plants and animals in the time called the Silurian and Devonian periods, where lower animals such as fish are present first, then amphibians and reptiles.

We then see an age in which the earth is covered over long distances by huge, tree-like plants; we then see how animal creatures lived there that seem adventurous to us today, that are extinct today. Then we see how these creatures become extinct, then how the first mammals arise – such as marsupials – then, relatively late, when the Earth had solidified, how the later mammals gradually arise, how they develop up, how they develop up to the apes; and how then, only very, very late, humans arise.

Natural science can tell us all this, but it has nothing to say about the way in which life develops out of the inanimate. It says: Once life existed, the beings developed ever higher through a constant struggle, [for which they needed and developed organs, and in this way they rose up to become human beings]. This is the confession that is purely limited to sensual facts – an image that would have to present itself from the point of view of natural science, the one who could sit down a chair in space and watch the world come into being over millions of years.

Spiritual science does not contradict this picture. It is important that one can develop a correct picture of the Earth's evolution using such methods. The spiritual researcher knows that there is much that is not right in this picture, because it assumes that higher and higher things have always emerged from the lower material, right up to the spirit. [And so it was initially with the material image that many have gained from the seemingly established facts that the] spirit is nothing more than what arises from material processes for the materialistic mind. Great emphasis must be placed on not overlooking this.

[As I said], this sensory image is not denied by spiritual science. Of course, it can only be recreated in the mind of today's man. Insofar as natural science is based on facts [and uses them to construct the past], it would be nonsense and folly to rebel against natural science. But spiritual science tells us: Behind all sensual existence and all sensual becoming stands spiritual being and spiritual becoming.

We will best understand this if we start from the present-day human being, because what the outer sensual appearance shows in the human being is, for spiritual science, only part of the human being. What presents itself to the senses, to the intellect, is only the human physical body. This physical body of man contains the same substances as all the seemingly lifeless nature around us; forces that live in every mineral being. Only in man are they much more complicated.

For every living being, especially for humans, spiritual science recognizes a second link in the overall being: this is the etheric or life body. If the physical body were left only to physical and chemical laws, it would disintegrate. In itself, the physical body is physically and chemically an impossible mixture. It is only possible because the physical body is permeated at every moment, like a sponge soaked in water, by the etheric body, a body of strength that fights at every moment against the disintegration of the physical body. Death is the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical body. Then the physical body follows the laws of physics and chemistry: it becomes a corpse and disintegrates into its component parts.

Thus, the human being has a second part of his being that he shares with all plants and animals (but no longer with minerals, with seemingly inanimate nature) – the etheric or life body.

Then there is a third part of the human being. Man not only contains what is present under his skin as bones, muscles, nerves and blood, but something lives in man that is much closer to his soul than bones, muscles and blood. What he knows exactly, because it is an experience for him in every moment of waking, is a sum of joy and sorrow, desire and passion. — All that we call soul life, from the lowest desires to the highest ideal — that is his astral body. Man has this in common with animals; no longer with plants.

Then there is a fourth element of the human being, the actual center of the human being, through which he is the crown of earthly creation. One thing is never properly taken into account by our contemporary researchers. There is a name that everyone can only say to themselves; it is the name “I”. Everyone can say “desk” to a desk, “table” to a table. But there is only one thing that everyone can say only to themselves, and that is the little word “I”! This means more than we usually think. None of us can say “I” to another person; it must resound in the innermost part of the soul if it is to express what is really meant by it. Therefore, those who knew the meaning of this word called this “I” the “inexpressible name of God.” They said: When this “I” sounds within man, then the drop of divinity, the spark of divinity in man, announces itself. Then the soul communes with itself. Only the truly divine being has access to this. This has access in the soul by pronouncing the “I am”. Jean Paul remembers the moment when he first became aware of the “I am”. There, he says, he looked “into the veiled holy of holies of his soul”.

These are the four members of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. When the naturalist, who believes he can base a belief purely on scientific facts, hears about these four parts of human nature, he may laugh, shake his head or consider the person who comes up with such word combinations and wants to base an insight on them to be a fool. But it would be just a set of words if the material processes of the body were actually to cause feelings, thoughts and the ego. Spiritual science recognizes that the outer body is not the first, but that the first is the ego and the astral body, and that the etheric body and the physical body are nothing but condensations of the spiritual being of man.

For the spiritual researcher, the physical body is to the astral body as ice is to water. If a child comes and shows us a piece of ice and asks what it is – and we say: Dear child, ice is water in a different form!, – at first it may not believe it; but we can make it understandable to it; then it will see it. Thus spiritual science shows that all material being is [transformed] condensed spirit. All that is material has emerged from the spiritual.

If we now look back to the beginning of the earth in terms of spiritual science, we recognize the following: Everything that the hypothetical person would see as a sensual becoming, he would recognize as a condensation of a previous spiritual, as a flowing out of the spirit. In the beginning of the earth's development, we are dealing with nothing but the spiritual. All matter – minerals, plants and animals, the entire world of the senses with all its beings – has developed out of the spiritual.

[Let us consider the state of sleep.] When we look at a sleeping person today, what do we see? First of all, the sleeping person has no inner consciousness. When we fall asleep, our feelings and desires, perceptions and ideas, ideals sink into the darkness. When we wake up, they emerge again [into our field of vision]. Spiritual science explains it this way: When a person sleeps, the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed; the astral body and the ego are lifted out. Because a person can only interact with the world around them through the instruments of the physical body, the astral body can only have perceptions, it can only experience pleasure and pain when it is within the physical body.

Fichte says: It is not the eyes that see, but the I perceives through them. — In a future state of development of humanity, the astral body will have [organs of perception] of its own, with which it can perceive; the initiate already has them. Then he will perceive the spiritual world as the initiate already does today. The astral body cannot perceive the world around it when a person is asleep. But it would be nonsense to say that the astral body and the human ego are destroyed at night and resurrected anew in the morning. No, the astral person was only in his actual home, the astral world.

For spiritual science, the sleeping human being is a different being than the waking human being. We now ask: What does the astral body and the ego do throughout the night while the person sleeps? Everything in the world, in the cosmos, has its task; so too does the astral body and the ego. Everything is wisely arranged in the cosmos. A being like the human being today could not exist without sleep. If the astral body were always in the physical body, always active in the senses, eyes and ears, the hands, then fatigue would ultimately have a wearing effect.

In the distant past, the astral body lived in the astral world. There it was in harmony with its world. Only in the course of time has it been incorporated into the physical body. There is not yet complete harmony with the physical body. This is expressed through fatigue. During the night, the fatigue must be carried away. We receive strength during sleep through the work of the astral body on the physical body during the night. Natural science says that the human body is refreshed by physical processes. The spiritual researcher does not deny this; but the other thing also happens.

Spiritual research sees the spiritual reasons behind the external facts. For example, let us imagine two people, one of whom slaps the other one in the face. One of the two people watching the scene explains: This person had a particular inner surge of anger [therefore he raised his hand to strike]; that was the cause of the slap. But the other says: You are a dreamer, I saw it: He raised his arm, moved his hand towards the other's face, and that's how he got slapped. Of course, the soul researcher does not deny this event; but he sees that something else was going on. Thus, the spiritual researcher faces the natural scientist.

The actual human being – the I – lives during the night state, albeit unconsciously, in a spiritual existence and works on his physical body. If we trace this image back in the course of the earth's development, it changes continuously. Today's relationship between waking hours and nighttime sleep is not found in all ages. Today we have a ratio between waking and sleeping of two-thirds to one-third. If we go back, we come to times when people slept much more – were outside their physical body for much longer periods of time – and in distant primeval times we find that people slept for the majority of the time and were only in their physical body for a very short time. On the other hand, the activity that the astral body can perform on the physical body is ever more powerful and mighty. At the same time, we see that the physical body is becoming ever simpler and the human spirit is being occupied more and more. If we go back even further, we would find that man has no physical and no etheric body yet, but that he is a purely astral being.

We can imagine it like this: Let us imagine that we have a mass of water and, through some process, cause a part of it to turn into ice. Now we cause [the same process] so that more water turns into ice, and [so on] that this ice becomes more and more complicated. The mass of water is used up more and more, the mass of ice becomes more and more complicated and larger, until finally all the water is used up and we only have an intricate ice formation.

Now imagine that we have not just one but a whole lot of such water balls, of which we treat only a part, as just described. In another, we let the first ice ball fall out of the water mass; because it is separated, no complicated ice ball can form from it. It always remains so simple. At ever further stages, we allow ever more complicated ice balls to fall out, [at the next stage again more]: Thus, in addition to the most complicated ice formations that have emerged from the entire mass of water, we have such formations that fall out of the mother water at an earlier, less complicated stage.

Let us apply this image to the development of our earth and of man, [but bear in mind that] at the beginning of our earth's development there was nothing physical, bodily. The only part of man present was what now slips out during sleep at night. Spiritual science teaches that all other beings on earth (minerals, plants, animals) came into existence later than the spiritual human being. (In the beginning there was nothing but the spiritual human being!)

In the beginning, the entire Earth was like a mulberry (made up of individual berries), composed of spiritual beings. From the astral, the physical first separated like ice balls from water. Some retained the astral [and only formed the physical at a higher level]; for others, what initially separated from the astral substance remained at the first level. The moners [Haeckel's were not there earlier than the spiritual man and] were the first attempt of man to form a physical body of man. Where the first physical rudiments of a physical body fell out of the astral, there the moners formed. But the astral bodies, with the inclusion of the physical, developed higher. Only what fell out of the astral did not advance.

At each level [more complicated beings are formed, and so on; at each level] beings remain who fall away from the spiritual. Let us now look at the entities on different levels that have fallen out and therefore stopped. These fallen out beings have stopped, while the human being, who was the first among all other beings, has separated out everything that was initially in his spirit, so that his complicated physical body was created.

If we look at a preliminary stage of humanity in the not too distant past, we see that the human being still has an awkward body, but also still has the spirituality to develop it to higher levels. But certain bodies remain at this earlier stage; they fall away from spirituality; these are the apes; others ascend, these are today's humans.

If we go back into the past of humanity, we find that the spiritual man is out of the physical body for longer and longer; he transforms the physical body. Thus, the astral man has gradually created today's man, ascending from the lowest form to ever more perfect forms. In the lowest beings, we do not see beings from whom we descend, but backward brothers of man. The other beings, plants and stones, are not the origin of the higher beings either, [but on the contrary, differentiations, retarded products of the same].

The question is therefore wrong: How did the living emerge from the non-living? This gives a completely false picture. We know that coal was formed from plants. There was also life there first. This was transformed into non-life. Once upon a time there were large fern forests and horsetail-like plants on Earth. We find these again in the coal deposits. Everything we now dig up as coal was once a plant. We can see from nature research how the rock kingdom emerged from the plant kingdom.

The spiritual researcher now says: All the mineral kingdom once emerged from the plant kingdom. At that time, the plant kingdom was formed differently and lived under very different conditions than when there was no mineral kingdom. Let us go to the oldest ancestors of the mineral kingdom: granite, which consists of quartz, [feldspar] and mica schist. In the distant past, it was formed from a solidification of the plant kingdom. All that is mineral originated from plant life, all plant life from animal life, all animal life from human life.

In the beginning, only spiritual people were on earth; the animal, plant and mineral separated out of them. What is so often referred to as the first thing to have come into being is the latest to have emerged: the mineral kingdom.

[It is a theosophical principle:] Man is the firstfruits of the earth's development; he contains everything else within him, everything else has emerged from him. All the suggestions of natural science contradict this, but anyone who engages with spiritual science will see the truth. Even where the first mineral, the primeval nebula, occurs, spiritual science says that this primeval nebula is already a creation of the spirit. We must learn to understand everything on earth, starting with human nature.

The future of the earth can only be understood by starting with the human being. [In his own human nature, he is a complicated being.] The physical body of the human being, with the miracle of the brain and the heart, shows us a structure full of wisdom. The smallest piece of the thigh bone is so wisely put together from small beams that the most skillful engineer could not imitate it. This wisdom-filled structure is a condensation of the etheric body, and this in turn is a condensation of the astral body. And this astral body is in turn a creation of the I.

Today, during the night, the astral body is busy working away the fatigue substances from the physical body. In the future, the astral body will become creative again by entering into a relationship with the outside world during the day and getting to know this outside world. In this way it gains knowledge and strength, and these signify increased creativity; with the powers thus acquired, it will continue to work and raise the physical body to levels of higher development. The spirit created the original form of the physical body, it has brought about the physical formation up to the present form and will raise the human form to even higher levels in the future development of the earth.

The spiritual researcher [does not recognize all organs as equal; he does not regard them indifferently, but values them according to different types. He] distinguishes among the physical organs those that are in the process of being regressed, [gradually] dying off, those that have reached their peak in the past, and those that have not yet reached their peak today, that are on the way to developing even more, to perfecting themselves. This is the case with the human heart. The lower organs, which are connected with man's desires and passions, are on the way to dying away; but those which are connected with the higher, with ideal aspirations, are on the way to perfection.

Take the heart, for example, which is a muscle that remains a mystery to anatomists and physiologists. All muscles have a certain structure. Those with voluntary movement, for example the muscles of the hand, have a striated musculature, while those with involuntary movement have longitudinally striated musculature. [The digestive system, with involuntary movement, also has longitudinally striated muscles; only] the heart, which is a muscle with involuntary movement, nevertheless has transversely striated muscles. This makes it a crux for external research.

Spiritual science, however, sheds light on this darkness of material research [by showing that] the heart is on the way to becoming an arbitrary muscle.

In the future, people will regulate their heart and pulse from their soul, with the qualities of their soul. They will gain control over their body. The body will be much more than it is today, the direct expression of the soul's qualities.

We can gain an understanding of this from two facts that already exist in the soul life of man today. The first is what occurs in man when he faces danger. The fear he feels before an event shows itself in the pallor as an influence on the blood, which recedes from the outer parts of his body. What is expressed in the blood is an immediate consequence of the soul process. The other pole of this expression of the soul is found in what we call feelings of shame, where the blood flows to the outer parts of the body, causing the person to blush. These are the two poles of soul feeling.

If we now imagine how the heart develops to ever higher levels of inner formation, until more and more of what takes place in the blood is subject to the will, we have the beginning of what spiritual science presents as the future course of human development. In the future, the human being will discard the organs that point to the past and develop the organs of the future. We look forward to an end of the earth in which man will be spiritualized, so that then, as today his hands are subject to his will, he will have his whole body subject to his will, in a way that today, when we hear about it, seems to border on the miraculous. Today, man already has dominion over many natural forces. He will continue to expand his dominion by gaining control over himself.

At the beginning of the earth, man was a spirit; but his consciousness was a dull, sleeping consciousness. His physical body did not yet exist. Then he separated himself from the astral body. Now the astral body will increasingly dominate the physical body and learn to spiritualize the physical more and more. In the process of higher development, man will again arrive at a spiritual stage, but consciously. In the end, he will stand as the great king of the earth.

The material is a creation of the spiritual, it stands in the middle. Before that, only the spiritual was there and in the future the spiritual will be there again. In the future, the material will recede again, and only what the spirit has drawn out as fruit will remain. Some formations on the human body have already receded. In the beginning, man was completely covered with hair. The hair is already in the process of regressing. Other organs are also in the process of regress.

The eye is formed by the mind. It now perceives the material world. The eye [as an organ] will pass away again; but what the eye has seen, the human mind takes with it as fruit, it incorporates it. Likewise, the ears will pass away as organs; but what man has heard with them, his mind takes with it as fruit. Man has formed his organs for a reason; when all material things cease, he will stand as a spiritual being, more mature, more inward, more perfect. [One day everything physical will be perfected; the earth will crumble into separate parts.] That the earth will one day disintegrate is also taught by physics. But what remains [for the materialist] of [the field of corpses] on earth? If we look at it in a materialistic sense, only the barren nothing remains. In the sense of spiritual science, however, we know that everything seen, heard or felt by these sensory organs will remain as the content of the spiritual man, and with this content the man will ascend to a new cosmic existence in other worlds, still unknown.

We see at the same time the goal of humanity when we consider the beginning and end of the earth's development. This theory is not just gray, but something that pours hope, [trust], strength and confidence into our souls, [inspiring courage and the desire to work. They are distant ideals; yes, but] when man takes up these ideals in his soul, they will help us [and carry us] in the smallest work in everyday life. It is something that makes us eager to work and makes us strong and confident.

We then learn that [we were there as a spirit before our physical matter was there, and that] he creates the form [that he loses], but only enriches himself through the form. [The spirit will emerge victorious again.] What we receive through our eyes and ears, experience in our soul, that will be spiritualized.

[We carry this imprinted spiritual form to ever higher levels of existence.] Those who knew this – [those who looked deeper into the nature of the world] – also knew that man owes his existence to heaven, that he is born out of the world of the stars, that he is more than anything on earth.

We can summarize this with Goethe's words. He felt that man is born out of the great cosmic world, out of which the stars were born. He expresses this in the words he calls “Orphic primal words”:

As on the day that gave you to the world,
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You come and go and go again
According to the law by which You came.
That is how You must be. You cannot escape Yourself,
As the Sibyls and the prophets have said;
And no time and no power dissect
The form that has been shaped, which develops in a living way.

Every profound soul must repeatedly ask itself the question about the meaning of life and must always ask itself anew about the mystery of death. Not only when we look up at the starry heavens, at the far reaches of the world, but at every step of everyday life, questions arise about the essential riddles of life. When one person is born under such circumstances that we can already see at his cradle that hopelessness and hardship will accompany him through life, while another is born under the most favorable circumstances and with the most favorable disposition, so that it is known that he is destined for a happy life and will be able to bring many blessings to his fellow human beings, we ask: Why is that so? We ask: How is it that one person seems to be born and grows up in need and misery through no fault of their own, while the other seems to be able to lead a happy existence through no merit of their own?

Man is never able to answer the riddles of life by merely considering them physically. Theosophy seeks the answers in the spiritual realization of the background of existence, which leads beyond the sensual world. Not because idle curiosity plagues people, does Theosophy want to answer their questions about the riddles of life, but because humanity needs that confidence for its healthy existence, which comes from the sources that give us answers to the questions about the riddles of life.

If we want to explore the sources of life in the sense of the theosophical worldview, we must remember the structure of the human being. What the senses see in a person is only a part of the human being, which it shares with so-called mineral beings. Spiritual science shows us how the physical organism is kept alive by a second principle of human existence, the etheric or life body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. Furthermore, we have seen from the study of Theosophy how everything that lives in the soul in the way of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, instincts, desires and passions, has a third link in the human being as a carrier – the astral body. While the physical body is shared with all mineral beings, the etheric body is shared with all living beings, but the astral body is shared only with animals. The sum of powers, that which the human being has at the center of his being, he is able to summarize with the words “I am”. The “I am” is proper only to man among all the living beings around him.

From this I, he becomes the master and transformer of his other three limbs. As the I works, it first transforms part of the astral body into the spirit self or manas. By working on itself through powerful impulses, the life body is transformed into the life spirit or budhi. When the ego works down into the physical principle, Atman or the spiritual man develops from it.

The ordinary human being has the four limbs up to the I. Large parts of Manas are also usually already developed. In the course of his development, the human being will achieve the ability to independently develop the seven limbs of his being. Actually, the seven parts are only four limbs, because Manas is the transformed astral body, Budhi is the transformed etheric body, and Atman is the transformed principle of the physical body.

When a person wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, we have the four limbs in front of us: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I.

In the state of sleep and in the state of death, these four members are present in different proportions. The state of sleep is also called the brother of death. When a person falls asleep in the evening, all the things that the astral body carries, such as desire and suffering, joy and pain, sink into an indeterminate darkness. The I also sinks into an indeterminate darkness when a person falls asleep in the evening. For those who view the human being from the standpoint of spiritual science, the state of the sleeping person is as follows: the physical body and the etheric body are lying in bed; the astral body and the ego are lifted out. In today's human beings, the astral being and the ego do not yet have spiritual organs of perception. In order to perceive the world, they still need the organs of the physical and etheric bodies. Otherwise, he cannot perceive consciously. Naively, man does not say, quite correctly, “My eye sees, my ear hears,” but “I see” and “I hear.” The sense organs of the physical body are the instruments of the astral body and the I.

Sleep thus presents itself as that state of man in which the astral body and the inner man, the I, are in a purely spiritual world. Is the astral body inactive during the night? It is not. During the night it is outside the physical and etheric bodies. For those who can explore these things, it can be observed that the astral body works on the physical and etheric bodies of the person throughout the night. Its actual home is where it is at night. There are the forces into which it immerses itself during the night. During the day, it absorbs all kinds of impressions through the external senses: form, color, light and so on. All of this surges back and forth in the astral body.

The astral body is not yet in complete harmony with the physical body; this is what causes fatigue. This has to be removed at night by the astral body immersing itself in the forces of its spiritual home and refreshing itself. Once complete harmony has been established between the astral body and the physical body, a very different state will have been reached. The surging and swaying of the impressions absorbed during the day from the physical environment manifests itself in the evening as fatigue. During the night, the astral body works off the fatigue. We feel the consequences of this work on the physical and etheric bodies early in the morning. We can see the manifestations of what the astral body does during the night in the refreshment we experience in the morning. Even when the physical and etheric bodies are ill, the astral body has a harmonizing effect on the disturbed etheric and physical bodies during sleep.

Physical science may object to some of these things, but spiritual processes at work behind the facts do not contradict the results of scientific research. If, time and again, physical research wants to object to the teachings of spiritual science about spiritual and psychological processes, the following example of a similar assessment can be pointed out. Let us assume: A person gives another a slap in the face. A has observed that the first person had a fit of anger and was therefore tempted to give the other a slap in the face. But B says: “I saw his hand rise and move towards the other person's face, and that's why he slapped him.” The part about the fit of anger is nonsense! This is the verdict of physical research when it insists on the truth of external facts in the face of the results of spiritual research. We only recognize a small part of the world when we only judge and observe external facts. Everything that happens in the world, that physics researches, that external observation shows us, these are only the gestures of the soul life of the world. The situation is quite different for a person in death than in sleep. Then not only the ego dissolves with the astral body, but the etheric body also goes with it and only the physical body remains behind. During life, the etheric body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body. But the physical body disintegrates the moment the etheric body leaves it. Immediately after death, the ego, the astral body and the etheric body are together – for a short while. Not all people experience this togetherness right after death; for each person, it lasts as long as that person has been able to exist without sleep.

The experiences that a person has during this time are very strange. They literally feel how they grow out of themselves, become greater. During this time, they see all the events of their past life around them as in a large memory tableau. This moment is extraordinary. Only in exceptional cases does a person experience something similar during their lifetime. It may be that in the event of a strong fright, when he is close to drowning or falling, he experiences a loosening of the etheric body from the physical body to such an extent that the memory of his entire past life then comes to him. However, this is only the case if the ego and the astral body do not lose consciousness. The astral body must remain within the etheric body.

Another example of the etheric body being disconnected from the physical body in places is when a limb, for example a hand, has fallen asleep. Children have a very telling expression for this; they say: “It feels like seltzer water.” The seer knows that at this moment the etheric body is protruding from the physical body at that point. The different blood circulation is only a consequence of the etheric body being partially released. Like the fingers of a glove, we can see the etheric body hanging out of the hand. When someone is hypnotized, you can see how the etheric body protrudes to the left and right, hanging down like rags.

Perhaps some will say that these explanations are nonsense and consider them foolishness. It is very good when we can cite examples from people who might otherwise laugh at theosophy to support our stories about the facts of the spiritual world. Criminal anthropologist Benedikt recounts the following experience: When he was once close to drowning while bathing, he suddenly saw his entire life before him.

We can explain this fact, that after death a person sees their entire previous life in front of them, and the similar experience of a tremendous shock, as follows: the etheric body is, among other things, also the carrier of memory. In ordinary life it is connected with the physical brain. At the moment when the vehicle of memory is freed from the physical brain, but while the astral body is still within the etheric body, the whole of life presents itself to the human soul as a great tableau of memories. Bit by bit it fades away into darkness, and a second corpse remains of the human being. From the etheric or life body, something remains for him like an essence, like an extract of the great memory picture, as if the content of a large book had been summarized in one page. So after death, the essence of earthly life remains for us from this memory tableau; this is incorporated into the astral body on its journey after death.

Now the human being still consists of his ego, the astral body and the imprinted essence of his last life. If we want to know what fate the astral body has after death, we must remember the experiences of ordinary life. Let us see who actually experiences the enjoyment of physical things. That is the astral body, which uses the physical organs only as tools. For example, in the case of a gourmet, it is also the astral body that uses the physical organs only as tools. But it is the astral body that craves the delicious food. Let us imagine ourselves in the astral body after death. It has the same desires and instincts as it had before, but now it lacks the instruments to satisfy them. The astral body is now in a special situation. It has desires but no tools to satisfy them. The human being is in a state of burning thirst. The more a person depends on everything that can only be satisfied by the physical body, the more burning the thirst. This thirst lasts until the astral body can recognize that it must get rid of these desires. The time of burning thirst is called the Kamaloka time; Kama - desire; Loka - place. It is the sum of experiences that can only be satisfied by the physical body and must be given up.

When man learns to seek the Divine-Spiritual in the world, he will lack nothing after death. It is a method of shortening the Kamaloka time if one frees oneself from the lower pleasures and learns to let one's inner being be satisfied by spiritual interests. The highest by which man can free himself from the sensual in the sensual is art, true art. The more idealistic and spiritual the art that affects a person, the shorter the Kamaloka period. Art that is directed towards the external, the sensual, is not suitable for the whole of the human being. For one person it is relatively longer, for another person it is relatively shorter, the time in which he must unlearn what connects him to the physical world.

Then there is the shedding of a third corpse. After a long time, the human being discards the astral corpse. The ego cannot take anything with it on the further pilgrimage through life that is not purified by the ego. The unpurified, unprocessed parts of the astral body remain in the astral world. These astral corpses are always around us. People who are or have been closely connected to the material world leave dense astral corpses behind.

Some influence on a person comes from the fact that he walks through spiritual entities, that his soul is permeated by such spiritual entities. These also include such astral corpses. Because if a person is not armed against it, he is open to such influences. A restlessness arises in him, perhaps also bad impulses. But a good person, full of character, will not succumb to these harmful influences.

We have now followed the human being to the point where only the ego remains, with the purified parts of the astral and etheric bodies. Now a purely spiritual state occurs, which is called devachan. The human being is stripped of his covers; he is a purely spiritual being. We now still have the I before us. It has sprung out of the bodily sheaths and has become spiritual in itself. The I in man is almost like a plant that has been enclosed in crevices and has been freed and unfolds freely. The I unfolds in all directions when the astral corpse has fallen away. It feels a bliss of the deepest kind.

If we want to get to know these feelings, we have to compare them with a feeling that is only a very weak echo of these feelings. When the hen on the egg uses her body heat to guide the developing being towards maturation, we have a small something in this feeling of bliss that the I experiences during this time.

Then comes the time when the fruit ripens, as an extract of the last life. It is not for nothing that the I has absorbed this extract of the last life. The I has absorbed the world in a thousand and one impressions. The I has faced life with the intellect and the mind. Everything it has absorbed is compressed into this small extract, and this extract has become a creator through the feeling of inner bliss.

The I is preparing to build a new human being. We have built ourselves as we are. Only the outer disposition and something of what is in the etheric body has been passed down to us by inheritance. What we have already seen developing in the child's body took this long time after death to utilize the fruits of the last life. Every time after death, the human being takes with them an extract of their last life. Each time, the human being builds a new life through what they have experienced. In addition to what we have brought with us from previous lives, after death we take with us the extract of our last life. The ego experiences this bringing in of the fruit of the last human life and its use as a blessing. So the ego works to use this fruit of the last life to build a new human being. Physical inheritance provides the building blocks. How they are put together comes from the last life. The extract of the last life contains the design of the new life.

But after death, people have more to do than just occupy themselves with themselves. If we look at the development of the earth, we have to realize that everything on earth is changing. People will not reappear on earth until they can have new experiences on earth. Imagine Europe a few centuries before Christ, when everything was covered with mighty forests, and how every corner of the earth has changed since then. The face of the earth is constantly changing, and so is the cultural face of the earth. Our children learn something completely different at school than the children of ancient Rome learned. The face of the earth has also changed in spiritual and mental terms. Where are the forces that bring about these changes?

The forces that transformed the Germany that existed in the first centuries after the birth of Christ lie in the spiritual world. The co-workers in this change are the people themselves. After death, they continue to work on the physiognomy of the earth. The seer sees how the earthly beings are surrounded and enveloped by the bodiless human beings who are preparing the soil into which they will be born into a new life. In the physical life, we build cities, construct instruments, machines, and so on. But after death we transform the face of the earth. We prepare the bed in which the human being will be embedded when he is ready to take on a new form. We see the human being creating in the spiritual world; he is one of the architects, one of the co-creators in the transformation of the earth.

It takes a long time for the earth to change in such a way that the soul returns to a completely different scene. Once man appeared for the first time in the earthly body. Before that he was in a purely spiritual world, in the bosom of the Godhead. What man experiences in the physical body in the physical world can only be experienced within the physical body. With each life he adds a new page to the previous one, so to speak. At the end of his incarnations, these earthly experiences are added to his soul, and he lays them down before the altar of the Deity.

As long as the human being can be enriched by special forms of earthly existence, he embodies himself. This is how the individual life is comprehensible. It is an effect of previous lives and is a preparation for a later life. This law was not created for brooding, for idle speculation and for looking back at the past without taking action. This law tells us: the experiences of this life are the consequences of previous lives and the preparations for later lives. If I am in need and misery, then this is the preparation for later experiences. This is a law of life that knows how to solve the riddles of life in a wonderful way.

If someone, invoking this law, were to object, as sometimes happens, that one could not then help someone who is in need, then that is completely nonsensical. Just as a merchant's balance is a specific one, but a new item can be entered on the debit and credit side every day, so you can take stock of all your good and bad deeds at any moment in your life, but a new item can also be added to either side at any moment. It is never out of the question for us to add completely new items. Through the law of karma, we are able to help people. It is a law that gives impetus to life and mobilizes all energy. The law of karma is often misunderstood from two sides: from theologians and from some theosophists. The theologians object that salvation was brought to all of humanity by Christ Jesus, and therefore people cannot do anything themselves for their salvation. On the other hand, many a theosophist believes that he must oppose the teaching of redemption through Christ Jesus because he believes in the law of karma. But if he understands the law of karma correctly, then he knows that you can always add a new item to your life account and that you can therefore always help another person. Thus, the more powerful a person is, the more he can help other people. A mighty being, such as Christ, can have an effect on an infinite number of people. The act of redemption is inscribed in the karma of all humanity. The law of karma is in beautiful harmony with the redemption of Christ Jesus.

The most beautiful instrument for comprehending the great religious truths is Theosophy. Through it, the modern human being receives the form that is right for his soul.

The meaning of life arises when we recognize that which is behind life and incorporate it into the impulses of our actions. Theosophy is for energetic people who want to create in this life. When we learn to recognize spiritual forces, we also learn to introduce them into life. The theosophist is indifferent to arguments for or against Theosophy based on the usual dialectical arguments. What matters for Theosophy is that it becomes an instrument for life, that it increasingly intervenes in life. In the next period of cultural development, it will become clear what people owe to Theosophy: that people become joyful in their work and hopeful through Theosophy.

Theosophy is a remedy for humanity. If it proves to be such, then it needs no other logical proof. If Theosophy has a healing effect on people, then it will be proven by the facts of life.

This last lecture of the winter series will be devoted to that realm in the life of the soul which has been enriched by so many of the greatest treasures that spring from man's inner life. We will consider the nature and significance of art in the evolution of mankind. Since the field is so wide, we will confine ourselves to the art of poetry, and you will understand that we have time to consider only the highest achievements of the human spirit in this realm.

Now someone might say: “The lectures this winter have been concerned with various aspects of the human soul, and their central purpose has been to seek for truth and knowledge in relation to the spiritual world—what have these studies to do with the human activities which strive, above all, to give expression to the element of beauty?” And in our time it would be easy to take the view that everything connected with truth and cognition should be kept far, far apart from the aims of artistic work. A widely prevalent belief today is that science in all its branches must be subject to strict rules of logic and experiment, whereas artistic work follows the spontaneous promptings of the heart and the imagination. Many of our contemporaries, accordingly, would say that truth and beauty have nothing in common. And yet, the great leaders in the realm of artistic creation have always felt that true art should flow from the same deep sources in the being of man as do knowledge and cognition.

To take one example, only, we will turn to Goethe, a seeker both for beauty and for truth. As a young man he strove by all possible means to acquire knowledge of the world and to find answers to the great riddles of existence. Before the time of his journey to Italy, which was to take him to a country enshrining longed-for ideals, he had pursued his search for truth, together with his Weimar friends, by studying, for example, the philosopher Spinoza,⁵⁹ who sought to find a uniform substance in all the phenomena of life. Spinoza's dissertations on the idea of God made a deep impression on Goethe. Together with Merck⁶⁰ and other friends he believed he could hear in Spinoza something like a voice which spoke through all surrounding phenomena and seemed to give intimations concerning the sources of existence—an idea which could appease in some way his Faustian aspirations. But Goethe's soul was too richly endowed for him to gain from a conceptual analysis of Spinoza's works a satisfying picture of truth and knowledge. What he felt about this, and what his heart longed for, will emerge most clearly if we accompany him on his travels in Italy where he beheld great works of art and caught in them an echo of the art of antiquity. In their presence he experienced the feeling he had hoped in vain to draw from the ideas of Spinoza. Thus he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “One thing is certain: the ancient artists had as much knowledge of Nature, and as sure an idea of what can be represented and of how it should be done, as Homer himself. Unfortunately, works of art of the highest order are all too few. But when one contemplates them, one's only desire is to get to know them rightly and then to depart in peace. These supreme works of art have been created by men as the highest products of Nature in accordance with true natural laws. Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.”⁶¹

Goethe believed he could discern that the great artists who had created works of art of this high order had drawn them out of their souls in accordance with the same laws that Nature herself had followed. This can mean only that in Goethe's view of the laws of Nature, which operate in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are raised to a new level and gain new strength in the human soul, so that they come to full expression in the soul's creative powers. Goethe felt that in these works of art the laws of Nature were operative again and thus he wrote to his Weimar friends: “Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” At such moments, Goethe's heart is stirred by the recognition that art in its highest manifestations comes from the same sources as do knowledge and cognition, and we realise how deeply Goethe felt this to be true when he declares: “Beauty is a manifestation of Nature's secret laws, which would otherwise remain forever hidden.”⁶² Thus Goethe sees in art a revelation of Nature's laws, which in its own language confirms the findings of cognition in other fields of investigation. If now we turn from Goethe to a modern personality who also sought to invest art with a mission and to bestow on mankind, through art, something related to the sources of existence—if we turn to Richard Wagner, we find in his writings, where he tries to clarify for himself the nature and significance of artistic creation, many similar indications of the inner relationships between truth and beauty, cognition and art. In writing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he says that these sounds convey something like a revelation from another world something quite different from anything we can grasp in merely rational or logical terms.⁶³

Of these revelations through art, one thing at least can be said with certainty. They act upon the soul with convincing power and permeate our feeling with a conviction of their truth, in face of which all merely rational or logical considerations are powerless.

Again, in writing about symphonic music, Wagner says that something resounds from it as though its instruments were an organ for revealing the feelings that went into the primal act of creation, when chaos was ordered and harmonised, long before any human heart was there to echo those feelings. Thus in the revelations of art Wagner saw a mysterious truth that could stand on an equal footing with knowledge gained by the intellect.

Something else may be added here. When we make acquaintance with great works of art in the sense of spiritual science, we feel that they communicate their own revelation concerning man's search for truth, and the spiritual scientist feels himself inwardly related to this message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he feels more closely related to it than he does to many of the so-called spiritual revelations that people accept so light-heartedly today.

How is it, then, that truly artistic personalities attribute to art a mission of this kind, while the spiritual scientist feels his heart so strongly drawn to these mysterious revelations of great art? We will approach an answer to this question by bringing together many things that have come before our souls during these winter lectures.

If we are to study the significance and task of art from this point of view, we must not go by human opinions or the quibblings of the intellect. We must consider the development of art in relation to the evolution of man and the world. We will let art itself speak to us of its significance for mankind.

If we wish to trace the beginnings of art, as it first appears among men in the guise of poetry, then according to ordinary ideas we have to go back very far indeed. Here we will go back only as far as the extant documents can take us. We will go back to a figure often regarded as legendary—to Homer, the originator of Greek poetry, whose work has come down to us in the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Whoever was the author—or authors, for we will not go into that question today—of these two poems, the remarkable thing is that both poems begin on a quite impersonal note:

Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles ...

Sing, O Muse, of much-travelled man ...

are the opening words of the second Homeric poem, the Odyssey. The author thus wishes to indicate that he is indebted to a higher power for his verses, and we need only a little understanding of Homer to realise that for him this higher power was not a symbol but a real, objective Being. If this invocation to the Muse means nothing to modern readers, this is because they no longer have the experiences from which a poem as impersonal as Homer's could derive. And if we are to understand this impersonal element in early Western poetry, we must ask: What preceded it? Whence did it arise?

In speaking of human evolution, we have often emphasised that in the course of millennia the powers of the human soul have changed. In the far-distant past, beyond the reach of external history but open to spiritual-scientific investigation, human souls were endowed with a primitive dreamy clairvoyance. In times before men were so deeply embedded in material existence as they came to be later on, they perceived the spiritual world as a reality all around them. We have pointed out also that the ancient clairvoyance was different from the trained, conscious clairvoyance that can be attained today, for this is bound up with the existence of a firm centre in the life of the soul, whereby a man takes hold of himself as an ego. This ego-feeling, as we now have it after its gradual development through long ages, was not present in the far-distant past. But for this very reason, because man lacked this inner centre, his spiritual senses were open and with his dreamy, ego-less clairvoyance he looked into the spiritual world from which his true inner being had emerged in the primal past. Powerful pictures, like dream-pictures, of the forces behind our physical existence came before his soul. In this spiritual world he saw his gods, he saw the actions and events that were played out among them. And present-day research is quite wrong in supposing that the sagas of the gods, found in various forms in different countries, were the product merely of popular fantasy. If it is thought that in the remote past the human soul functioned just as it does today, except that it was more prone to imagine things, including the imaginary gods of the sagas that is sheer fantasy and it is those who believe it who are imagining things. For people in that remote past, the events described in their mythologies were realities. Myths, sagas, even fairy-tales and legends, were born from a primeval faculty in the human soul. This is connected with the fact that man had not yet acquired the firm central point in his soul which now enables him to live within himself and in possession of himself. In the far past he could not shut himself up in his ego, within the narrow boundaries of his soul, separated from his environment, as he came to do later on. He lived in his environment, feeling that he belonged to it, whereas a modern man feels that he stands apart from it. And just as man today can feel in his bodily organism the inflow and outflow of the physical strength he needs to sustain his life, so primeval man, with his clairvoyant consciousness, was aware of spiritual forces flowing in and out of him, so that he lived in inward reciprocity with the forces of the great world; and he could say: “When something takes place in my soul, when I think, feel or will, I am not a separate being. I am open to forces from the beings who come before my inward sight. By sending their forces into me, they stimulate me to think and feel and will. “That was the experience of man when he was still embedded in the spiritual world. He felt that spiritual powers were active in his thinking, and that when he accomplished anything, divine-spiritual powers had poured into him their willing and their purpose. In those primeval times, man felt himself to be a vessel through which spiritual powers expressed themselves.

Here we are looking back to a period far away in the past, but this period extended, through all sorts of intermediate stages, right up to the time of Homer. It is not difficult to discern how Homer was giving continued expression to the primeval consciousness of mankind: we need only look at some features of the Iliad. Homer describes a great armed struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans, but how does he do this? What did the struggle signify for the Greeks of that time?

Although Homer may not start out from this aspect, there was more in this struggle than the antagonism generated by the passions, desires and ideas which stem from the human ego. Was it merely the personal and tribal emotions of Trojans and Greeks that clashed in this fighting? No! The legend which provides a connecting link between primeval and Homeric consciousness tells how three goddesses, Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite, competed at a festival for the prize of beauty, and how a human connoisseur of beauty, Paris, son of the king of Troy, was appointed to judge the contest. Paris gave the prize to Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife. The woman was Helen, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta. In order to gain possession of Helen, Paris had to abduct her by force. In revenge for this outrage, the Greeks armed themselves for war against the Trojans, whose country lay on the far side of the Aegean sea, and it was there that the struggle was fought out.

Why did human passions flare up in this way, and why did all the events described by Homer's Muse take place? Were they merely physical events in the human world? No. Through the consciousness of the Greeks we see depicted the antagonism of the goddesses behind the strife of men. A Greek of that time could have said: “I cannot find in the physical world the causes which have brought human beings into violent conflict. I must look up to a higher realm, where the gods and their powers are set against one another.” The divine powers, as they were seen at the time in the images which we have just described, were actively involved in human conflicts. Thus we see the first great work of poetic art, Homer's Iliad, growing out of the primeval consciousness of mankind. In Homer we find presented in metrical form, from the standpoint of a later consciousness, an echo of the clairvoyant vision which came naturally to primeval humanity. And it is precisely in this Homeric period that we must look for the first time when clairvoyant consciousness came to an end for the Greek people, and only an echo of it remained.

A primeval man would have said: “I can see my gods battling in the spiritual world, which lies open to my clairvoyant consciousness.” In Homeric times this was no longer possible, but a living memory of it endured. And just as primeval man had felt inspired by the divine worlds wherein he had his being, so the author of the Homeric epics felt the same divine forces holding sway in his soul. Hence he could say: “The Muse that inspires me inwardly is speaking.” Thus the Homeric poems are directly connected with primeval myths, if these are rightly understood. From this point of view, we can see arising in Homer's poetic imagination something like a substitute for the old clairvoyance. The ruling cosmic powers withdrew direct clairvoyant vision from man, and gave him, instead, something that could live similarly in the soul and could endow it with formative power. Poetic imagination is compensation for the loss of ancient clairvoyance.

Now let us recall something else. In the lecture on Conscience we saw that the withdrawal of the old clairvoyance occurred in quite different ways and at different times in various countries. In the East the old clairvoyance persisted up to a relatively late date. Over towards the West, among the peoples of Europe, clairvoyant faculties were less widely present. In the latter peoples, a strong ego-feeling came to the fore while other soul-powers and faculties were still relatively undeveloped. This ego-feeling emerged in the most varied ways in different parts of Europe—differently between North and West, and notably different in the South. In pre-Christian times it developed most intensively in Sicily and Italy. While in the East men remained for a long time without an ego-feeling, in these regions of Europe there were people in whom the ego-feeling was particularly strong because they had lost the old clairvoyance. In the proportion that the spiritual world withdraws externally from man does his inward ego-feeling light up.

Hence there was bound to be a great difference at certain times between the souls of the Asiatic peoples and the souls living in the parts of Europe we are concerned with here. Over there in Asia we see how the cosmic mysteries still rise before the soul in great dream-pictures, and how man can witness the deeds of the gods as they unroll externally before his spiritual eye. And in that, which such a man can relate, we can discern something like a primeval account of the spiritual facts underlying the world. When the old clairvoyance was succeeded in Asia by the substitute for it, imagination, this gave rise especially to visionary symbols in picture form.

Among the Western peoples, in Italy and Sicily, a different faculty, arising from a firmly-grounded ego, produced a kind of excess of strength, an enthusiasm that broke forth from the soul, unaccompanied by any direct spiritual vision but inspired by a longing to reach up to things unseen. Here, therefore, we find no recounting of the deeds of the gods, for these were no longer evident. But when with ardent devotion, expressed in speech and song, the soul aspired to the heights it could only long for, primitive prayer and chant were born, addressed to powers which could not now be seen after the waning of old clairvoyant consciousness.

In Greece, the intermediate country, the two worlds meet. There we find men who are stimulated from both sides. Pictorial vision comes from the East; from the West comes the enthusiasm which inspires devotional hymns to the unseen divine-spiritual powers. This intermingling of the two streams in Greek culture made possible a continuation from Homeric poetry, which we can locate in the 8th or 9th century B.C., to the works of Aeschylus, three or four hundred years later.

Aeschylus comes before us as a personality who was certainly not open to the full power of Eastern vision, the convincing power we find in Homer as an echo of the old clairvoyant vision of the deeds of the gods and their effect on mankind. This echo was always very weak, and in Aeschylus so weak that he came to feel a kind of unbelief in the pictorial visions of the world of the gods that ancient clairvoyance had brought to men. Homer, we find, knew very well that human consciousness had once been open to these visions of the divine-spiritual powers which stand behind the interplay of human passions and emotions in the physical world. Homer, accordingly, does not describe merely a human conflict. Zeus and Apollo intervene where human passions are involved, and their influence is apparent in the course of events. The gods are a reality which the poet brings into his poem.

How different it all is with Aeschylus. The stream of influence from the West, with its emphasis on the human ego and the inward isolation of the human soul, had a particularly strong effect on him. For this reason he was the first dramatist to portray man as acting from out of his ego and beginning to release his consciousness from the inflow of divine powers. In Aeschylus, in place of the gods we find in Homer, the independent man of action appears, though still at an initial stage. As a dramatist, Aeschylus puts this kind of man at the centre of things. The epic had to emerge under the influence of the pictorial imagination that came from the East, while Western influence, with its emphasis on the personal ego, gave rise to drama, wherein the man of action is the central character.

Let us take, for example, Orestes, who is guilty of matricide and as a consequence sees the Furies. Yes, that is still Homer: things do not pass away so quickly. Aeschylus is still aware that the gods were once visible in picture form, but he is very near to giving up that belief. It is characteristic that Apollo, who in Homer acts with full power, incites Orestes to kill his mother, but after this no longer has right on his side. The human ego begins to stir in Orestes, and we are shown that it gains the upper hand. The verdict goes against Apollo, he is repudiated, and we see that his power over Orestes is no longer complete. Aeschylus was thus the right and proper poet to dramatise the figure of Prometheus, the divine hero who titanically opposes the might of the gods and represents the liberation of mankind from them.

Thus we see how the awakening ego-feeling from the West mingles in the soul of Aeschylus with memories of the pictorial imagination of the East, and how from this conjunction drama was born. And it is decidedly interesting to find that tradition wonderfully confirms the findings derived entirely from spiritual-scientific research.

One remarkable tradition partly acquits Aeschylus of the charge that he had betrayed certain secrets of the Mysteries; he replied that he could not have done so, for he had not been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. It certainly never was his intention to present anything derived from temple secrets, from which Homer's poems had originated. In fact, he stood somewhat apart from the Mysteries. On the other hand, the story goes that at Syracuse, in Sicily, he had gained knowledge of secrets connected with the emergence of the human ego. This emergence took a particular form in regions where the Orphic devotees cultivated the older form of ode, the hymn, addressed to the divine-spiritual worlds that could no more be seen but only aspired to. In this way art took a step forward. We see it emerging naturally from ancient truths and finding its way to the human ego. Inasmuch as man, after living predominantly in the outer world, took possession of his own inner life, the figures in the Homeric poems became the dramatic characters of Aeschylus; and so, side by side with the epic, drama arose.

Thus we see primeval truths living on in another form in art, and the achievements of ancient clairvoyance reproduced by poetic imagination. And whatever was preserved from ancient times by art was applied to the human personality, to the ego becoming aware of itself.

Now we will take an immense step forward in time—on to the 13th and 14th centuries of the Christian era. Here we encounter the great mediaeval personality who leads us so impressively to the region which the human ego can reach when, by its own endeavours, it ascends to the divine-spiritual world. We come to Dante, whose Divine Comedy (1472) was read and re-read by Goethe. It affected him so strongly that when an acquaintance sent him a new translation of it, he wrote his thanks to the sender in verse:

Great gratitude is due to him
Who brings us freshly to this book once more,
The book which in a glorious manner makes us cease
All our searchings and complaints.⁶⁴

How did art progress from Aeschylus to Dante? How does Dante bring before us a divine-spiritual world once again? How does Dante lead us through its three stages, Inferno, Purgatory and Heaven—the worlds which lie behind our physical existence?

Here we can see how the fundamental spiritual impulse that guides human evolution has continued to work in the same direction. Aeschylus, quite clearly, is still in touch with spiritual powers. Prometheus is confronted by the gods, Zeus, Hermes and so on, and this applies also to Agamemnon. In all this we can discern an echo of the ancient clairvoyance. With Dante it is quite different. He shows us how, solely through immersing himself in his own soul, developing the forces slumbering there and overcoming all the obstacles to this development, he was able, as he says, in “the middle of life”—which means his thirty-fifth year—to gaze into the spiritual world. Where as men endowed with the old clairvoyance directed their gaze to their spiritual environment, and whereas Aeschylus still reckoned with the old divinities, in Dante we see a poet who goes down into his own soul and remains entirely within his personality and its inner secrets. By pursuing this path of personal development he enters the spiritual world, and is thus able to present it in the powerful pictures we find in the Divine Comedy. Here the soul of Dante is quite alone with his personality; he is not concerned with external revelations. No one can imagine that Dante could have taken over from tradition the findings of the old clairvoyance. Dante relies on the inner development that was possible in the Middle Ages, with the strength of human personality as its only aid; and he brings before us in visionary pictures something often emphasised here—that a man has to master everything that clouds or darkens his clairvoyant sight. Whereas the Greeks still saw realities in the spiritual world, Dante here sees pictures only—pictures of the soul-forces which have to be overcome. Such are those lower forces of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul which tend to hold the ego back from higher stages of development. The good, opposite forces were already indicated by Plato: wisdom for the consciousness soul, self-reliant courage for the intellectual soul, moderation for the sentient-soul. When the ego goes through a development which enlists these good forces, it comes gradually to higher soul experience which lead into the spiritual world; but the hindrances must first be overcome.

Moderation works against intemperance and greed, and Dante shows how this shadow-side of the sentient soul can be met and mastered.

He depicts it as a she-wolf. We are then shown how the shadow-side of the intellectual soul, senseless aggression, depicted as a lion, can be overcome by its corresponding virtue, self-reliant courage. Finally we come to wisdom, the virtue of the consciousness soul. Wisdom which fails to strive towards the heights, but applies itself to the world in the form of mere shrewdness and cunning, is pictured as a lynx. The “lynx-eyes” are not the eyes of wisdom, able to gaze into the spiritual world, but eyes focused only on the world of the senses. After Dante has shown how he guards against the forces which hinder inner development, he describes how he ascends into the world which lies behind physical existence.

In Dante we have a man who relies upon himself, searches within himself, and draws from out of himself the forces which lead into the spiritual world. With him, poetry takes closer hold of the human soul and becomes more intimately related to the human ego. Homer's characters are woven into the doings of the divine-spiritual powers, as indeed Homer felt himself to be, so that he says: “Let the Muse sing the story I have to tell.” Dante, alone with his soul, knows that the forces which will lead him into the spiritual world must be drawn from within himself. We can see how it becomes less and less possible for imagination to depend on external influences. A small fact will show that on this point we are concerned not with mere opinions but with forces deeply rooted in the human soul. Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock⁶⁵ was a deeply religious man and a profounder spirit even than Homer. He wished to write a sacred epic poem, with the conscious intention of doing for modern times what Homer did for antiquity. He sought to revive Homer's manner, but without being untrue to himself. Hence he could not say, “Sing for me, O Muse,” but had to open his Messias with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful man.” Thus we see how progress in artistic creation does indeed occur among men.

Now let us take a further giant stride over several centuries, from Dante to another great poet, Shakespeare. Here again we see a remarkable step forward in the sense of a progression. We are not concerned with criticism of Shakespeare or with setting one poet above another, but solely with facts that point to a necessary, legitimate advance.

What was it about Dante that specially impressed us? He stands there by himself, with his own revelations of the spiritual world, and describes the great experience that came to him from within his own soul. Can you imagine that Dante would have given so effective expression to the truth as he saw it if he had described his visions five or six times over in various ways? Do you not feel that the world into which Dante has transposed himself is such that it can be described once only? That is indeed what Dante did. The world he describes is the world of one man at the moment when he feels himself to be at one with what the spiritual world is for him. Hence we must say: Dante immerses himself in the element of human personality, and in such a way that it remains his own. And he sets himself to traverse this human-personal aspect from all sides.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, creates an abundance of all possible characters—a Lear, Hamlet, Cordelia, Desdemona; but we have no direct perception of anything divine behind these characters, when the spiritual eye beholds them in the physical world, with their purely human qualities and impulses. We look only for what comes directly from their souls in the form of thinking, feeling and willing. They are all distinct individuals, but can we recognise Shakespeare himself in them, in the way that Dante is always Dante when he immerses himself in his own personality? No—Shakespeare has taken another step forward. He penetrates still further into the personal element, but not only into one personality but into a wide variety of personalities. Shakespeare denies himself whenever he describes Lear, Hamlet and so on; he is never tempted into presenting his own ideas, for as Shakespeare he is completely blotted out; he lives entirely in the various characters he creates. The experiences described by Dante are those of one person; Shakespeare shows us impulses arising from the inner ego in the widest diversity of characters. Dante's starting-point is human personality; he remains within it and from there he explores the spiritual world. Shakespeare has gone a step further: he, too, starts from his own personality and slips into the individuals he portrays; he is wholly immersed in them. It is not his own soul-life that he dramatises, but the lives of the characters in the outer world that he presents on the stage, and they are all depicted as independent persons with their own motives and aims.

Thus we can see here, again, how the evolution of art proceeds. Having originated in the remote past, when human consciousness was devoid of ego-feeling, with Dante, art reached the stage of embracing individual man, so that the ego itself became a world. With Shakespeare, it expanded so far that other egos became the poet's world. For this step to be possible, art had to leave the spiritual heights from which it had sprung and descend into the actualities of physical existence. And this is just what we can see happening when we pass on from Dante to Shakespeare. Let us try to compare Dante and Shakespeare from this point of view.

Superficial critics may reproach Dante for being a didactic poet. Anyone who understands Dante and can respond to the whole range and richness of his work will feel that his greatness derives precisely from the fact that all the wisdom and philosophy of the Middle Ages speak from his soul. And for the development of such a soul, endowed with Dante's poetic power, the totality of mediaeval wisdom was a necessary foundation. Its influence worked first on Dante's soul and was again evident, later on, in the expansion of his personality into a world. We cannot properly understand or appreciate Dante's poetic creation unless we are familiar with the heights of mediaeval spiritual life. Only then can we come to appreciate the depths and subtleties of his achievement.

Certainly, Dante took one step downwards. He sought to bring the spiritual down to lower levels, and this he did by writing in the vernacular, not in Latin as some of his predecessors had done. He ascends to the loftiest heights of spiritual life, but descends into the physical world as far as the vernacular of his place and time.

Shakespeare descends still further. The origin of his great poetic characters is nowadays the subject of all sorts of fanciful speculation, but if we are to understand this descent of poetry into the everyday world—still often looked down on by the highly placed—we must bear in mind the following facts.

We must picture a small theatre in what was then a suburb of London, where plays were produced by actors who, except for Shakespeare, would not be rated highly today. Who went to this theatre? The lower orders. It was more fashionable in those days to patronise cockfights and other similar spectacles than to go to this theatre, where people ate and drank and threw eggshells to mark their disapproval and overflowed on to the stage itself, so that the players acted in the midst of their audience. Thus it was before a very low-class London public that these plays were first performed, although many people today fondly imagine that from the first they were acclaimed in the highest circles of cultural life. At best, unmarried sons, who allowed themselves to visit certain obscure resorts in disguise, would go now and then to this theatre, but for respectable people it would have been highly improper. Hence we can see that poetry came down into a realm of the most unsophisticated feelings.

Nothing human was alien to the genius who stood behind Shakespeare's plays and the characters in them. So it happened—in respect even of external details—that art, after having been a narrow stream flowing on high levels, descended into the world of ordinary humanity and broadened into a wide stream running through the midst of everyday life. And anyone who looks more deeply into this will see how necessary it was that a lofty spiritual stream should be brought down to lower levels in order that such vital figures as Shakespeare's highly individual characters should appear.

Now we will move on to times nearer our own—to Goethe. We will try to connect him with his own creation—the figure of Faust, in whom were embodied all his ideals, endeavours and renunciations during the sixty years he worked on his masterpiece. Everything he experienced in his innermost soul in the course of his rich life, while he climbed from stage to stage of knowledge in his search for higher answers to the riddles of the world—all this is merged in the figure of Faust that we encounter today. What sort of figure is he in the context of Goethe's poetic drama?

Of Dante we can say that what he describes is portrayed as the fruit of his own vision. Goethe had no such vision: he makes no claim to having had a special revelation at a particularly solemn time, as Dante does with regard to the Divine Comedy. Everywhere in Faust Goethe shows that he has worked inwardly on what he presents. And whereas the experiences that came to Dante could be described only in his own one-sided way, Goethe's experiences were no less individual but they were translated into the objective character of Faust. Dante gives us his most intimate personal experience; Goethe, too, had personal experiences, but the actions and sufferings of Faust are not those of Goethe's life. They are free poetic transformation of what Goethe had experienced in his own soul. While Dante can be identified with his Divine Comedy, it would take almost a literary historian to identify Goethe with Faust. Faust is an individual character, but we cannot imagine that an array of Faust-like figures could have been created, as numerous as the characters created by Shakespeare. The ego depicted by Goethe in his Faust can be created once only. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare created Lear, Othello, and so on. Goethe, it is true, also wrote Tasso and Iphigenia, but the difference between them and Faust is obvious. Faust is not Goethe; fundamentally he is every-man. He embodies Goethe's deepest longings, but as a poetic figure his is entirely detached from Goethe's own personality. Dante brings before us the vision of one man, himself; Faust is a character who in a certain sense lives in each one of us. This marks a further advance for poetry up to Goethe.

Shakespeare could create characters so individualised that he immersed himself in them and enabled each one of them to speak with a distinctive voice. Goethe creates in Faust an individualised figure, but Faust is not a single individual; he is every-man. Shakespeare entered into the soul-natures of Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Cordelia and so on. Goethe entered into the highest human element in all men. Hence he creates a representative character relevant to all men. And this character detaches himself from Goethe's personality as a poet, and stands before us as a real objective figure in the outer world.

Here is a further advance of art along the path we have outlined. Starting from the direct spiritual perception of a higher world, art takes hold of man's inner life to an ever-increasing degree. It does so most intimately when—as with Dante—a man is dealing with himself alone. In Shakespeare's plays the ego goes out from this inwardness and enters other souls. With Goethe, the ego goes out and immerses itself in the soul-life of every-man, typified by Faust. And because the ego is able to go out from itself and understand other souls only if it develops its own soul-powers and sinks itself in another's spirituality, so it is in line with the continued advance in artistic creation that Goethe should have been led to depict not only physical acts and experiences in the outer world, but also the spiritual events that everyone can experience if he opens his ego to the spiritual world.

Poetry came from the spiritual world and entered the human ego; with Dante it took hold of the ego at the deepest level of the inner life. With Goethe we see the ego going forth from itself again and finding its way to the spiritual world.

The spiritual experiences of ancient humanity are reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey; and in Goethe's Faust the spiritual world comes forth again and stands before man. That is how we should respond to the great final tableau in Faust, where man, after having descended into the depths, works his way up again by developing his inner forces until the spiritual world stands open to him once more. It is like a chorus of primal tones, but ever-renewed in ever-advancing forms. From the imperishable spiritual world resounds the imagination, bestowed on man as a substitute for spiritual vision and given form in the perishable creations of human genius. Out of the imperishable were born the perishable poetic figures created by Homer and Aeschylus. Once more poetry ascends from the perishable to the imperishable, and in the mystical chorus at the very end of Faust we hear:

Everything transient is but a parable ...⁶⁶

And so, as Goethe shows us, the power of man's spirit ascends from the physical world into the spiritual world again.

We have seen artistic consciousness advance with great strides through the world and in representative poets. Art emerges from the spiritual, its original source of knowledge. Spiritual vision withdraws more and more in proportion as the sense-world commands ever-wider attention, thereby stimulating the development of the ego. Human consciousness follows the course of world evolution and so has to make the journey from the spiritual world to the world of the ego and the senses. If man were to study the world of the senses only through the eyes of external science, he would come to understand it only intellectually in scientific terms. But in place of clairvoyance, when this passes away, he is granted imagination, which creates for him a kind of shadowy reflection of what he can no longer perceive. Imagination has had to follow the same path as man, entering eventually into his self-awareness, as with Dante. But the threads that link humanity to the spiritual world can never break, not even when art descends into the isolation of the human ego. Man takes imagination with him on his way; and when Faust appears, we see the spiritual world created anew out of imagination.

Thus Goethe's Faust stands at the beginning of an epoch during which man is to re-enter the spiritual world where art originated. And so the mission of art, for all those who cannot reach the spiritual world through higher training, is to spin the threads that will link the spirituality of the far-distant past with the spirituality of the future. Art has indeed already advanced so far that it can give a view of the spiritual world in imagination, as in the second part of Faust. Here we have an intimation that man in his evolution is at the point when he must learn to develop the powers which will enable him to re-enter the spiritual world and to gain conscious knowledge of it. Moreover, having led man towards the spiritual world with the aid of imagination, art has prepared the way for spiritual science, which presupposes clear vision of the spiritual world, based on full ego-consciousness. To point the way towards that world—the world that human beings long for, as we have seen in the examples drawn from the realm of art—that is the task of spiritual science, and it has been the task also of this winter's lectures.

Thus we see how great artists can be justified in feeling that reflections of the spiritual world are what they have to give to mankind. And the mission of art is to mediate these revelations during the time when direct revelations of the spiritual world were no longer possible. So Goethe could say of the works of the old artists: “There is necessity, there is God!” They bring to light the hidden laws of nature which would otherwise never be found. And so could Richard Wagner say that in the music of the Ninth Symphony he could hear revelations of another world—a world which a mainly intellectual consciousness can never reach. The great artists have felt that they are bearers of the spirit, the original source of everything human, from the past, through the present, into the future. And so with deep understanding we can agree with words spoken by a poet who felt himself to be an artist: “The dignity of mankind is given into your hands.”⁶⁷

In this way we have tried to describe the nature and mission of art in the course of human evolution, and to show that art is not as separate from man's sense of truth as people today may lightly suppose. On the contrary, Goethe was right when he refused to speak of the idea of truth and the idea of beauty as separate ideas. There is, he said, one idea, that of the necessary workings of the divine-spiritual in the world, and truth and beauty are two revelations of it.

Everywhere among poets and other artists we find agreement with the thought that the spiritual foundations of human existence find utterance in art: or there are artists with deeper feelings who will tell you that art makes it possible for them to believe that their work carries a message to mankind from the spiritual world. And so, even when artists are most personal in expression, they feel that their art is raised to a universal human level, and that in a true sense they speak for humanity when the characters and revelations of their art give effect to the words spoken by Goethe's Mystical Chorus:

Everything transient is but a parable ...

And on the strength of our spiritual-scientific considerations we may add: Art is called upon to transfuse the transient and the perishable with the light of the eternal, the imperishable. That is the mission of art.

• 59. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677. For Goethe's relationship to Spinoza cf. Goethe's description in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part III Book 14.
• 60. Johann Heinrich Merck, 1741–1791. Writer.
• 61. See Italienische Reise, Rome, 6th September 1787.
• 62. See Goethe, “Sprüche in Prosa”, in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, ed. Rudolf Steiner, reprint Dornach 1975, vol. V, p. 495.
• 63. Cf. “Beethoven,” 1870, in vol. XI of Wagner's Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen.
• 64. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zahme Xenien VIII, dated 23rd July 1824.
• 65. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, 1724–1803. He concluded his “Messias” in 1773.
• 66. Concluding lines to Goethe's Faust (Faust II, 1. 12, 104ff.).
• 67. Friedrich von Schiller in the poem “Die Künstler”.

This lecture is also known as Spiritual Science and Language. It appears as lecture 2 of 9 in the lecture series: Metamorphoses of the Soul, Paths of Experience – 2. The original German is included in: Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens. Pfade der Seelen Erlebnisse. Zweiter Teil (#59 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961.)

It is fascinating to study from the point of view of Spiritual Science the different ways in which the being of man expresses itself,—that is to say Spiritual Science in our sense of the term. We can obtain a general survey of human life in its different phases and aspects by studying them as we have done in the course of these lectures.

To-day we shall consider the expression of the spirit of man in speech, and in the next lecture, under the title of ‘Laughter and Weeping,’ an aspect of man’s power of expression which is indeed bound up with speech and yet fundamentally different from it.

The whole being of man, his whole significance and dignity, is bound up with speech. Our innermost life, all our feelings and will-impulses flow out from us, linking us to our fellow-men through speech which enables us to expand and radiate into our environment. On the other hand, those who dare to penetrate into the inner life of some great individuality may feel that human speech is a kind of tyrant that exercises its power over the inner life. We are indeed aware, if we are only willing to admit it, that word and speech can only inadequately express the feelings, the thoughts, and all the intimate and individual colouring of everything that passes through the soul. We also realise that our own native language compels us to a definite kind of thinking. Do we not all realise how dependent our thinking is upon our speech? In more senses than one our concepts attach themselves to words, and an imperfectly developed man may easily mistake the word, or what the word infuses into him, for the concept. This is why so many people are incapable of building up a conceptual world of their own transcending what is imparted by the words current around them. We must surely realise that the character of a whole people speaking a common language is in a certain sense dependent on that language. Anyone who studies the more intimate connections between the characteristics of race and speech knows to what an extent the way a man is able to express the content of his soul in sound reacts upon the strength and weakness of his character, upon his temperament, indeed upon his whole outlook on life. Those who have knowledge will be able to learn a great deal about the character of a people from the configuration of their particular speech or language. Since, however, a language is common to a whole people, the individual is dependent on the community and on its average level. The individual is subject, as it were, to the tyranny and power of the community. But when we realise how our individual spiritual life on the one hand, and the common spiritual life on the other, are expressed in speech, the so-called ‘Mystery of Speech’ assumes great significance.

It is certainly possible to understand something of the life of the soul by observing how a man expresses himself in words. The mystery of speech and its origin and development through the different epochs has always been a problem in certain domains of Science, but it cannot be said that specialists in our age have been very successful in fathoming this mystery. To-day, therefore, we shall try in a somewhat aphoristic manner, to throw light on the development of speech and its connection with the human being, from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

What at first seems so mysterious when we designate an object or a process by a word, is how the particular sound-combination in the word or sentence is related to what comes forth from us, and how it expresses the phenomenon as a word. External Science has made many attempts to bring the most varied experiences together in different combinations, but this mode of observation has been felt to be unsatisfactory. There is one question which is really so simple, and yet so difficult to answer: how was it that man, confronted with something in the external world, produced, as from out of himself, an echo of the particular object or process in a definite sound?

Some people thought this question quite simple. They imagined, for instance, that speech-formation took its start from the fact that man heard some external sound, either produced by animals, or caused by the impact of one object against another, and that he then imitated the sound through the inner faculty of speech, like a child, who, hearing the ‘bow-wow’ of a dog, imitates this sound and calls the dog ‘bow-wow.’ Word-formation of this kind may be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ an imitation of the sound. This kind of imitation was the basis of the original sound and word formation,—at least so it was stated by those who regarded the matter from this particular point of view. The question is of course still unanswered as to how man comes to give names to dumb entities from which no sound proceeds. How does he ascend from the sound uttered by an animal or caused by an occurrence which can be heard, to one which cannot? Max Müller, the famous Philologist, ridiculed this, calling it the ‘bow-wow’ theory, because he realised what an unsatisfactory piece of speculation it was. He advanced another theory in its place which his opponents in turn called ‘mystical,’ though they used the word in an unjustifiable sense. Max Müller really means that every single thing contains something of the nature of sound within itself; everything has sound in a certain sense, not only a glass we let fall, or a bell we strike, but every single thing. Man’s capacity to set up a relationship between his soul and the inner sound-essence of the object calls forth in the soul the power to express this inner sound-essence; the inner essence of the bell is expressed in some way when we ‘feel again’ its tone in the ‘ding-dong.’ Max Müller's opponents ridiculed him in return by calling his the ‘ding-dong’ theory. However many more combinations of this kind we might care to enumerate,—and they have been evolved with great diligence,—we should find that the attempts to characterise in this external way what man causes to resound like an echo from his soul to meet the essence of things, must always be unsatisfactory. We must, in effect, penetrate more deeply into the whole inner being of man.

According to Spiritual Science man is a highly complex being. As he stands before us he has in the first place his physical body, which contains substances which are also found in the mineral world. As a second, higher member he has the etheric, or life body. Then he has the member which is the vehicle of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, instinct, desire and passion,—the astral body. This astral body is, to Spiritual Science, as real a part of man's constitution as anything the eyes can see and the hands touch. The fourth member of the human being has been spoken of as the bearer of the Ego, and man's evolution, at its present stage, consists in working, from his Ego outwards, as it were, at the transformation of the other three members of his being. It has also been indicated that in a far-off future the human Ego will have transformed these three members to such an extent that nothing will remain of what Nature, or the spiritual powers existing in Nature, have made of them.

The astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, of all ebbing and flowing ideas, feelings and perceptions, came into existence in the first place without our co-operation,—that is to say, without the activity of our Ego. The Ego works upon the astral body, purifying and refining it, gaining mastery over its qualities and activities. If the Ego has worked but little on the astral body, man is the slave of his instincts and desires. If, however, the Ego has refined the instincts and desires into virtues, has co-ordinated phantasmal thinking by the guiding threads of logic, a portion of the astral body is transformed. Whereas formerly it was not worked upon by the Ego, it has become a product of the Ego. When the Ego carries out this work consciously,—as it is beginning to do in human evolution to-day,—we call the part of the astral body which has been consciously transformed from out of the Ego, ‘Spirit Self,’ or ‘Manas,’ to use a term of Oriental Philosophy. When the Ego works in a different and more intense way, not only upon the astral body, but also upon the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body which has been thus transmuted the ‘Life Spirit’ or ‘Budhi’ in Eastern terminology. And finally, although this belongs to the far-off future, when the Ego has become so strong that it transmutes the physical body and regulates its laws,—in such a way that the Ego is everywhere controlling all that lives in the physical body,—we give the name of ‘Spirit Man’ to that part of the physical body thus under the rulership of the Ego; and since this work begins with a regulation of the breathing process, the oriental term is ‘Atman,’ from which the German ‘atmen’ (to breathe) is derived.

In the first place, then, we have man as a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And just as we may speak of three of the members of our being as being products of the past, so may we speak of three other members which as a result of the work of the Ego will gradually unfold in the future. Thus we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being, adding Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man to physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. But although we regard these three higher principles as belonging to a far-off future of human evolution, it must be said that in a certain sense man is preparing for them even to-day. Man will only begin consciously to transform the physical, etheric and astral bodies by means of the Ego in a distant future, but unconsciously, that is to say, without full consciousness, the dim activity of the Ego has already transformed these three members. A certain result has indeed already been achieved.

Those inner members of man's being mentioned in previous lectures could only have come into existence because the work of the Ego upon the astral body has resulted in the development of the sentient soul as a kind of inner reflection of the sentient body. The sentient body conveys what we call ‘enjoyment’ (Genuss) and this is reflected in the inner soul-being as the desires we ascribe to the soul. (Sentient body and astral body are the same thing so far as man is concerned; without the sentient body there could be no ‘enjoyment.’) Thus astral body, and transformed astral body, or sentient soul, belong together in the same sense as enjoyment and desires. The Ego has also worked on the etheric body in the past. What it has unfolded there has brought about the fact that in his inner being man bears the intellectual, or mind-soul. The intellectual soul, which is also the bearer of the memory, is connected with a subconscious process of transformation of the etheric body proceeding from the Ego. And finally, the Ego has in past ages already worked at the transformation of the physical body in order that man may exist in his present form. The product of this is called the consciousness soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the things of the outer world. In this sense too, therefore, we may speak of the sevenfold human being: the three soul members, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul have arisen as the result of a preparatory, subconscious. Ego activity. But here the Ego has worked unconsciously or subconsciously, upon its sheaths.

Now we must ask: are not these three members, physical body, etheric body and astral body complicated entities? It is a most marvellous structure, this physical body of man! Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. These elements are poor in comparison with what was already in existence before man possessed an Ego. Therefore Spiritual Science teaches us that in a primordial past the first germ of man's physical body was brought into existence by Spiritual Beings. To this was added the etheric body, then the astral body, and finally the Ego. The physical body of man has thus passed through four evolutionary stages. First of all the physical body existed in direct correspondence with the spiritual world, then it was elaborated, permeated and interwoven with the etheric body, and grew more complicated. Then it was permeated by the astral body and grew more complicated still. Then the Ego was added, and only when the Ego had worked on the physical body was a portion transformed into the vehicle of so-called ‘human consciousness,’ the faculty by which man acquires a knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has to do a great deal more than create a knowledge of the external world through the senses and brain. It has to carry out a number of activities lying at the basis of consciousness but taking their course entirely outside the region of the brain. And so it is with the etheric and astral bodies.

When we realise that all around us in the external world is Spirit, that Spirit is at the basis of everything material, etheric, astral, we must say: just as the Ego itself, as a spiritual being works from within outwards while man's evolution proceeds in the three members of his being, so must Spiritual Beings, or spiritual activities, if you will, have worked upon his physical, etheric and astral bodies before the Ego asserted itself and elaborated a further fragment of what had already been prepared. Here we look back to past ages when an activity proceeding from without inwards was exercised upon the astral, etheric and physical bodies, just as now the Ego works from within outwards upon these three members. Thus it must be said that spiritual creation, spiritual activity has been at work on our sheaths, imparting form, movement, shape and so on before the Ego was able to take root therein. We must speak of the existence of spiritual activities in human beings preceding the activity of the Ego. We bear within us spiritual activities which are necessary preliminaries to those of the Ego and which were in operation before the Ego could intervene. Let us then for the moment eliminate all that has been elaborated by the Ego from the three members of our being (sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul) and consider the structure, inner movement and activity of the sheaths of the human being. Before the activity of the Ego, a spiritual activity was exercised upon us. Therefore in Spiritual Science we say that in man as he is to-day we have to do with an individual soul, with a soul permeated by an Ego which makes each single human being into an individuality complete in itself. We say that before man became this complete Ego-being, he was the product of a ‘Group-Soul,’ of a soul essence, just as we speak of Group-Souls to-day in the animal world. The individual soul in the human being is, in the animal kingdom, at the basis of a whole family or species. A whole animal species has one common animal Group-Soul. In man, the Soul is individualised.

Thus before man became an individual soul, another soul worked in the three members of his being. This other soul—which we can only learn to know to-day through Spiritual Science—is the predecessor of our own Ego. This predecessor of the Ego, man's Group- or Species-Soul which gave over to the Ego the three members it had already elaborated, physical body, etheric body, astral body, in order that the Ego might further work upon them,—this Group-Soul similarly transformed, developed and regulated the three bodies from its inner centre. And the last activity which worked upon the human being before the bestowal of the Ego, the last influences immediately preceding the birth of the Ego, are to-day expressed in human speech. If, therefore, we take our start from our life of consciousness, intelligence and feeling, and look back to what has preceded this inner life, we are led to a soul activity as yet unpermeated by the Ego, the result of which is to-day expressed in speech.

Now let us consider this fourfold being of ours, and what lies at its foundation. How is it expressed outwardly in the physical body? The physical body of a plant has a different appearance from that of a man. Why is this so? It is because the plant possesses only physical body and etheric body, whereas in the physical body of man astral body and Ego are working as well. And what is inwardly working there correspondingly forms and transforms the physical. What is it, then, that has worked in man's physical body in such a way that it has become permeated by an etheric or life body?

The system of veins and glands is, in the human being and also in the animal, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or moulder of the system of veins and glands. The astral body, again, moulds the nervous system. Therefore it is only correct to speak of a nervous system in the case of beings possessing an astral body.

And what is the expression of the Ego in man? It is the blood system, and, in the human being, the blood which is under the influence of the inner, vital warmth. Everything that the Ego brings about in man, if it is to be moulded into the physical body, proceeds by way of the blood. Therefore it is that blood is such ‘a very peculiar fluid.’ When the Ego has elaborated the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, all that it is able to shape and fashion can only penetrate to the physical body by way of the blood. The blood is the medium for all the activities of astral body and Ego.

Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. The facial expression is surely an elaboration of what is working and living in the inner being. And is there anyone who would not admit that the inner activity of thought, if it lays hold of the whole soul, has a transforming effect on the brain, throughout the course of human life? Our brain adapts itself to our thinking; it is an instrument that moulds itself according to the requirements of our thinking. But, if we observe to what extent man is to-day able to mould his external being artistically from out of his Ego, we shall see that it is indeed very little. We can accomplish very little through the blood by setting it in movement from the “inner warmth.” The Spiritual Beings, whose activity preceded the activity of the Ego could do much more. They had a more effective medium at their disposal, and under their influence, man's form was so moulded that it has become, on the whole, an expression of what these Spiritual Beings made of him. What was the medium in which they worked? It was the air. Just as we work in the inner warmth, making our blood pulsate and thus bringing it to activity within our own form,—so did these Spiritual Beings work with regard to the air. Our true human form is the result of the work of these Beings upon us through the medium of the air.

It may appear strange to say that spiritual activities worked upon man through the air in a far-off past. I have already said that we should not understand our own inner life of soul and spirit if we were to conceive of it merely as so many concepts and ideas, if we did not know that it has been bestowed by the whole external world. Anyone who stated that concepts and ideas arise within man, even though there may be no ideas in the external world, might just as well say that he can obtain water from an empty glass. Our concepts would be so much froth if they were anything else than what is living in the objects outside us and the laws within them. The elements brought to life in the soul are drawn from the world around us. We may say, therefore, that everything around us in the material world is permeated and woven through by Spiritual Beings. However strange it may appear, the air around us is not merely the substance revealed by Chemistry; spiritual beings, spiritual activities are working within it. Through the blood warmth proceeding from the Ego (for that is the essential point), we can to a very small extent mould our physical body. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego performed mighty things in the outer form of our physical body through the medium of the air. That is the important thing.

It is the form of the larynx, and all that is connected with it, that makes us man. This marvellous organ and its relation to the other instruments of speech has been elaborated artistically out of the spiritual element of the air. Goethe said so beautifully in speaking of the eye: “The eye has formed itself from the light, for the light.” To say in the sense of Schopenhauer that “without an eye sensitive to the light, the impression of the light would not exist for us,” is only half a truth. The other half is that we should have no eyes if the light, in a primordial past, had not plastically elaborated the eye from undifferentiated organs. In the light, therefore, we must not merely see the abstract essence described to-day by Physical Science as light; we have to seek in the light the hidden essence that is able to create an eye.

In another sphere, it is the same thing as if we were to say that the air is permeated and ensouled by a Being who at a certain epoch was able to mould in man the highly artistic organ of the larynx and all that is related to it. All the rest of the human form,—down to the smallest details,—has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. Hence, it is speech that raises man above the animal. The Spiritual Being whom we call the “Spirit of the Air,” has indeed worked in and moulded the animal nature, but the activity did not reach the point of development of a speech organism such as is possessed by man. With the exception, for example, of what has been elaborated unconsciously by the Ego in the brain and in the perfecting of the senses,—everything, that is, except the products of Ego activity,—has proceeded from a higher activity preceding that of the human Ego, whose purpose it was to create man's body out of a further elaboration of his organs of speech. There is no time now to explain why the birds, for instance, in spite of their perfection of song, have remained at a stage where their form cannot, be an expression of the organs of speech.

So far, then, as the instruments of speech are concerned, man was already inwardly organised before he arrived at the stage of thinking, feeling and willing as he does to-day. These latter processes are connected with the Ego. We can now understand that the higher Spiritual activities, having created the astral, etheric and physical bodies through the influences of the air, could only so mould the physical body that it ultimately became a kind of appendage of man's instruments of speech. When man had been thus presented with an organ responding to the so-called “Spirit of the Air” (in the same sense as the eye responds to the spiritual essence of the light), his Ego could project into this organ its own functions of intelligence, consciousness and feeling. A threefold subconscious activity,—an activity in the physical, etheric and astral bodies precedes the activity of the Ego. A keystone for the understanding of this is our knowledge that it was due to the “Group-soul,” which has, of course, worked upon the animal also, but imperfectly. This must be taken into consideration in our study of the spiritual activity in the astral body preceding that of the Ego. In such a study, we must eliminate any conception of the Ego itself, but bear in mind all that has been brought about by the Group-Ego from mysterious depths of being. Desire and enjoyment, in an imperfect, chaotic condition, confront each other in the astral body. Desire could become a soul-quality, could be transformed into an inner faculty, because it already had a precursor in the astral body of man.

Similarly, the capacity for the formation of pictures, a symbol-creating faculty, inheres, in the etheric body, confronting outer stimuli. A distinction must be made between this pre-Ego activity of the etheric body and the Ego activity itself. When the Ego is functioning as intellectual soul, it seeks, at the present stage of human development, to present as Truth what is the most faithful image of external objects. Anything that does not correspond to outer objects is said to be ‘untrue.’ The spiritual activities preceding the operations of the Ego did not function in this way; they were more symbolical, picture-like, more or less like a dream. We may dream, for instance, that a shot is fired, and on waking find that a chair beside the bed has fallen down. The outer event and impression (the falling chair) are transformed in the dream into a sense image, the shot. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego “symbolised,” and this is what we ourselves do when we rise to higher spiritual activity through Initiation. At that stage, we try, but with full consciousness, to work our way from the merely abstract outer world into a symbolising, imaginative activity.

These spiritual beings worked yet further on the human physical body, making man into an expression of the correspondence between outer happenings or facts, and imitation. In the child, for instance, we find imitation when the other members of the soul are as yet but little developed. Imitation is a process belonging to the subconscious essence of man's nature. Therefore, early education should be based on imitation, for it exists as a natural impulse in the human being before the Ego begins to regulate the inner activities of soul. The impulse to imitate in presence of outer activities, in the physical body, the symbolising process in the etheric body in response to outer stimuli, and the so-called correspondence between desire and enjoyment in the astral body,—all these things must be thought of as elaborated through the agency of the air. Their plastic, artistic impression has been worked into the larynx and the whole apparatus of speech. The Beings who preceded the Ego, then, formed and moulded man in this threefold sense, and thus the air can come to expression in the human being.

When we study the faculty of speech in the true sense we must ask: is speech the “tone” that we produce? No, it is not. Our Ego sets in movement, and gives form to what has been moulded and incorporated in us through the air. Just as we set the eye in movement in order to receive the light that is working externally (the eye itself is there for the reception of light), so, within ourselves, from out of the Ego, those organs which have been elaborated from the spiritual essence of the air are set in movement; and then we must wait until the spirit of the air itself sounds back to us as the echo of our own “air activity,”—the tone. We do not produce the tone any more than the single parts of a flute produce the tone. We produce from our own being, the activity which the Ego is able to develop by using the organs which have been elaborated from out the spirit of the air. Then it must be left to the spirit of the air to set the air in movement again, by means of the same activity which has produced the organs. Thus the word sounds forth.

Human speech is founded on the threefold correspondence, of which I have spoken. But what is it that must correspond? Upon what has imitation to be based in the physical body? Imitation in the physical body must be based upon the fact that, in the movements of our vocal organs, we imitate the outer activities and objects which we perceive and which make an impression upon us; that we produce the echo of what we have in the first place heard echoing as tone, imitating through the physical body the thing that has made an external impression upon us. The painter imitates a scene which is made up of quite other elements than colour and canvas, light and shade. Just as the painter imitates by manipulating light and shade, so do we imitate what comes to us from outside, by setting our organs in movement, imitatively,—organs which have been elaborated out of the element of the air. What we bring forth in the sound, is therefore an actual imitation of the essential being of things. Our consonants and vowels are nothing but reflections and imitations of impressions from outside.

In the etheric body, we have a picture-forming, symbolising activity. Hence we can understand that although the earliest beginnings of our speech arose through imitation, a development took place in that the process tore itself loose, as it were, from the external impressions, and was then further elaborated. In symbolism,—as in the dream,—the etheric body elaborates something that no longer resembles the outer impressions, and the continued operation of the sound, consists in this. First of all, the etheric body works upon something that is mere imitation; this mere imitation is transformed by it, and becomes an independent process. So that what we have inwardly elaborated, corresponds only in a symbolical sense, as sense-imagery, to the outer impressions. Our activity is no longer merely imitative.

Finally, there is a third element,—desire, emotion, everything that lives inwardly. This expresses itself in the astral body, and works in such a way, that it gives further form to the tone. These inner experiences stream from within outwards into the tone. Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, desire, wish,—all these things flow into it, and impart to it a subjective element. First there is the process of mere imitation. This is further developed as speech symbolism in the tone- or word-picture that has become an independent entity, and this is now again transformed by being permeated with man's inner experiences of sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, horror, fright and so forth. It must always be an outer correspondence that first wrests itself from the soul, in the tone. But when the soul expresses its experiences, and allows them to sound forth, as it were, it has first to seek for the corresponding outer experience. The third element, then, where pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, horror and so on, express themselves inwardly, psychically, in the tone, has first to seek for its correspondence. In imitation there is an after-copy of the external impression; the inner tone-picture, the symbol that has arisen, is the next development; but what man allows to sound forth, merely from inner joy, pain, and so on, would only be a radiation or emanation to which nothing could correspond.

When children learn to speak, we can continually observe the correspondence between outer being and inner experience. The child begins to translate something it feels into sound. When it cries “Mamma,” “Papa,” this is nothing but an inner transfusion of emotion into sound, the externalisation of an inward element. When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” Naturally, the child does not ask how it happens that in this case its mother comes to it. The inner experience of joy, or pain, associates itself with the outer impression. This is the third way in which speech operates.

It may therefore be said that speech has arisen just as much from without, inwards, through imitation, as through the association of external reality with the expression of the inner being. What has led to the formation of the words “Mamma,” “Papa,” from the expression of the inner being, which feels satisfaction when the mother comes, occurs in innumerable cases. Wherever the human being perceives that something happens as the result of an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being unites itself with the external fact.

All this takes place without the co-operation of the Ego. The Ego only later takes over this activity. Thus we can see how an activity, preceding that of the Ego, worked at the configuration which lies at the basis of man's faculty of expression in speech. And because the Ego makes its entrance after the foundations for speech have already been created, speech, in turn, accommodates itself to the nature of the Ego. As a result, utterances corresponding to the sentient body are permeated with the sentient soul; the pictures and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated with the intellectual soul. Man pours into the sound what he experiences in the intellectual soul, and this was at first, mere imitation. Thus, do those elements of our speech, which are reproductions of inner experiences of the soul, come gradually into existence.

In order, therefore, to understand the essential nature of speech, we must realise that there lives within us, something that was active before the Ego, and any of its activities were there; into this, the Ego afterwards poured what it is able to elaborate. We must not demand that speech shall exactly correspond to what originates in the Ego, to all the spirituality and intimacies of our individual being. Speech can never be the direct expression of the Ego. The activity of the spirit of speech, is of a symbolical nature in the etheric body, imitative in the physical body. All this in conjunction with what is elaborated by the spirit of speech, from out the sentient soul,—for it projects the inner experiences from that domain, in such a way that we have in the sound an emanation of the inner life,—justifies us in saying that speech has not been elaborated by the methods of the conscious Ego, as we know it to-day. The development of speech, is indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present, any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech only reproduces the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit, in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active. This is a somewhat figurative way of speaking, but it expresses the truth. It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being, as a work of art. By analogy, speech must be conceived of as a work of art, but we must not forget, that each work of art can only be understood within the scope of that particular art. Speech itself, therefore, must necessarily impose certain limits upon us. If this were taken into consideration, a pedantic effort, like Fritz Mauthner's ‘Critique of Speech,’ would have been impossible from the very outset. In that work, the critique of speech is built upon entirely false premises. When we examine human languages, says Mauthner, we find that they by no means, correctly reproduce the objective reality of things. Yes, but are they intended to do so? Is there any possibility of their doing so? No; no more than it is possible for the picture to reproduce external reality by the colours, lights and shades, on the canvas. The spirit of speech underlying this activity of man, must be conceived in an artistic sense.

It has only been possible to speak of these things in bare outline. But when we know that an Artist, who moulds speech, is at work in humanity, we shall understand that however different the single languages may be, artistic power has been at work in them all. When this ‘spirit of speech,’ as we will now call the being working through the air, has manifested at a comparatively low stage in man, its action has been like that of the atomistic spirit, which would build up everything out of the single particles. It is then possible to build up a language where a whole sentence is composed of single sound-pictures.

When in the Chinese language, for instance, we find the sounds ‘Shi’ and ‘King,’ we have two ‘atoms’ of speech formation, the one syllable ‘Shi,’ or song, and ‘King,’ book. Putting the two sound-pictures together—‘Shi-King,’ we should have the German ‘Liederbuch’ (English, Song-Book). This ‘atomising’ process results in something that is conceived of as one whole, ‘Song-Book.’ That is a small example of how the Chinese language gives form to concepts and ideas.

If we elaborate what has been said to-day, we can understand how to study the spirit of so marvelously constructed a language as the Semitic, for instance. The foundation of the Semitic language lies in certain tone-pictures, consisting really, only of consonants. Into these tone-pictures, vowels are inserted. If, for the mere sake of example we take the consonants q—t—l, and insert an ‘ a ’ and again ‘ a ’, we obtain the word ‘qatal’ (German, töten, to kill), whereas the word consisting of consonants only is the mere imitation of an external sound impression.

This is a remarkable permeation, for ‘qatal,’ to kill, has come into existence as a sound picture, through the fact that the outer happening or event has been imitated by the organs of speech; that is the original sound picture. The soul elaborates this, by adding something that can only be an inner experience. The sound picture is further developed and the killing referred to a subject. Fundamentally speaking, the whole Semitic language has been built up in this way. The working together of the different elements of speech-formation is expressed in the whole construction of the Semitic language, in the symbolising element that is pre-eminently active. The activity of the spirit of speech in the etheric body is revealed in the characteristics of the Semitic language, where all the single, imitated sound-pictures are elaborated and transformed into sense images by the insertion of vowels. All words in the Semitic language are fundamentally so formed, that they are related to the external world, as sense images.

In contrast to this, the elements in the Indo-Germanic languages are stimulated more by the inner expression of the astral body, of the inner being. The astral body is already bound up with consciousness. When man confronts the outer world, he distinguishes himself from it. When he confronts the outer world, from the point of view of the etheric body, he mingles, and is one with it. Only when objects are reflected in the consciousness, does he distinguish himself from them. This activity of the astral body, with its wholly inward experience, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-Germanic languages—in contrast to the Semitic—in that they include the verb ‘to be,’—the affirmation of what is there without our co-operation. This is possible because man distinguishes himself from what causes the outer impression. If, therefore, a Semitic language wants to express ‘God is good,’ it is not directly possible. The word ‘is’, which expresses existence, cannot be rendered, because it is derived from the antithesis of astral body, and external world. The etheric body, simply presents things. Therefore, in the Semitic language, we should have to say ‘God the Good.’ The confronting of subject and object is not expressed. In these Indo-Germanic languages there is differentiation from the outer world; they contain the element of a tapestry of perceptions spread out over the external world. These in turn, react on the human being, strengthening and giving support to the quality of ‘inwardness,’ that is to say, all that may be spoken of as the predisposition to build up strong individuality, a strong Ego.

It may seem to many of you that I have only been able to give unsatisfactory indications, but it would be necessary to speak for a fortnight if a detailed exposition of speech were to be given. Only those who have heard many such lectures, and have entered into the spirit of them, will realise that a stimulus such as has been given to-day is not without justification.

The only intention has been to show that it is possible to acquire a conception of speech and language in the sense of Spiritual Science, and this leads us to realise that speech can only be understood with the artistic sense which must first have been developed. All learning will be shipwrecked if it is not willing to recreate what the ‘artist of speech’ has moulded in man before the Ego was able to work within him. Only the artistic sense can understand the mysteries of speech; the artistic sense alone can recreate. Learned abstractions can never make a work of art intelligible. Only those ideas which are able fruitfully to recreate what the artist has expressed with other media,—colour, tone, and so on,—can shed light on a work of art. Artistic feeling alone can understand the artist; artists of speech alone can understand the creative Spiritual element in the origin of speech. This is one thing that Spiritual Science has to accomplish with regard to the domain of speech.

The other thing has its bearing in practical life itself. When we understand how speech has proceeded from an inner, prehuman artist, we shall also realise that when we want to speak or express through speech, something that claims to be authoritative, this artistic sense must be allowed to come into play. There is not much realisation of this in our modern age, when there is so little living feeling for speech. To-day, if a man can speak at all, he imagines that he is at liberty to express everything. What should be realised is that we must recreate in the soul a direct connection between what we wish to express in speech, and how we express it. The artist of speech, ‘in all domains’ must be reawakened within us. To-day, people are satisfied with any form that is given to what they want to say. How many people realise that the artistic feeling for speech and language is necessary in every description or thesis? This, however, is absolutely essential in the domain of Spiritual Science. Examine any genuine writings in the sphere of Spiritual Science and you will find that a true Spiritual Scientist has tried to mould each sentence artistically; he does not place a verb arbitrarily at the beginning or end. You will find that every sentence is a ‘birth ‘ because it must be experienced, not merely as thought, but inwardly in the soul, as actual form. If you follow the coherence of what is written, you will find that in three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely an appendage of the first, and the third of the second. The third sentence is already there in germ, before the second is built up, because the force of the middle sentence must depend on what has remained of the force in the first, and this must in turn pass over to the third. In Spiritual Science, one cannot create without the artistic feeling for language. Nothing else is of any use. The essential point is to free ourselves from being slavishly chained to the words, and this cannot happen if we imagine that any word can express a thought, for our speech formation is then already at fault. Words which are coined wholly for the world of sense, can never adequately express super-sensible facts. Those who ask, ‘how can one describe the etheric or astral body concretely by a word,’ have understood nothing at all of these things. Only that man has understood who says to himself, ‘I will experience what the etheric body really is from the one aspect before I allow myself to write a single page about it, and I will realise that it is a question of artistic imagery. Then I will describe it from the other three aspects.’ In such a case, we have the matter presented from four different aspects, so that the presentations given through language are really artistic imagery. If this is not realised, we shall have nothing but abstractions and an emaciated repetition of what is already known. Hence, development in Spiritual Science will always be bound up with a development of an inner understanding of the plastic forces of speech. In this sense Spiritual Science will work fruitfully upon our present atrocious style of speech which reveals no indication of the nature of artistic power. If it were otherwise, so many people who can really hardly speak or write, would not rush into literary activity. People have long ago lost the realisation that prose writing, for instance, is a much higher activity than writing verse, only, of course, the prose that is written to-day is of a much lower order.

Spiritual Science is there to impart, in every domain, the stimulus connected with the deepest spheres of human life. In this sense, Spiritual Science will fulfil the dreams of the greatest men. It will be able to conquer the super-sensible worlds through thought, and so to pour out the thoughts into sound pictures that speech can again become an instrument for communicating the vision of the soul in super-sensible worlds. Then Spiritual Science will fulfil, in ever-increasing measure, a saying relating to this important region of man's inner being: ‘Immeasurably deep is thought, and its winged instrument is the word.’

Medieval mysticism prepared the way for spiritual science; prayer prepared for medieval mysticism. Today the essence of prayer has been misunderstood. Prayer is intended to produce the divine spark, the special life of the soul. For this, we must understand both the soul and the soul in relation to the future set before us by world wisdom.

In my recent lecture on mysticism I spoke of the particular form of mystic absorption that appeared in the Middle Ages between the time of Meister Eckhart and that of Angelus Silesius. This type of mysticism is distinguished by the fact that the mystic seeks to become free of all the experiences aroused in his soul by the external world. He seeks to acquire the feeling that proves to him that, even when everything of the everyday world is removed from his soul and it withdraws into itself, a world of its own still remains within it. This world always exists but is outshone by the experiences that work so powerfully on man from without. Thus, it generally appears as a light so faint that most men do not even notice it. The mystic usually calls it “the spark.” Yet, he feels sure that it can be fanned to a mighty flame that will illumine the source and foundation of existence leading man along the path of his soul to the knowledge of his origin. This may, indeed, be called “knowledge of God.”

In the same lecture we saw how medieval mystics held that this spark, constituted as it is at the moment, must grow by itself. In contrast, we pointed out that modern spiritual research calls for a conscious and controlled development of these inner soul forces, so that they can rise to higher forms of knowledge, designated the imaginative, the inspirational and the intuitive. This medieval absorption is thus the beginning of true higher spiritual research that does indeed seek the spirit through the development of the inner being but, through the method of approach, is led beyond it to the source and foundation of the existence of all facts and phenomena, and of our own souls as well. Mysticism, therefore, appeared as a sort of first step to true spiritual investigation. If we have the ability to sink ourselves in the fervor of a Meister Eckhart, to recognize what an immeasurable force of spiritual knowledge it brought to Johannes Tauler, to see how deeply Valentin Weigel or Jacob Boehme were initiated into the secrets of existence by all that they attained through such absorption even though they passed beyond it, or to understand what an Angelus Silesius became through its means, how he was enabled not only to gain an illuminating insight into the great laws of spiritual order but also to utter with glowing rapturous beauty all sorts of sayings about world secrets, we shall then be able to realize the depth and force of this medieval mysticism and to see what an enormous help it can be to anyone who wants to tread the path of spiritual investigation.

Medieval mysticism thus appears to us, particularly as the result of that lecture, as a great and wonderful preparatory school for spiritual research. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? After all, our own object is simply to develop the spark of which the mystics spoke through its own inner forces. They believed that they might surrender themselves in the peace of their souls to the little glimmering spark, so that it might begin to burn ever more brilliantly of itself. Spiritual science, however, is convinced that, for the growth of the spark, we must use the capacities and forces that are placed under our control by the wisdom of the world.

This mystical attitude, then, is a good preparation and guide for spiritual science, and the soul activity that may in the true sense be called prayer is a preparation for this medieval absorption. Just as the mystic is enabled to attain a state of absorption because he has, even though unconsciously, trained his soul to have the right temper for such mysticism, so if we want to work our way through to this absorption, treading a path that shall end there, we shall find a preparation in true prayer.

In the development of the last centuries, even from a spiritual aspect, the essence of prayer has been misunderstood in many ways by various spiritual currents or thought. Thus, it will be difficult for us to get a true understanding of it. If we remember, however, that the last centuries have been associated particularly with the appearance of egoistic currents of spiritual thought that have laid hold of all sorts of people, we shall not be surprised to find that prayer has been dragged down among the egoistic wishes and desires of men. In fact, prayer can hardly be more misunderstood than when it is permeated with some form of egoism. In this study we shall try to consider prayer entirely and without prejudice from the point of view of spiritual science.

To get some preliminary understanding of prayer we might say that, while the mystic assumes the existence in his soul of some spark that his mystical absorption can brighten and illuminate, prayer is intended to produce that spark and special life of the soul. Whatever leads to prayer displays its efficacy just in this stirring of the soul, so that, if it lives there, even though hidden, we either gradually discover the spark, or else we kindle it. To study the need for, and the essence of, prayer, we shall have to enter on a description of soul depths of which the words of Heraclitus are only too true: “You can never fathom the boundaries of the soul even though you tread every path, so all-embracing is it.” Thus, even if in prayer we seek only for the secrets of the soul, it is true that these inmost feelings that are stirred in prayer teach even the simplest of us something of the infinite expanses of soul life.

We must comprehend this soul as it lives in us and carries us forward in life somewhat as follows. This soul that is in process of living evolution does not merely come from the past and progress into the future, but at every moment of its life it carries within itself something of the past and, indeed, also of the future. The actual moment in which we are living is penetrated by both the effects of the past and the effects that come from the future. Anyone who can see deeply into the life of the soul will feel that there are two streams continually meeting in it, one rising from the past, the other from the future.

Possibly in other spheres of life it might seem mere folly to talk of the approach of the events of the future. It is, after all, easy to say that the events of the future do not yet exist, thus preventing us from saying that what will happen tomorrow approaches us. But it is possible to say that what happened in the past stretches its effects into the present—a standpoint that is easy enough to establish. Who would dispute that our lives today are the result of our lives yesterday, or that we are today under the influence of our activity or idleness of yesterday or the day before? No one will deny the penetration of the present by the past. Yet, we ought no more to deny the reality of the future since we can see in the soul the reality of such intrusion of future events before they happen. There is, for example, such a thing as fear or anxiety of something that is to happen tomorrow. Is that not a sort of feeling or perception that we direct to an as yet unknown future? Every moment the soul experiences fear or anxiety it shows by the reality of its feelings that it reckons not only with the effects of the past but also that it vividly allows for what is coming to it from the future. These are, of course, trivial indications. They will show, however, that even a casual observation of the soul contradicts the logical abstractions that proclaim the future can have no effect because it does not exist. This is proved in living reality when we study immediate soul life.

In our souls, then, the past and the future unite and produce there, as everyone who observes himself would admit, a sort of whirlpool comparable to the confluence of two streams. Observation of what lives in our souls from the past shows that they come into being under the impression of our experiences of the past. The way in which we have used those past experiences has made us what we are, and we bear within us the legacy of our past doing, feeling and thinking. We are what we have become. If we look back from today's standpoint to our past experiences, particularly those in which we were ourselves concerned in their actual happening and in the judgment of them, if we allow our memory to play over the past, we shall be driven to a judgment of ourselves. We shall realize that today we have attained a certain quality of character. With that as our basis we shall find we are not in agreement with a good deal that happened in our pasts because we have acquired the capacity to be opposed to, even ashamed of, some past actions.

If we thus measure our pasts against the present, we shall come to the conviction that there is something within us that is far richer, far more significant than what we have made of ourselves by our will, consciousness and individual forces. If there were not something stretching beyond what we have made of ourselves, we should be unable to reproach ourselves or even to know ourselves. There must, then, be something within us greater than all that we have employed to form ourselves from the past. If we allow such a judgment to be transformed into a feeling, we shall be able to observe what is known and visible to us in our past deeds and experiences. This will lie as clearly before us as memory can make it. Then we shall be able to compare this clear vision with our souls, and we shall see there something bigger seeking to work itself out, urging us to set ourselves face to face with ourselves and to judge ourselves from the standpoint of the present. In short, we shall feel something projecting beyond ourselves when we observe the stream flowing into the soul from the past. This sense of something greater is the first glimmer of the inner feeling of God within us, a feeling that there is something within us that is greater than our own will. So we are enabled to see something leading beyond our limited egos to a divine spiritual ego. Such is the impression of an observation of the past that has been transformed into feeling and perception.

What is the message, then, of what we may call the stream of the future, when we transform it into feeling and perception? This speaks even more emphatically and definitely to us. In looking back over the past, our feelings assert themselves in the form of a judgment of rejection, of regret or shame, but only after the event. In relation to the future, however, we deal at once with the feelings of fear and anxiety, hope and joy, but the actual events to which these feelings refer are not yet existent. We cannot see through to them and it is thus easier in this case to transform the idea into a feeling, something the soul does of itself. As it can, in relation to the future, give no more than the feeling of reality, these feelings exist as something born from an unknown stream of which we know only that it may have different effects and bring different hopes. If we can transform into a right feeling what comes so surely to us from the lap of the future, and if we experience its course into our souls and the way in which our own perceptions meet it, we shall realize how our souls are always being kindled anew by the experiences approaching from the future. Here, above all, we feel how our souls can become richer and more comprehensive. Even now in the present we can know that in the future our souls will have an infinitely richer and mightier content. We feel ourselves akin to the future. We must feel it. We must feel our souls to be equal to everything the future can give.

Such an observation of the streaming together of the future and the past into the present will show us how the life of the soul grows beyond itself. When, in looking back over the past, the soul observes the important things that play on it and of which it does not feel itself to be equal, we shall understand how it can unfold a basic attitude and feeling in relation to the outcome of the past. When the soul, whether in judgment or in shame and regret, feels something great flow into itself out of the stream of the past, it creates within itself what we may call a devotion toward the divine. This devotion toward the divine that looks down upon us from the past and that we can imagine as something acting upon us, although our consciousness cannot take it in, is produced by one of two forms of prayer that lead to an intimacy with God. If the soul surrenders itself in inmost calm to these feelings about the past, it will begin to wish that the mightier thing it left unused and that has not permeated its ego may become present in it. The soul will know that if it were possessed of this greatness, it would be different, but the divine did not belong fully to its inner life and that is why it has failed so to form itself that it can approve of all that it is. When the soul experiences this, it can overcome the feeling by asking itself clearly how it can make truly part of itself what has lived unconsciously in all its actions and experiences, how it can draw into itself this unknown that its ego has failed to grasp. When the soul holds this attitude, either in feeling or in word and idea, we have the prayer to the past and thus seek to approach the divine through one of the ways of devotion.

Another attitude is held toward the divine gleam shining through the approaches of the future. To distinguish it from the one with which we have just been dealing, let us ask once again what it is that leads to prayer as regards the past. It is that we have remained imperfect even though we can feel something divine shining into us. We have not developed and unfolded all the capacities and forces that might have flowed to us, and we feel all the defects that make us less than the divine shining into us. What is it, then, coming to us from the future that makes us defective in similar fashion and restricts our ascent to the spiritual?

We have only to remember that feelings and sensations, fear and anxiety of the unknown future, gnaw at our souls. Is there anything that can pour some certainty about the future into our souls? It is what we may call the feeling of devoted acceptance of what enters our souls from the hidden future, and it can only work properly if it arises as an attitude of prayer. Let us avoid misunderstanding. We are not praising what here or there is considered to be acceptance, but a definite form, an acceptance of what the future can bring forth. If we look to the future with fear and anxiety, we strangle our development and hamper the free unfolding of our soul forces. Nothing so obstructs this development as anxiety about what may come to the soul from the future. Only actual experience, however, can judge the results of the right feeling of acceptance of the future. What does such devoted acceptance mean?

In its ideal form it would be the sort of soul attitude that would assure us that no matter what might come, no matter what the next hour or day might bring, were it unknown to us, we could not alter it by fear or anxiety. We should wait for it, therefore, in complete inner peace and utter tranquillity.

This experience, resulting from devoted acceptance of future events, means that anyone who can thus calmly and quietly meet the future and can yet prevent his energy and activity from suffering in any way, is able to develop his soul forces most intensively and freely. It is as if hindrance after hindrance falls away as his soul is gradually pervaded by this feeling of acceptance of the events that approach from the future.

This feeling, however, cannot be produced in our souls by some edict or arbitrary decision lacking foundation. It is the result of this second form of prayer that is directed to the future and the course of events, pervaded by wisdom, within it. To give ourselves up to the divine wisdom of events, to be certain in our thoughts, feelings and impulses that what will be must be and that it will have its good effects somewhere, to call forth this feeling in the soul and to live it in our words and ideas is the second form of prayer, the prayer of devoted acceptance.

It is from these feelings that we must acquire the impulses to what is called prayer. The soul possesses the urge, and fundamentally it attains the attitude of prayer when it raises itself even only a little above the immediate present. The attitude of prayer, we might say, is the upward gaze of the soul from the transitory present into the eternal that embraces past, present and future. Because to live looking upward from the present is so essential, Goethe has Faust speak these great and significant lines to Mephistopheles:

Were I to say the pleasing present should remain,
And that is what I truly meant ...

This is, if ever I could be satisfied with living merely for the moment,

Then you may throw me into chains,
And I will gladly seal my doom.

We might say, then, that it is the attitude of prayer for which Faust begs in order to escape the fetters of his companion.

Prayer leads to the observation of the limited ego that has worked from the past into the present. Upon examination, we see how much more there is in us than we have put to actual use. It also leads us to the study of the future, showing how much more can flow from the future into the ego than it has comprehended in the present. Every prayer must coincide with one of these attitudes. If we take this to be the spirit of prayer, and prayer as the expression of this spirit, we shall find in every prayer the force to lead us beyond ourselves. Prayer that is born in this way is nothing else than the kindling of the power that seeks to pass beyond what our ego is at the moment. As soon as the ego is seized by this striving, it already has this power of development. When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power. When we have reached this knowledge by our own feelings and perception, prayer becomes the source of further development. It is thus one of the means of developing the ego.

When we live in anxiety over what the future may bring, still lacking that submissiveness that prayer can give when it is directed to our future destiny, we can do something similar. By means of prayer we realize that the future is set before us by world wisdom. If we surrender ourselves to this feeling, we produce something quite different than we do when we meet coming events with fear and anxiety. These only restrict our development, pushing back from our souls what the future can give us. If, however, we meet the future with submissiveness and devotion, we draw near to it in fruitful hope and make it possible for it to enter our souls. Thus, submission, which seems to make us small, is a powerful force carrying us forward toward the future, enriching our souls and bringing our development to a higher level.

So we see prayer as an active force within us. We can also see in it a cause drawing with it as immediate effects the growth and evolution of our egos. We need not expect external results. We know that by prayer we have put within our souls what we may call a force of warmth and light—light because we free the soul in regard to what is coming to us from the future and prepare it to assimilate what the obscure future may bring; warmth because it helps to realize that even though in the past we have failed to bring the divine within us to full development, we have now permeated our feelings and sensations with it so that it can really work within us. The attitude of prayer that we attain from our feeling of the past produces the inner warmth of soul of which all those speak who can understand prayer in its true being. The effect of light appears in those who know the feeling of submission in prayer.

With this view of prayer we shall not be surprised that, in devotion to prayer, the greatest mystics found the best training for what they were seeking in mystic contemplation. They guided their souls by means of prayer to the point where they were able to ignite the spark previously mentioned. It is just the study of the past that can give us the deep intimacy that comes over us in true prayer. Experience and living in the external world really estrange us from ourselves, just as in the past they prevented the unknown and more powerful ego from coming to the surface. We are given over to external impressions, wasting our energies in the variety of external life, thereby upsetting our composure. It is this that prevented the higher and stronger divine force from unfolding in us. Now, when we unfold it in such deep intimacy with God, we no longer feel ourselves given over to the dissipating effects of the external world. Rather are we filled with that wonderful and ineffable warmth, as with an inner blessedness, that we really may call divine. It is the heat in the cosmos that appears in higher beings as physical inner warmth and it originally created the higher beings; the lower beings, of course, have the same body temperature as their surroundings. As this physical heat interiorizes a being, so the psychic warmth, born of prayer, can make a soul that is losing itself in externalities collect itself in inwardness. In prayer we are warmed in the feeling of God. We not only feel warmth but we find ourselves intimately within ourselves.

When we approach the external world, however, we always find it confused with what has been called “the dark lap of the future.” Upon close observation we always find that there is a germ of the future in whatever we touch of the outer world. We are continually thrust back when we still feel fear of what may befall us, and the world is like a veil before us. If we develop this feeling of submission in regard to all that may come to us from the future, we shall find that we meet everything in the external world with the same certainty and hope. This we have gained from our submissiveness. We know that in everything it is the wisdom of the world that shines before us. As a rule, in everything that comes to meet us, we see a darkness that passes into our feelings. Through our submission, however, we now see how the feeling arises in us that all the wisdom of the world shines through what we long for and desire as the highest. Thus, it is hope for illumination of the entire world that comes to us in the devotions of prayer. When darkness encloses us within ourselves and narrowness and confusion surround us even in the physical, when we stand in the gloom and black of night, we feel when morning comes and we meet the light as though set beyond ourselves. Yet this is not in such a way that we should lose ourselves, but as though we could transfer into the real world all our soul's truest longing and highest aims. Surrender to the world, estranging us from ourselves, is overcome by the warmth of prayer uniting us with ourselves. Then, too, the warmth of prayer becomes a light. We pass beyond ourselves and know that when now we unite with and behold the outer world, we are no longer disturbed and estranged by it. What is best in our souls flows from it and we are united with what radiates toward us from the external world.

These two types of prayer can be better comprehended in pictures than in ideas. Consider, for instance, the Old Testament story of Jacob and the bitter nocturnal struggle that seared his soul. It is as if we ourselves were given over to the manifoldness of the world in which our souls at first were lost and could not find themselves. When the striving to find ourselves begins, the struggle between the lower and higher egos follows. Feelings surge up and down, but we can work our way through this turmoil by prayer. As illustrated in the story of Jacob, the moment finally will come when, as the morning sun shines upon us, the inner struggle of our souls during the night is leveled out in harmony. That is really the effect of prayer in the human soul.

To think of prayer in this way is to be free of all superstition. It brings out the best in us and works within us immediately as a force. Prayer in this light is preliminary to mysticism, just as mystic contemplation is itself preliminary to what we know as spiritual investigation. From this discussion it should now be clear that, as has so often been emphasized, we continually err if we think we can find the divine, or God, in ourselves by mystic thought. This has been a common mistake of many mystics, and even of ordinary Christians in the Middle Ages, because at that period the attitude to prayer began to be permeated with an egoism that impels the soul to concentration on an ever-increasing inner perfection. It is fundamentally an echo of such an egoistic desire for inner perfection that impels a misguided theosophy today to assert that, if we will only turn aside from everything external, we can find God within ourselves.

We have seen that there are two types of prayer, one leading to an inner warmth, the other leading through a feeling of submission out again into the world to illumination and true knowledge. When we think of prayer in this way, we soon see that the knowledge acquired through ordinary intelligence is unfruitful compared to this other knowledge. When we come to realize the attitude of prayer, we become aware of the soul's withdrawal into itself, thus releasing it from the multiple world in which it has been dissipated. It gathers itself together and lives enclosed in itself, a complete self-being living above the momentary and what comes to it from the past and future.

When we know this feeling, when our environment becomes breathless and silent, when only our finest thoughts and feelings hold the soul together, when perhaps even these vanish and only a basic feeling remains directed toward the God who proclaims himself from the past, and toward the God from the future, when we know this and have learned to live in this feeling, then we realize that there are moments when the soul sees that it has turned away from, and disregards, all the cleverness it created by its own thinking. What it brought into being by its thinking and feelings, the ideals to which it had been educated and grasped in its will have all been swept away. It was given over to its highest thoughts and feelings, but even these were swept away, leaving only that last basic feeling. When we have come to feel this, we know that in the same way that the wonders of nature meet us when we look upon them with cleansed and purified eyes, these new feelings of which we were hitherto unaware shine into the soul. Impulses of will and ideals formerly strange to us rise up in it, germinating fruitful seeds.

In its best sense, then, prayer can give us wisdom that we are not yet capable of acquiring by ourselves. It can give us the possibility of feeling and thinking that we cannot attain by ourselves. If we go further, it can give us a strength of will that we have previously been unable to muster. In order to feel this, it must be called up by the greatest thoughts, the most splendid ideas and impulses living in the soul. Here we must refer again to the prayers that have originated in most solemn moments and that have been handed down to us from time immemorial.

In my pamphlet on the Lord's Prayer you will find an account showing that its seven petitions embrace all the wisdom of the world. It is no real objection to tell me that there it is said that these seven petitions can only be understood by those who know the deeper sources of the universe and that simple people have no real comprehension of their depth. This is not so. In order, however, that the Lord's Prayer should have come into existence, it was necessary that the all-embracing wisdom of the world should be set down in words that may indeed be said to express the deepest secrets of man and the world. Since this is what is contained in this prayer, it works through the words even if we are far from understanding the secrets. This can be understood when we rise to the higher stages to which prayer and mysticism are the prelude. Prayer prepares us for mysticism, mysticism for meditation and concentration, and from that point on we are directed to the real work of spiritual research.

Nor is it an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet, we can take pleasure in it. Even though we do not penetrate all its wisdom, nevertheless the soul delights in its contemplation. Wisdom was necessary that the flower might come into being, but it is not necessary to be aware of such wisdom to take delight in the flower. For a prayer to come into existence, the wisdom of the world is necessary. That it should possess warmth and light for the soul is just as possible without understanding its wisdom as it is in the case of the flower. If a prayer did not owe its existence to such wisdom, however, it could not produce such an effect. The mere effect of a prayer shows us its depth.

If one's soul is really to develop under the influence of such a vital quality within it, it makes no difference what one's stage of development may be. A true prayer can give everyone something. Even the simplest person, who knows nothing more than the mere prayer, can still feel its effect, which calls forth the power to raise him ever higher. But whatever height we may have achieved, we are never finished with a prayer. Our souls can always be raised higher. The Lord's Prayer can be simply repeated, yet it can also call forth a mystical frame of mind and even be the subject of meditation and concentration. This is also true of other prayers.

Since the Middle Ages, however, a sort of egoism has occurred that makes prayer and the attitude of prayer impure. If we use prayer in order to become more perfect in ourselves, to descend into ourselves, as was the case with the medieval Christians and perhaps still is today—if we do not look out into the external world with the illumination we have received, then prayer can only estrange and isolate us from the world. This has happened with many of those who have used prayer as false and seclusive asceticism. They have wanted perfection, not only as the rose, which adorns itself that the garden may be fair, is perfect, but for their own sakes that they might find blessedness in their souls. When we seek God in our souls and then do not pass to the other world the power we have thus won, we find that we are in a sense punished. Thus you will find in the writings of many authors who have known only the type of prayer in which inner warmth is to be found—even in the work of Miguel Molinos—remarkable descriptions of all sorts of passions and impulses, fights, temptations and wild desires that the soul has to experience if it seeks perfection by inner prayer and complete surrender to what it understands to be God. If we approach the spiritual world by seeking God one-sidedly, if we only unfold that feeling for prayer that leads to inner warmth and excludes illumination, this neglected other side takes its revenge on us.

If I look to the past only with feelings of regret and shame, realizing that there is something great in me that I have never allowed full play, thus failing to fill myself with this greatness so that I may become perfect, then, even so, to a certain extent a feeling of perfection does still arise. But the imperfection remaining in the soul becomes a counterforce that assails us with greater vigor in the form of temptation and passion. But as soon as the soul that has found itself in inner warmth and intimacy seeks for God wherever he is revealed and thus strives for illumination, it immediately comes out of itself and escapes the narrow selfish ego. The wild temptations sink down in calm and peace. This is why it is so harmful to allow an egoistic impulse to be mixed up in prayer or mystical contemplation or meditation. If we want to find God only to keep him in our souls, we exhibit an unsound egoism that maintains itself even into our soul's highest reaches. For this, we shall be punished. Healing is to be found only when, having found God in ourselves, we pour out unselfishly into the world in thoughts, feelings and actions what we have won.

We are often told today, particularly in the ideas of a falsely understood theosophy, and we cannot be careful enough of this, that we cannot find God in the external world because he lives within us. We have only to look within ourselves in the right way and we shall find God. I have even heard someone say in flattery of his audience that we need not learn or experience anything of the great secrets of the world. If only we would look within ourselves, we would find God.

But something must be added to this before we can reach the truth. To this, which may be true enough if it is kept within proper limits, a medieval thinker gave a true answer. Let us remember that it is not untruths that are most harmful. The soul will soon uncover what is false. Most harmful are those things that are true from one aspect but when applied on false assumptions produce grave falsehoods. It is true that in a sense we seek God in ourselves. Because it is true, it is the more harmful if it is not kept within its proper limits.

This medieval thinker said, “Who would seek everywhere in the external world for a tool he needed when he knows it to be at home? He would be a fool to do so. Equally is he a fool who seeks the instrument for the knowledge of God in the outer world when it lies at home within his soul.”

Bear in mind that he uses the words tool and instrument. It is not God we seek in the soul. He is sought by an instrument that we shall not find in the external world. It is found in the soul in prayer and genuine mystical absorption, and beyond that by meditation and concentration. We must approach the kingdoms of the world with this instrument, and then we shall find God everywhere. If we have acquired the instrument, he reveals himself in all worldly realms and at all stages of being. Thus, we find the instrument in ourselves but we find God everywhere.

Such observations of prayer are not popular today. Nowadays we are asked how on earth any of our prayers could alter the course of the world, which after all is guided by laws of necessity that cannot be altered. When we want to locate a force, however, we should look for it where it really is. Today we have sought the power of prayer in the soul and have found it to exist there, thus enabling the soul to progress. If we know that it is the spirit that works in the world, not an imagined, abstract spirit but a real, perceptible spirit, and that the soul belongs to the realm of the spirit, we shall also know that material forces are not the only forces working actively in accordance with external laws of necessity. Spiritual beings also are at work in the world even though the effects of these forces and beings are not visible externally to the eye or outwardly available to knowledge. If we strengthen our spiritual lives by prayer, we need only wait for the effects. They will certainly appear. No one, however, will seek the working of spirit in the external world who has not first recognized the force of prayer to be a reality.

When once we have admitted this fact, the following experiment will give evidence to support it. Consider a period often years during which we have scorned prayer, and another period often years when we have recognized its force. Compare the two periods. We shall soon see how the course of our lives was altered under the influence of the forces that poured into the soul with prayer. Forces become visible in their working, but it is easy to deny them when we shut our eyes to their effects. Who can deny the force of prayer if he has never let its force be effective within him? Do we believe we can know the Light if we have never developed or approached it? A force that is to work in and through the soul can only be discovered by its use.

The further effects of prayer, I am willing enough to admit, cannot yet be discussed today, however unbiased the discussion might be. Thus, to understand that a community prayer in which the forces rising from a praying community flow together, has an enhanced spiritual force and therefore an intensified effect on reality, cannot be easily accepted by the ordinary consciousness of today. So we must remain content with what we have discussed as the inner being of prayer. Indeed, it is sufficient since, if we have some understanding of it, we shall rise above many of the possible objections that are so easily raised against it.

We are told, for instance, that if we compare an active man who uses his powers to help his fellow men with one who withdraws meditatively into himself and works on the forces of his soul in prayer, then idleness is the only word that can truly apply to the one who meditates. You will excuse me if on the basis of spiritual science I tell you there is another point of view. I will speak bluntly, but there is good reason for it. Anyone who knows the interrelations of modern life will maintain that many journalists would do others a better service if they were to pray and work for the perfection of their souls. Would that there were people who were convinced that it would be better to pray than to write newspaper articles. This attitude is equally applicable to many other intellectual occupations today.

Further, we shall never understand the life of man in its entirety without the force that lives in prayer and that becomes particularly clear when we look at certain departments of higher spiritual activity. For instance, is it not clear that prayer, when considered not in a one-sided egoistic sense but in the broad sense in which we have discussed it today, takes its place as an element of art? Art, of course, also expresses the opposite attitude in comedy through the humorous feeling with which it rises above what it depicts, but there is in the ode and hymn, for example, a feeling of prayer. In painting we have what might be called a “painted prayer,” and surely in a massive, majestic cathedral a prayer in stone towers heavenward.

We need only to feel these things in relation to the whole of life in order to see that prayer, looked at in the right way, can lead us from the transitory finite of this world to the infinite. This was felt especially by those such as Angelus Silesius whom I have previously mentioned who passed from prayer to mysticism. He felt that he owed the inner truth and glorious beauty, the warm intimacy and brilliant clearness of his mystical thought, shown for instance in The Cherubinean Wanderer, to the training of prayer that had worked so powerfully on his soul. In fact, following this prelude of prayer, it is the feeling of eternity that streams through and illuminates all such mysticism. Everyone who prays has an idea of this, when in prayer he comes to true inner peace and intimacy and thence again to liberation from himself. It is something that teaches us to look from the passing moment to eternity, embracing in our souls the past, present and future. Whether we know it or not, whenever we turn in prayer to those sides of life where we seek God, the feelings, thoughts, and impressions accompanying us are permeated by a sense of eternity. It dwells consciously or unconsciously in every true prayer like some divine sweetness and aroma. It lives in the following lines of Angelus Silesius, which form a fitting conclusion to our discussion.

When I leave time,
I myself am eternity.
Then I am one with God
And God is one with me.

Among the fundamental principles underlying Spiritual Science and to which your attention has been drawn in previous lectures, the most prominent is the idea of Reincarnation. According to this generally unpopular and little understood concept, it is maintained that human individuality is constrained to manifest again and again in a single personality, during its enfoldment in the course of repeated earth-lives. It has been previously pointed out that many and diverse questions are associated with this conception, and that such is the case will become more and more apparent as we proceed.

What deep meaning, we might ask, underlies the fact that the span of man’s life on earth is destined to recur, not once only, but many times, and that during each successive period between rebirth and death human individuality persists. When we study the evolution of mankind in the light of Spiritual Science, we find therein a progressive purport, a design of such nature that each age and each epoch presents in some fashion a different content, and we realize that human evolution is ever destined to maintain a definite upward trend. Thus do we become aware of a profound latent significance, when we know that the varied influences which act upon mankind are indeed potent and become absorbed over and over again by the Ego during the course of human development. A condition which is only possible because man, with all that comprises his being, is brought into contact not once alone, but recurrently, with the great living stream of evolution.

When we regard the whole evolutionary process as a rational progression, ever accompanied by fresh contents, there dawns a true comprehension of those Great Spiritual Beings who set the measure of progress. We are then able to realize the import and proper relation of these outstanding leaders, from whom have come new thoughts, experiences and impulses destined to further the advancement and progressive evolution of humanity.

During this Cycle of Lectures I shall speak of many such Spiritual Beings who have acted as guides to mankind, and at the same time bring forward and elucidate various matters connected with this subject. The first human individuality to claim our attention from such a point of view is Zarathustra, about whom, although there is much discussion in these days, little is known; for as far as external investigation goes his history is especially problematical, as it is shrouded in mystery and unrecorded in ancient documents.

When we consider the characteristics of such a personality as Zarathustra, whose gifts to mankind, as far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to our present age, we at once realize how great is the dissimilarity in man’s whole being at different periods of earthly progress. Casual reflection might easily lead to the conclusion, that from the very beginning humanity has always had the same ideas concerning morality, the same general thoughts, feelings and conceptions as those which exist in our time. From previous lectures, however, and from others which will follow, you will know through the teachings of Spiritual Science that during man’s development great and important changes take place, especially as regards the life of the human soul, the nature of human apprehension, emotions and desires. Further, you will realize that man’s consciousness was very differently constituted in olden days; and that there is reason to believe that in the future yet other stages will be reached in which the conscious condition of mankind will vary considerably from its normal state to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra we find that we must look back over an extremely long period. According to certain modern researches, he is considered to be a contemporary of Buddha; the approximate date of his life being fixed at some six to six and a half centuries before the birth of Christianity. It is, however, a remarkable and interesting fact that other investigators of late years, after carefully studying all existing traditions concerning Zarathustra, have been driven to the conclusion that the personality concealed beneath the name of the ancient founder of Persian religion must have lived a great many centuries before the time of Buddha. Greek historians have stated over and over again that the period ascribed to Zarathustra should be put back very many, possibly five to six thousand years before the Trojan War¹

From the above, and from what has been learned through research in many directions, we can now feel certain that historical investigators will in the end be unwillingly forced to acknowledge that the claims of Grecian scholarship regarding the great antiquity of the Zarathustran era, as indicated by ancient tradition, are justly founded and must be accepted as authentic. Spiritual Science, in its statements and theories, fully concurs with the old Greek writers who already in olden days had fixed the period of the founder of Persian religion so far back in time. We have, therefore, good reason for maintaining that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was doubtless confronted with a very different class of human consciousness from that which exists in our present age.

It has often been pointed out, and we will again refer to this matter, that in ancient times the development of human consciousness was such that the old ‘dream state’, or ‘clairvoyant condition’ (we will avoid misusing this term, as is so often done in these days), was in every way perfectly normal to man, so that his conceptions and ideas were such that he did not contemplate the world from that narrow perceptual point of view that is so prevalent to-day.

We can best picture the impressions made by the world upon the consciousness of the ancients, if we turn our thoughts to that last enduring remnant of the old clairvoyant state, namely, dream consciousness. We all know those fluctuating dream pictures that come to us at times, the most of which carry no meaning, and are so often merely suggestive of the outer world, although there may now and then intrude some higher level of conscious thought; dream visions, which in these days we find so difficult to interpret and to understand. We might say that our sleep consciousness runs its course pictorially in ever-changing scenes, and which are at the same time symbolical. For instance, many of us have had the experience that events connected with some impressive happening—say, a conflagration—have been after a time once more figuratively manifested to us in a dream. Let us now consider for a moment this other horizon of our sleeping state, where clings in truth that last remnant of a conscious condition belonging to a by-gone age in the grey and distant past.

The consciousness of the ancients was such that in reality they lived in a life of imagery. The visions which came to them were not merely indefinite unrelated creations, for they had reference to an actual outer world. In olden days primitive man was capable of intermediate conscious states, between those which prevail when we sleep and when we are awake; then it was that he lived in the presence of the Spirit-World, and the Spirit-World entered into his being. To-day this door is closed, but in those ancient times such was not the case. It was while in this intermediate condition that man became aware of visions which resembled to some extent dream pictures, but were definite in their manifestation of a spirit life and of spiritual achievement existing beyond the perceptual world. Although in the Zarathustran era, such visions had already become somewhat confused and vague, there was nevertheless still close contact with the world of spirit, therefore these ancients could say from direct observation and experience: ‘In the same way as I realize this outer physical world and this perceptual life, even so do I know that there exists another conscious condition belonging to a different region—a spiritual realm—related to that which is material, and where I do of a verity experience and observe the workings of the Divine Spirit.’

It is a fundamental principle underlying the evolution of the human race, that in no case can any one quality be developed except at the expense of some other attribute; hence it came about that from epoch to epoch, the faculty through which in olden times mankind obtained a clear inner vision of the spiritual realms became ever less and less pronounced. Our present day exact methods of thought, our power of expression, our logic, all that we regard as the most important driving forces of modern culture did not exist in the remote past. Such faculties have been acquired during later periods at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness, and it is now for mankind to regain and cultivate this long-lost power. Then in the future of human evolution a time will come when in addition to man’s purely physical consciousness, his intellectuality and his logic, he will again approach the condition of the ancient seer.

We must differentiate between the upward and downward tendency of human consciousness. Evolution has a deeper meaning when we realize that in the beginning man was entirely of a spiritual realm, where he lived in the soul, and that when he descended into the physical world it was ordained that he should gradually relinquish his clairvoyant power in order that he might acquire qualities born of the existing purely physical conditions; such as intellectuality and logic. When this stage in his development has run its course he will again return to the world of spirit.
Regarding the circumstances connected with these curious clairvoyant states and experiences of the ancients we have no historical record. Zarathustra lived in that same remote age, and was one of those great leading personalities who gave immense stimulus to the advancement of culture and civilization. Such guiding personalities must ever draw from the creative source that which we may term Illumination, whereby they are initiated into the higher mysteries of the world, irrespective of the standard of normal human consciousness existing in their time. Other such outstanding personalities of whom mention will be made during these lectures are: Hermes, Buddha and Moses.

Zarathustra lived at least 8000 years before the present era, and those glorious gifts to civilization which emanated from his illumined spirit have been reflected in the great cultural progress of humanity. His influence has long ago been clearly recognized, and can be detected even to this day, by all who take note of the mysterious currents underlying the whole of human evolution.

We now realize that Zarathustra belonged essentially to those Great Ones in whose souls lived a measure of the spiritual elements of truth, wisdom and perception, far surpassing the customary standard of human consciousness of their period. His mission was to proclaim to his fellow men, in that part of the world later known as the Persian Empire, those grand truths which emanated from the superperceptual regions—a world utterly beyond the apprehension of man’s normal consciousness in that dim and distant age.

If we would understand the true significance of Zarathustra’s teachings, we must remember that it was his task to present to a certain section of humanity, in an intelligible manner, a particular world aspect; while on the other hand, various movements which had been in progress among the peoples of other regions, had given a different trend to the whole sphere of man’s culture.

The personality of Zarathustra is of special interest because he lived in a territory, contiguous upon its South side to a country which was inhabited by Indian tribes, upon whom spiritual blessings flowed in quite a different manner. When we look forward from those by-gone times we find upon the selfsame soil where dwelt these ancient Indian tribes, the peoples among whom at a later period arose the poets of the Vedas. To the North, where spread the great Brahman Doctrine, is situated that region which was permeated throughout by the powerful and compelling teachings of Zarathustra. But that which he gave to the world was in many respects fundamentally different from the teachings of the great Ieaders among the Indians, whose words have lived on in the moving poetry of the Vedas, in their profound philosophy, and has reached yet an echo in that final glorious blaze of light—The Revelation of the Buddha.

We can understand the difference between that which was born of the flow of thought from Zarathustra and the teachings of the ancient Indians, when we bear in mind that we may approach the region of the superperceptual world from two sides. Already in other lectures we have spoken of the path which man must traverse in order that he may enter into the spirit realms. There are two possible methods by which he may raise the energy of his soul, and the capacities latent in his inner being, so much above their normal level that he can pass out of this perceptual into the superperceptual world. The one method is that by which man enters or retires, more and more deeply into his soul, and thus merges himself in his very essence. The other leads behind the veil which is spread around us by our material state. Man can enter the superperceptual region by both these methods.

When we experience within our very being a deepening of all values of our spiritual feelings, conceptions and ideas—in short, of our soul impulses; when in fact we creep more and more into ourselves, so that our spiritual powers become ever stronger and stronger; then can we, as it were, in some mystic way merge ourselves within and pass through all that we hold of the physical world to our actual spirit essence—the soul Ego—which Ego continues from incarnation to incarnation, and is not perishable but everlasting. When we have overcome our lusts and passions and all those experiences of the soul which are ours because we are of the body in a physical world, then can our true being pierce the surrounding veil and for ever enter the world of spirit.

On the other hand, if we develop those powers which will enable us not merely to be sensible of the outer world with its colours, tone sensations, heat and cold; and if we so strengthen our spiritual forces that we shall be aware of that which lies beyond the colours, the sound, the heat and the cold, and all those other earthly sense-perceptions which hang as a mist about us—then will the enhanced powers of our soul take us behind the enshrouding cloud and into that boundless superperceptual region which is without confine and stretches ever into the infinite.

There is one way leading to the Spirit-World which we may term the ‘Mystical Method’, and another which is properly called ‘The Method of "Spiritual Science"‘. All great spiritual personalities have followed these paths, in order to attain to those truths and revelations which it was their mission to impress upon humanity in the form of cultural progress. In primeval times man’s development was of such nature, that great revelations could only come to the people of any particular race, through one of these methods alone. But from that period on, in which the Greeks lived, that is, at the dawn of the Christian era, these two separate thought currents commingled, and became more and more one single cultural stream. When we now speak of entering the higher spheres, we understand, that he who would penetrate into the superperceptual region, develops both qualities of power in his soul. The forces necessary to the ‘Mystical Method’ are evolved within the inner being, and those essential to the course of ‘Spiritual Science’, are strengthened while man is yet conscious of the outer world. There is to-day no longer any definite separation of these two paths, as since about the time of that epoch marked by the life of the Grecian race, these two currents have run their course together—in the one, revelation comes about through a mystic merging of man’s consciousness within his very being—in the other, the veil is torn asunder by the enhanced power of his spiritual forces, and man’s awareness stretches outward into the great cosmos.

In olden times before the Grecian or Christian era, these two possible methods were in operation separately among different peoples, and we find them working in close proximity, but in divers ways, in the Indian culture which found expression among the Vedas, on the one hand, and that of Zarathustra, further North, on the other. All that we look upon with such wonder in the ancient Indian culture, and which later found expression through Buddha, was achieved by inner contemplation, and turning away from the outer world—through causing the eyes to become less sensitive to physical colours, the ears to physical sounds, and bringing about a deadening of the sense organs in general to the perceptual veil—so that the inner soul forces might be strengthened:—Thus did man press on to Brahma, there to feel himself unified with that which ever works and weaves as the Inner Spirit of the Universe,—In this way originated the teachings of the Holy Rishis, which live on in the poetry of the Vedas, in the Vedantic philosophy, and in Buddhism.

The Doctrine of Zarathustra was, however, entirely based upon the other method above-mentioned. He taught his disciples the secret of strengthening their powers of apprehension and cognition, in order that they might pass beyond the mists surrounding the outer perceptual world. He did not say to his followers, as did the Indian teachers: ‘Turn away from the colours, and from the sounds, and from all outer sense-impressions, and seek the path to the spiritual realms only through the merging of yourselves within your very souls’,—but he spoke thus:—‘Strengthen your powers of perception, in order that you may look around upon all things, the plants, the animals, that which lives in the air and in the water, upon the mountains, and in the depths of the valleys, and cast your eyes upon the world.’ We know that the disciples of the Indian mystics regarded this earth upon which we live as merely maya (illusion), and turned from it in order to attain to Brahma. On the other hand, Zarathustra counselled his followers not to draw away from the material world, but to pass outward and beyond it, so that they might say:—‘Whenever we experience perceptual manifestations in the outer physical world, we realize that therein lie concealed and beyond our sense perceptions the workings and achievements of the spirit.’

It is remarkable that the two paths should have been thus united in early Grecian times, and just because in that period true spiritual knowledge was more profound than in our day (which we are inclined to regard as so amazingly enlightened!) all things found expression in imagery, and the images gave rise to Mythology. Thus do we find these two thought currents commingled and fostered in the Grecian culture—The Mystical tending inward, and the Zarathustran outward into the great cosmos.

That such was the case becomes evident from the fact, that one of these paths was named after Dionysos, that mysterious god who was reached when man merged himself ever deeper and deeper within his inner being, there to find a questionable sub-human element, as yet unknown, and from which he first developed into man. It was this unclean and half-animal residue to which was given the name of Dionysos. On the other hand, all that comes to us when we regard our physical sense perceptions from a purely spiritual standpoint, was termed Apollo. Thus we find in ancient Greece, in the Apollo current of thought, the teaching of Zarathustra; and in the Dionysos current, the doctrine of mystical contemplation, side by side in contrast. In Greece they united and operated conjointly—the Zarathustran and the Mystical Methods, those methods which had been at their highest level, working separately, in the days of the ancient Indians.

Here we might say, that already in olden times these two thought currents were destined to commingle in the coming Grecian cults of Apollo and Dionysos, and thenceforward they would continue as one; so that in our present cultural period, when we raise ourselves to a certain spiritual understanding, we find them still unified and enduring.

It is very remarkable, and one of the many riddles which present themselves to the thinking mind, that Nietzsche in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, gave evidence of a vague suspicion that in the Grecian creeds of Dionysos and Apollo, the Mystical current meets the stream of scientific spiritual thought.

A further matter of interest lies in the fact, that Zarathustra actually taught his disciples to recognize in detail, the hidden workings of the Spirit in all material things, and from this starting-point the whole of his gifts to culture emanated. He emphasized that it was not sufficient for man merely to say:—‘There before us spreads a material world, behind which ever works and weaves the Divine Spirit.’ Such a statement might appear at first sight full of significance, it leads, however, only to a general pantheistic outlook, and means nothing more, than that some vague nebulous spirit underlies all material phenomena. Zarathustra, like all other great personalities of the past who were exalted and had direct contact with the Spirit-World, did not present these matters to his followers and the people in any such indefinite and abstract manner; he pointed out, that in the same way as individual physical happenings vary in import, so is it with the latent spiritual factor, it being sometimes of greater and sometimes of less moment. He further stated that the sun, regarded purely from the physical point of view as a member of the stellar system, is the source of all earthly phenomena, life, and activity, while concealed within is the centre of spiritual existence in so far as we are immediately concerned.

These things Zarathustra impressed earnestly and clearly upon his disciples, and, using simple words, we can picture him as addressing them somewhat as follows:—‘When you regard man, you must realize that he does not only consist of a material body—such is but an outer expression of the spirit which is within. Even as the physical covering is a manifestation in condensed and crystallized form of the true spiritual man, so is the sun which appears to us as a light-giving mass when considered as such, merely the external manifestation of an inner spiritual sun.’ In the same way as we term the human spirit element as distinguished from the physical, The Aura, to use an ancient expression, so do we call the all-embracing hidden spiritual part of the sun, The Great Aura (Aura Mazda); in contradistinction to man’s spiritual component, which is sometimes called the Little Aura.

Now, Zarathustra named all that lies hidden within and beyond man’s mere apprehension of the physical sun—‘Aura Mazda’ or ‘Ahura Mazdao’—and considered this element as important to our spiritual experiences and conditions, as is the physical sun to the wellbeing of plants and animals, and all that lives upon the face of the earth. There behind the physical sun lies the Spiritual Master—The Creator—‘Ahura Mazdao’ or ‘Aura Mazda’, and from ‘Ahura Mazdao’ came the name, ‘Ormuzd’, or, ‘The Spirit of Light’.

While the Indians mystically searched their inner being, in order to attain to Brahma—The Eternal—who shines outward as a point of light from within man’s essence, Zarathustra urged his disciples to turn their eyes upon the great periphery of existence, and pointed out that there within the body of the sun, dwells the great Solar Spirit—Ahura Mazdao—‘The Spirit of Light’. He taught them that, just in the same way as when man strives to raise his spirit to perfection, so must he ever battle against his lower passions and desires, against the delusive images suggested by possible deception and falsehood, and all those antagonistic influences within, which continually oppose his spiritual impulses. Thus must ‘Ahura Mazdao’ face the opposition of ‘The Spirit of Darkness’—‘Angra Mainyus’ or ‘Ahriman’.

We can now realize how the great Zarathustran conception could be evolved from experiences born of sensations and sense contents. Through these, Zarathustra could advance his disciples to a point where he could make clear to them that:—Within man there is a ‘Perfecting Principle’, which tells him that whatever may be his present condition this principle will work persistently within, and through it he may raise himself ever higher and higher; but at the same time there also operate impulses and inclinations, deceit and falsehood, all tending towards imperfection. This Perfecting Principle must therefore be developed and expanded, in order that the world may be destined to attain to wiser and more advanced states of perfection; it is the ‘Principle of Ahura Mazdao’, and is assailed throughout the whole world by Ahriman—‘The Spirit of Darkness’—who through imperfection and evil brings shadows into the light. By following the method above outlined, Zarathustra’s disciples were enabled to realize and to feel, that in truth each individual man is an image of the outer universe.

We must not seek the true significance of such teaching in theories, concepts and ideas; but in active vivid consciousness and in the sensations impressed when through it man realizes that he is so related to the universe that he can say:—‘As I stand here, I am a small world, and as such I am a replica of the Great Cosmos.’ Just as we have within us a principle of perfection, and another which is antagonistic, so throughout the universe is Ormuzd opposed by Ahriman. In these teachings the whole cosmos is represented as typical of a widespread human being; the forces of greatest virtue are termed Ahura Mazdao, while against these operate the powers of Angra Mainyus.

When a man realizes that he is in direct contact with the workings of the universe and the attendant physical phenomena, but can only apprehend the perceptual, then as he begins to gain spiritual experience, a feeling of awe may come over him (especially if he is materialistic in thought) when he learns through Spectrum Analysis, that the same matter which exists upon the earth is found in the most distant stars. It is the same with Zarathustranism, when man feels that his spiritual part is merged in that of the whole cosmos, and that he has indeed emanated from its great spirit. Herein lies the true significance of such a doctrine, which was not merely abstract in character, but on the contrary wholly concrete.

In this present age it is most difficult to make people understand (even when they have a certain sense for the spiritual that lies behind the perceptual) that it is necessary to a true and spiritually scientific view of the cosmos, that there be more than one central unity of spirit-power. But even as we distinguish between the separate forces in Nature, such as Heat, Light, and Chemical forces, so in the world of spirit must we recognize not merely one centralized power (whose existence is not denied) but we must differentiate between it and certain subservient uplifting forces, whose spheres of action are more circumscribed than are those of the all-embracing spirit. Thus it was that Zarathustra made a distinction between the omnipotent Ormuzd, and those spirit beings by whom he was served.

Before we turn to a consideration of these subservient spirit entities, we must draw attention to the fact that the Zarathustran theory was not a mere Dualism—a simple doctrine of two worlds—the worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman; but that it maintained that underlying this double flux of cosmic influence, is a definite unity—a single power—which gave birth to both The Realm of Light (Ormuzd) and to The Realm of Darkness (Ahriman). It is not easy to gain a right understanding of Zarathustra’s conception concerning this ‘Unity’ underlying Ormuzd and Ahriman. With reference to this point the Greek authors state that the ancient Persians worshipped, and regarded as a ‘Living Unity’, that which lay beyond the light, and which Zarathustra termed ‘Zervane Akarene’. How can we gain a comprehension of what Zarathustra in his teachings meant by ‘Zervane Akarene’ or ‘Zaruana Akarana’?

Let us consider for a moment the course of evolution; this we must regard as of such nature, that all beings tend towards greater and greater perfection. So that if we look into the future, we see more and more of the radiance from the Light-Realms of Ormuzd; but if we turn our eyes upon the past, we realize how the powers of Ahriman, which oppose Ormuzd, are circumstanced; and we then know that with the passing of time, these must be conquered and for ever ended.

We will now picture to ourselves that the path into the future and that into the past each lead to the same point; a conception which present-day man finds most difficult to grasp. Let us take as an example a circle; if we pass along the circumference from the lowest point in one direction, we come to the opposite point above, if, however, we go along the other side, we come to the same point. When we consider a larger circle, then the circumference is flatter, and we must traverse a greater distance in each case. We will now suppose a circle to expand ever more and more, then ultimately the path on either side becomes a straight line, and is infinite. But just before the circle becomes infinite we would reach the same point whether we went by the one path or the other. Why, then, should not the same happen when the circumference is so flattened that the periphery becomes a straight line? In this case the point at infinity on the one must be identical with that on the other, and therefore we must be able to travel to it, from the lowest point in one sense (say, positive), and return as if coming from the opposite (negative) direction. This means that when our conception is infinite, we have a straight line extending without limit on either side, but which is in reality the circumference of an infinite circle.

The abstraction given above lies at the basis of Zarathustra’s conception of what he termed Zaruana Akarana. Here, with regard to time, we look in one direction into the future, in the other into the past, and when we consider an infinite period time closes in upon itself as in a circle. This self-contained and infinite time circle is symbolically represented as a serpent eternally biting its own tail, and into it is woven upon the one side, The Power of Light, shedding upon us continually a greater and greater radiance; and upon the other, The Power of Darkness, becoming ever more and more profound. When we are midway, then is the light (Ormuzd) intermingled with the shadows (Ahriman); all is interwoven in the self-embracing infinite Flux of Time, ‘Zaruana Akarana’.

There is something more about this ancient cosmic conception; its basic ideas were treated seriously, there were no mere vague statements such as:—‘Without and remote from all that is material in this perceptual world, beyond those things which affect our eyes, our ears, and sense organs in general—abides The Spirit’. But it was definitely asserted, that in everything which could be seen and apprehended, therein could be discerned something of the nature of spirit signs, or a manifestation of the Spirit-World.

If we take a sheet of paper upon which are inscribed alphabetical characters, these may be combined into words; but we must first have learnt how to read. Without this ability no one could read about Zarathustra; for they would merely perceive certain characters which could only be followed with the eyes. Actual reading can only take place after it is clearly understood how to connect such characters with that which is within the soul. Now, Zarathustra discerned a written sign underlying all that was in the perceptual world, particularly in the manner in which the stars are grouped in the universe. Just as we recognize written characters upon paper, so did Zarathustra descry in the starry firmament something similar to letters, conveying a message from the Spirit-World. Hence, arose an art of penetrating into the World of Spirit, and of deciphering the signs indicated by the arrangement of the stars, and of finding a method of reading and construing from their movements and order, in what manner and way those spiritual beings that are without, inscribe the facts concerning their activities in space.

Zarathustra and his disciples had a paramount interest in these matters. To them it was a most important sign that Ahura Mazdao, in order to accomplish his creations and to reveal his message to the world, should (in the language of Modern Astronomy) ‘describe a circular path’. This fact was regarded as a sign traced in the heavens indicating in what manner Ahura Mazdao worked, and the relation which his activities bore to the universe as a whole. It is important that Zarathustra was able to point out that the constellations of the Zodiac, taken together as forming a closed curve in space, should symbolize a continuous and also retroactive time flux; and we can realize that there is indeed a most profound significance underlying the statement, that one branch of this time-curve stretches outward into the future, while the other leads backward into the remote past. Zaruana Akarana is that bright band of stars, later known as the Zodiac, that self-contained time-line ever traversed by Ormuzd, The Spirit of Light. In other words, the passage of the sun across the constellations of the Zodiac is an expression of the activity of Ormuzd; while the Zodiac itself is the symbol of Zaruana Akarana. In reality, Zaruana Akarana and The Zodiac are identical terms, just in the same way as are Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao.

There are two special circumstances to be considered in this connection. First, when the passage of the sun through the Zodiac takes place while it is light, as in the summer. At such time the solar radiance falls full upon the earth, bringing with it the power emanating from those spiritual forces ever flowing outward from the Light-Realms of Ormuzd. That part of the Zodiac traversed by Ahura Mazdao in the daytime, or during the summer, denotes the manner in which He works and weaves unhindered by Ahriman. On the other hand, those Zodiacal constellations which lie far beneath the horizon—dark regions through which we might picture the passage of Angra Mainyus—are symbolical of the Kingdom of The Shadows.

We have stated that Zarathustra regarded Ormuzd as associated with the bright sections of the Zodiac (Zaruana Akarana), while he looked upon Ahriman as connected with the gloom. In what way do the activities of Ormuzd and Ahriman find expression in our material world? In order to understand this point we must realize that the effect of the solar rays is different in the morning from that at noon; varying as the sun ascends from Aries to Taurus, and again during its descent toward the horizon. The influence exerted is not the same in winter as in summer, and differs with every passing sign of the Zodiac. Zarathustra regarded the changing aspects of the sun in connection with the Zodiacal constellations as symbolical of the activities of Ormuzd proceeding from different directions, and from which came those spiritual beings that are both His servants and His sons, and who are ready at all times to execute His commands. These are the ‘Amschaspands’ or ‘Ameschas Pentas’, subservient entities, to each of whom is allotted some special duty.

While Ormuzd controls all active functions in the Light-Realms, the Amschaspands undertake that specific work which finds expression in the transmission of the sun’s light when in Aries, Taurus, Cancer, etc. But the true vital activity of Ormuzd is manifested in the full radiance of the sun, shining throughout all bright signs of the Zodiac, from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. Following the Zarathustran line of thought, we might say:—‘It is as though the evil powers of Ahriman came through the earth from those dark regions where abide his servants—his own Amschaspands—who are opposed to the good genii standing by the side of Ormuzd.’ Zarathustra actually distinguished between twelve different subservient spirit entities; six or seven on the side of Ormuzd, and five or six on that of Ahriman. These are regarded as typical of good or evil genii (Amaschas Pentas—lower spirits), according as to whether their influence comes with the sun’s rays from the bright Signs of the Zodiac, or emanates from those which are in gloom.

Goethe had the subservient spirits of Ormuzd in mind when he wrote the following words at the beginning of Faust in the ‘Prologue of Heaven’:

‘But ye, God’s sons in love and duty,
Enjoy the rich, the ever-living Beauty!
Creative Power, that works eternal schemes,
Clasp you in bonds of love, relaxing never,
And what in wavering apparition gleams
Fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever!’²

(Trans: BAYARD TAYLOR)

From the above it is apparent that the conception which Goethe formed of ‘God’s sons’ as the servants of the Highest Divine Power, is similar to Zarathustra’s concept concerning the Amschaspands, of which, as already stated, he recognized twelve different kinds. Again, subservient to these Amschaspand entities, according to Zarathustranism, are yet lower orders of spiritual powers or forces, among which some twenty-eight separate types are usually distinguished. These are the so-called ‘Izarads’ or ‘Izeds’; the number of different classes into which they may be divided is, however, indeterminate, being variously estimated from twenty-four up to twenty-eight, and even as high as thirty-one. There is yet a third division of spiritual powers or forces, termed by Zarathustra ‘Ferruhars’ or ‘Frawaschars’. According to our conceptions, the Ferruhars have the least influence of any upon our tendencies and dispositions in the material world, and are regarded as that spiritual element which permeates the great macrocosm, and underlies all perceptual physical activity. They are the reality behind everything of which we are conscious and appears to us as merely external and material.

While we picture the Amschaspands as controlling the twelve forces which are at work during all physical effects engendered by the action of light, and the Izeds, as governing those which influence the animal kingdom, so do we consider the Ferruhars, in addition to possessing the quality above-mentioned, as spiritual entities having under their guidance the ‘Group-Souls’ of animals.

Thus did Zarathustra discern a specialized realm beyond this perceptual universe—a perfectly organized superperceptual world—and his concept was absolutely definite, and in no sense of the nature of an abstraction. Behind Ormuzd and Ahriman he pictured Zaruana Akarana, further the good and bad Amschaspands, below these the Izeds, and lastly the Ferruhars.

Man, as he is fashioned, is a replica in miniature of the great universe, and therefore all forces operative in the cosmos must be present in some manner within his being. Just as the benevolent powers of Ormuzd are expressed during that inner struggle to attain to perfection, and the unclean forces of Ahriman are in evidence while there is gloom and temptation, so do we find also the trace of other spiritual powers—those of the lower genii.

I will now make a definite statement, which when viewed from the standpoint of modern cosmic ideas, is liable to awaken bitter feeling, namely:—I assert that before long it will be discovered and recognized by external science, that a superperceptual element underlies all physical phenomena, and that latent spirit exists in everything that comes within the limits of our sense perceptions. Further, that science will be driven to admit, that in the physical structure of man there is much that is a counterpart of those forces which permeate and spread life throughout the whole universe, and which flow into the body, there to become condensed.

Let us go back to the Zarathustran Doctrine, which in many ways is similar to that of Spiritual Science. According to its concepts, Ormuzd and Ahriman are regarded as influencing mankind from without. Ormuzd being the source of inward impulses toward perfection, while Ahriman is ever in opposition. The Amschaspands also exert spiritual activity, if we consider their forces as being, so to speak, condensed in man, then it should be possible to trace and recognize their action to the point of physical expression.

In Zarathustra’s time, anatomy, as we understand it to-day, did not exist. Zarathustra and his disciples, by means of their spiritual insight, actually saw the cosmic streams to which reference has been made; they appeared to them in the form of twelve cosmic outpourings, flooding in upon man, there to maintain activity. Thus it came about that the human head was regarded by Zarathustra’s followers as a symbol of the inflowing of the seven good, and five evil, Amschaspands. Within man we have a continuance of the Amschaspand flux; how, then, is this flux to be recognized at this much later period? The anatomist has discovered that there are twelve principal pairs of brain nerves, which pass from the brain into the body. These are the physical counterparts, as it were, of the twelve condensed Amschaspand out-flowings, namely, twelve pairs of nerves of extreme potency in bringing about either the highest perfection, or the greatest evil. Here, then, we find reappearing in our present age, but transformed into material terms, that concept which had come to Zarathustra from the Spirit-World, and which he preached to his disciples.

There is, however, in all this a point of controversy. It is so easy for anyone in our day to maintain that the statements of Spiritual Science become wholly fantastical when it is alleged that Zarathustra, speaking of twelve Amschaspands, had in mind something connected with the twelve pairs of nerves which are in the human head! But the time will come when the world will gain yet another item of knowledge, for it will be discovered in what manner, and form the spirit, which permeates and lives throughout the universe, continues active in man.

The old Zarathustranism has arisen once again in our modern physiology. For in the same way as the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izeds are the servants of the Amschaspands, so are the twenty-eight spinal nerves subordinate to those of the brain. Again, the Izeds, who are present in the outer universe as a spirit flux, enter the human body, and their sphere of action is in those nerves which stimulate the lower soul-life of man; in these nerves they crystallize, as it were, and assume a condensed form. And where the Ized-flux, as such, entirely ceases, and the term ‘nerve’ can no longer be applied, is the actual centre where our personality receives its crowning touch. Further, those of our thoughts which rise slightly above mere cognition and simple brain action, are typical of the Frawaschars or Ferruhars.

Our present period is connected in a remarkable manner with the Doctrine of Zarathustra. Through his teachings and by means of his spiritual archetypes, Zarathustra was enabled to enlighten his people regarding those regions which spread beyond the perceptual world, while his imagery was ever as a flowing contact with that which lies hidden behind the veil. With reference to this great doctrine it is most significant that after it had acted as an inspiration to humanity for a long period, always tending to promote greater and greater effort in various directions of cultural progress—only to lose its influence from time to time—there should arise once more, in our day, a marked tendency toward a mystical current of thought.

It was the same with the Greeks after the two methods of approach to the Spirit-World had commingled, for they also, at times, showed a preference for either the mystical or the Spiritual Scientific thought current. It is owing to the modern predominating interest in mysticism that many people find themselves drawn towards the Indian Spiritual Science, or Method of Contemplation. Hence it is, that the most essential and deeply significant aspects of Zarathustranism—in fact, its very essence—hardly appear in the spiritual life of our time, although there is abundant evidence of the nature of Zarathustra’s concepts and his methods of thought. But all that lies at the very base, and is absolutely vital to his doctrine, is in a sense lost to our age.

When once we realize that in Zarathustranism is contained the spiritual prototype of so many things which we have rediscovered in the domain of physical research (numerous examples of which might be quoted), and of others that will be rediscovered later, then will a fundamental chord in our culture give place to one which will be founded upon the old Zarathustran teachings. It is remarkable that the profound attention which Zarathustranism paid to macrocosmic phenomena caused the world to recede, as it were, or appear of less moment; while in nearly all other beliefs with which a flood of mystical culture is associated, the outer world plays an important part, this is also the case in our materialism.

That great fundamental concept concerning two opposing basic qualities, and which recurs again and again throughout the religious doctrines of the world, we regard in the following manner; we consider it as symbolized by the antithesis of the sexes—the male and the female—so that in the old religious systems which were founded upon mysticism, the Gods and Goddesses were in reality, antithetical symbols of two opposing currents which flow throughout the universe. It is amazing that the teachings of Zarathustra should rise above these conceptions, and picture the origin of spiritual activity in so different a manner, portraying the good, as the resplendent, and the evil as the shadows.

Hence, the chaste beauty of Zarathustranism and its nobility, which transcends all those petty ideas which play so ugly a part in our time, when any endeavour is made to deepen man’s conception of spiritual life. Where the Greek writers state that the Supreme Deity in order to create Ormuzd, must also create Ahriman, so that He should obtain an antithesis; then, since Ahriman opposed Ormuzd, we have an example of how one primordial force is conceived as set against another. This same idea finds expression in the Hebrew, where evil comes upon the world through the woman—Eve—but we find nothing in Zarathustranism concerning ills that the world suffered through the antithesis of the sexes.

All those hateful ideas which are disseminated throughout our daily literature, pervading our very thoughts and feelings, distorting the true significance of the phenomena of disease and health, while failing to comprehend the intrinsic facts of life, will disappear, when that wholly different concept, the antithesis exhibited by Ormuzd and Ahriman—a conception so lofty and so powerful when compared with present-day paltry notions—is once more voiced in the words of Zarathustra, and enters to permeate and influence our modern culture. In this world, all things pursue their appointed course, and nothing can hinder the ultimate triumph of Zarathustran conceptions, which will, little by little, insinuate themselves into the life of the people.

When we look upon Zarathustra in this way, we realize that he was indeed a Spirit, who in bygone times brought potent impulses to bear upon human culture. That such was the case becomes evident, if we but follow the course of subsequent events which took place in Asia Minor, and later among the people of Assyria and Babylonia, on down to the Egyptian period, and further even to the time of the spreading of Christianity. Everywhere we find in different lines of thought something which may be traced back, and shown to have its origin in that Great Light, which Zarathustra set blazing for humanity.

We can now understand how it was that a certain Greek writer (who wished to emphasize the fact that some among the Leaders had always given their people instruction in matters that they would only require at a later period in their culture) should have stated, that while Pythagoras had obtained all the knowledge that he could from the Egyptians concerning the methods of Geometry, from the Phænicians concerning Arithmetic, and from the Chaldeans concerning Astronomy—he was forced to turn to the successors of Zarathustra, in order to learn the secret teachings regarding the relation of humanity to the Spirit-World, and to obtain a true understanding of the proper conduct of life. The writer who made these statements regarding Pythagoras further asserts that the Zarathustran method for the conduct of life leads us beyond antitheses, and that all antitheses can be considered as culminating in the one great contrast of Good and Evil, which opposing condition can be finally absorbed, only by the purging away of all evil, falsehood and deceit. For instance, the worst enemy of Ormuzd is regarded as that one which bears the name of Calumny, and Calumny is one of the outstanding characteristics of Ahriman. The same writer states that Pythagoras failed to find the purest and most ideal ethical practice, namely, the one directed toward the moral purification of man, among either the Egyptians, the Phænicians, or the Chaldeans; and that he had again to turn to Zarathustra’s successors, in order to acquire that lofty conception of the universe which leads mankind to the earnest belief that through self-purification alone may evil be overcome. Thus did the great nobility and oneness of Zarathustra’s teachings become recognized among the ancients.

We would here mention that the statements made in this lecture are supported in every case by independent historical research; and we should carefully weigh all assertions coming from the representatives of other sciences, and judge for ourselves, whether or no they are in accord with our fundamental concepts. For instance, take the case of Plutarch, when he said that in the sense of Zarathustranism, the essence of Light as it affects the earth, is regarded as of supreme loveliness, and that its spiritual counterpart is Truth. Here is a definite statement made by an ancient historian, which is in complete agreement with all that has been said. We shall also find as we proceed that many historical events become clear and understandable when we take into consideration the various factors to which we have drawn attention.

Let us now go back to the ancient Vedantic conception; this was based upon the mystical merging of man within his very being; but before he can attain to the inner Light of Brahma, he must meet with, and pass through, those passions and desires which are induced by wild semi-human impulses that are within him, and which are opposed to that mystical withdrawal within the spirit-soul, and into the eternal inner being. The Indian came to the conclusion that this could only be accomplished, if pending his mystic merging in Brahma, he could successfully eliminate all that we experience in the perceptual world which stimulates sensuous desires, and allures through colours and through sounds. Just so long as these play a part during our meditations, so long do we keep within us, an enemy opposed to our mystical attainment to perfection.

The Indian teacher said:—‘Put away from yourselves all that can enter the soul through the powers that are external; merge yourselves solely within your very being—descend to the Devas—and when you have vanquished the lower Devas, then will you find yourselves within the kingdom of the Deva of Brahma; but shun the realm of the Asuras, whence come those malignant ones who would thrust themselves upon you from the outer world of Maya; from all such you must turn away, whatsoever may befall.’

Zarathustra, on the other hand, spoke to his disciples after this fashion:—‘Those who follow the leaders among the people of the South can make no advance along the path which they have chosen, because of the different order of their search after those things which are of the Spirit; in such manner can no nation make headway. The call is not alone to mystic contemplation and to dreaming, but to live in a world which provides freely of all that is needful—man’s mission lies with the art of agriculture, and the promotion of civilization. You must not regard all things as merely Maya, but you must penetrate that veil of colours, and of sounds, which is spread around you; and avoid everything that may be of the nature of the Devas, and which because of your inner egoism, would hold you in its grasp. The region wherein abide the lower Asuras must be traversed, through this you must force your way, even up to the highest; but since your being has been especially organized and adapted to this intent, you must ever shun the dark realms of the Devas.’

In India, the teaching of the Rishis was otherwise, for they said to their followers:—‘Your beings are not suitably organized to seek that which lies within the Kingdom of the Asuras—therefore avoid this region and descend to that of the Devas.’

Such was the difference between the Indian and Persian culture. The Indian peoples were taught that they must shun the Asuras and regard them as evil spirits; this was because through the method of their culture they were only aware of the lower Asuras; the Persians, on the other hand, who found only low types of Devas in the Devas regions were adjured by their leaders thus:—‘Enter the Kingdom of the Asuras, for you are so constituted that you may attain even unto the highest of them.’

There lay within the impulse that Zarathustra gave to mankind a great fervour, which found expression when he said:—‘I have a gift to bestow upon humanity which shall endure and live throughout the ages, and will smooth the upward path, overcoming all false doctrines, which are but obstacles diverting man from his struggle toward the attainment of perfection.’ Thus did Zarathustra feel himself to be the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such he experienced personally the opposition of Ahriman, over whose principles his teachings should enable mankind to achieve a sweeping victory. This conviction he expressed in impressive and beautiful words, to which reference is found in ancient documents. These, however, were necessarily inscribed at a later date; but what Spiritual Science tells us concerning Zarathustra and his pronouncements comes from other sources. Throughout all his telling adjurations there rings forth the inner impulse of his mission, and we feel the power of that great passion which overcame him, when, as the opponent of Ahriman and the Principle of Darkness, he said:—‘I will speak! draw nigh and listen unto me, ye that come with longing from afar, and ye from near at hand—mark my words!—No more shall he, the Evil One, this false teacher, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long hath his vile breath bemingled human voice and human speech. But now I will denounce him in the words which The Highest—The First One—has put into my mouth, the words which Ahura Mazdao has spoken. To him who will not harken unto my words, and who will not heed that which I say unto you—to him will come evil—and that, ere ever the world hath ended its cycles.’

Thus spoke Zarathustra, and we can but feel that he had something to impart to humanity, which would leave its impress throughout all later cultural periods. Those among us who have understanding and will but pay attention to that which persists in our time, even if only dimly apparent, who will note with spiritual discernment the tenor of our culture, can even yet, after thousands of years, recognize the echo of the Zarathustran teachings. Hence it is that we number Zarathustra among Great Leaders such as Hermes, Buddha, Moses, and others, about whom we shall have much to say in subsequent lectures. The spiritual gifts possessed by these Great Ones, and the position which they occupied among men, are indicated, and fitly expressed in the following words:—

‘God sends us Spirits that shine as stars,
From the spheres of eternal love.
May we behold that glorious light,
They reflect from the realms above.’³

• 1. the date of which has been placed at about 1200 B.C.
• 2. Doch ihr, die echten Göttersöhne,
  Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schöne!
  Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
  Umfass euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
  Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
  Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken.
• 3. Es leuchten gleich Sternen
  Am Himmel des ewigen Seins
  Die gottgesandten Geister.
  Gelingen möge es alien Menschenseelen,
  Im Reiche des Erdenseins
  Zu schauen ihrer Flammen Licht!

It is of great importance to Spiritual Science to follow the gradual development of man’s spirit, from epoch to epoch, as it slowly evolves, and pressing ever upward, emerges from the dark shadows of the past. Hence it is that the study of ancient Egyptian culture and spiritual life is of especial moment. This is found to be particularly the case when we endeavour to picture and live in the atmosphere and conditions associated with the latter.

The echoes which reach us from the dim grey vistas of by-gone times seem as full of mystery as is the countenance of the Sphinx itself, which stands so grimly forth as a monument to ancient Egyptian civilization. This mystery becomes intensified as modern external scientific research finds that it is constrained to delve ever deeper and deeper into the remote past, in order to throw light upon later Egyptian culture; regarding which most important documents are extant. Such investigations have found traces of certain things, clearly related to the active cultural life of Egypt, which date back to a period at least 7,000 years before the beginning of the Christian era. Here, then, is one reason why this particular civilization is of such paramount interest, but there is another, namely, present-day man, although living in times of broader and more general enlightenment has nevertheless a feeling, whether acceptable or not, that this ancient culture is in some singular and mysterious manner, connected with his very aims and ideals.

It is indeed significant that a man of such outstanding intellect as Kepler, should, at the very dawn of modern scientific development, have been moved to express the feelings which came over him, while engaged in astronomical research, in words somewhat as follows:—‘During my attempt to discover the manner of the passing of the planets around the sun, I have sought to peer into the deep secrets of the cosmos; the while it has oft-times seemed as if my fancy had led me into the mysterious sanctuaries of the old Egyptians—to touch their most holy vessels, and draw them forth that I might bestow them upon a new world. At such moments the thought has come to me, that only in the future will the true purport and intent of my message be disclosed.’

Here we find one of the greatest scientists of modern times overcome by a sense of such close relation to the ancient Egyptian culture, that he could find no better way of expressing the fundamental concepts underlying his work, than by representing them as a regeneration, naturally differing as to word and form, of the occult doctrines taught to the disciples and followers in the by-gone Egyptian Sanctuaries. It is therefore a matter of the greatest interest to us that we should realize the actual sentiments of these olden Egyptian peoples, in regard to the whole meaning and nature of their civilization.

There is an ancient legend that has been handed down through Greek tradition which is most suggestive, not only of what the Egyptians themselves felt regarding their culture, but also the way in which their civilization was looked upon by the ancients as a whole. We are told that an Egyptian sage once said to Solon:—‘You Greeks are still children, you have never grown up, and all your knowledge has been acquired through your own human observation and senses; you have neither traditions nor doctrines grey with age.’ We first learn what is implied by the expression, ‘doctrines grey with age‘, when the methods of Spiritual Science are employed in an endeavour to throw light upon the nature and significance of Egyptian thought and feeling. But, as has been before stated, when we approach this matter we must bear in mind that during successive periods of man’s development he gradually acquired different forms of consciousness, and that that order of conscious apprehension which is ours to-day, with its scientific method of thought, and through which we realize the outer world in virtue of our senses working in conjunction with reason and intellect, did not always exist. Deep down, underlying all human cognition, there is what we term ‘Evolution’, and evolution affects not only the outer world of form, but also the disposition of man’s soul. It follows, that we can only really understand the events which took place at the ancient centres of culture, when we accept that knowledge which Spiritual Science can alone obtain, from the sources of information at its disposal. We thus learn that in olden times instead of our present intellectual consciousness, there existed a clairvoyant state that differed from our customary normal conscious condition, of which we are cognizant from the moment we awake until we again fall asleep. On the other hand, the ancient clairvoyant state cannot be likened to the insensibility produced by slumber. Hence, the primeval consciousness of prehistoric man should be regarded as an intermediate condition now only faintly apparent, and retained, as one might say, atavistically in the form of an attenuated heritage in the picture world of our dreams.

Now, dreams are for the most part chaotic in character, and therefore meaningless in their relation to ordinary life. But the old clairvoyant consciousness, which also found expression in imagery although often of a somewhat subdued and visionary nature, was nevertheless a truly clairvoyant gift, and its symbolical manifestations had reference, not to our physical world, but to that realm which lies beyond all material things, in other words—the world of spirit. We can say that in reality all clairvoyant consciousness, including the dream-state of primitive man, as well as that acquired to-day through those methods to which we have previously referred, finds expression pictorially and not in concepts and ideas, as is the case with externalized physical consciousness. It is for the possessor of such faculty to interpret the symbols presented in terms of those spiritual realities, which underlie all physical perceptual phenomena.

We have reached a point where we can look back on the evolution of the ancient races, and of a surety say:—Those wondrous visions of by-gone times of which tradition tells us, were not born of childish fantasy and false conception of the works of Nature (this, as I have pointed out, is the wide-spread opinion in the materialistic circles of to-day), but were in truth veritable pictures of the Spirit-World, flashed before the souls of men in that now long distant past.

He who seriously studies the old mythologies and legends, not from the point of view of modern materialistic thought, but with an understanding of the creation and spiritual activities of mankind, will find in these strange stories a certain coherence which harmonizes wonderfully with those cosmic principles that dominate all physical, chemical and biological laws; while there rings throughout the ancient mythological and religious systems a tone of spiritual reality, from which they acquire a true significance.

We must clearly realize that the peoples of the various nations, each according to disposition, temperament and racial or folk-character, formed different conceptions of that vision world in which they conceived higher powers to be actively operating behind the accustomed forces of Nature. Further, that during the gradual course of evolution, mankind passed through many transitionary stages between that of the consciousness of the ancients, and our present-day objective conscious state. As time went on, the power necessary to the old clairvoyance dimmed and the visions faded; one might say—the doors leading to the higher realms were slowly closed, so that the pictures manifested to those whose souls could still peer into the Spirit-World, held ever less and less of spiritual force, until towards the end, only the lowest stages of supersensible activity could be apprehended. Finally, this primeval clairvoyant power died out, in so far as humanity in general was concerned, and man’s vision became limited to that which is of the material world, and to the apprehension of physical concepts and things; from that time on, the study of the interrelation of these factors led, step by step, to the birth of modern science. Thus it came about, that when the old clairvoyant state was past, our present intellectual consciousness gradually developed in diverse ways among the different nations.

The mission of the Egyptian peoples was of a very special nature. All that we know regarding ancient times, even that knowledge attained through modern Egyptian research, if rightly understood, tends but to verify the statements of Spiritual Science regarding the allotted task and true purpose of the Egyptian race. It was ordained that these olden peoples should still be imbued with a sufficiency of that primal power which would enable them to look back into the misty past; when their leaders in virtue of outstanding individualities and highly developed clairvoyant faculties, could gaze far into the mysteries of the Spirit-World. [Spiritual Science asserts that it was in accordance with ‘The Great Eternal Plan‘ that the Egyptians should gain wisdom and understanding from this source, to be a guide and a benefit in the development of mankind.] And we have learnt that it was to this end that this great nation was still permitted to retain a certain measure of that fast-fading clairvoyant power so closely associated with a specific disposition of soul. Although these qualities were, at that time, weak and ever waning in intensity, nevertheless they continued active until a comparatively late period in Egyptian history.

We can therefore make this statement:—The Egyptians, down to less than 1000 years before the Christian era, had actual experience of a mode of vision differing from that with which we are familiar in every-day life, when we merely open our eyes and make use of our intellect; and they knew that through this gift man was enabled to behold the spiritual realms. The later Egyptians, however, were unable to penetrate beyond the nethermost regions as portrayed in their pictorial visions, but they had power to recall those by-gone times in the Golden Age of Egyptian culture, when their priesthood could gaze both far and deeply into the world of spirit.

All knowledge obtained through visions was most carefully guarded and secretly preserved for thousands of years with the greatest piety, thankfulness and religious feeling, especially by the older Egyptians. At a later period, those among the people who still retained somewhat of clairvoyant power, expressed themselves after this fashion:—‘We can yet discern a lower spiritual realm—we know therefore that it is possible for mankind to look upon a Spirit-World; to question this truth would be as sensible as to doubt that we can really see external objects with our eyes.’ Although these later Egyptians were only able to apprehend weak echoes, as it were, of the inferior spiritual levels, nevertheless they felt and divined that in olden times man could indeed penetrate far into the mystic depths of that realm which lies beyond all physical sense perceptions. There is a doctrine grey with age, still preserved in wonderful inscriptions in Temples and upon columns. (It was this doctrine to which the sage referred when he spoke to Solon.) These inscriptions tell us of the broad deep penetration of clairvoyant power in the remote past.

That being to whom the Egyptians attributed all the profundity of their primordial clairvoyant enlightenment they called THE GREAT WISE ONE—THE OLD HERMES. When, at a later period, some other outstanding leader came to revive the ancient wisdom, he also called himself Hermes, according to an old custom prevalent among exalted Egyptian sages, and because his followers believed that in him the primeval wisdom of the old Hermes lived once again. They named the first Hermes,—‘Hermes Trismegistos‘—the Thrice-Great Hermes; but as a matter of fact it was only the Greeks who used the name of Hermes, for among the Egyptians he was known as ‘Thoth‘. In order to understand this being, it is necessary to realize what the Egyptians, under the influence of traditions concerning Thoth, regarded as true and characteristic cosmic mystics.

Such Egyptian beliefs as have come to us, one might say from outside sources, seem very strange indeed. Various Gods, of whom the most important are Osiris and Isis, are represented as not wholly human; oft-times having a human body and an animal head, or again formed of the most varied combinations of manlike and animal shapes. Remarkable religious legends have come down to us regarding this world of the Gods.

Again, the veneration and worship of cats and other animals by this ancient race was most singular, and went to such lengths that certain animals were considered as holy, and held in the greatest reverence, and in them the Egyptians saw something akin to higher beings. It has been said that this veneration for animals was such that when a cat, for instance, which had lived for a long time in one house, died, there was much weeping and lamentation. If an Egyptian observed a dead animal lying by the wayside, he did not dare to go near it, for fear that someone might accuse him of having slain it, in which case he would be liable to severe punishment. Even during the time that Egypt was actually under Roman rule, so it has been said, any Roman who killed a cat went in danger of his life, because such an act produced an uproar among the Egyptians. This veneration of animals appears to us as a most enigmatic part of Egyptian thought and feeling. Again, how extraordinary do the Pyramids, with their quadrilateral bases and triangular sides, seem to modern man; and how mysterious are the sphinxes and all that modern research drags forth from the depths of this ancient civilization and brings to the surface, to add to our knowledge an ever-increasing clarity. The question now arises:—What place did all these strange ideas occupy in the image world of the souls of those olden peoples? What had they to say regarding those things which the Thrice-Great Hermes had taught them, and how did they come by these curious concepts?

We must henceforth accustom ourselves to seek in all legends a deeper meaning, especially in those which are the more important. It is to be assumed that the purpose of some of these legends, is to convey to us in picture form, information regarding certain laws which govern spiritual life, and are set above external laws. As an example we have the fable of the god and goddess, Osiris and Isis. It was Hermes himself who called the Egyptian legends ‘The Wise Counsellors of Osiris‘. In all these fables, Osiris is a being who in the grey dawn of primeval times lived in the region where man now dwells. In the legend Osiris, who is represented as a benefactor of humanity, and under whose wise influence Hermes, or Thoth, gave to the Egyptians their ancient culture, even to the conduct of material life, was said to have an enemy whom the Greeks called Typhon. This enemy, Typhon, waylaid Osiris and slew him, then cut up his body, hid it in a coffin, and threw it into the sea. The goddess Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, sought long her husband who had been thus torn from her by Typhon, or Seth, and when she had at last found him, she gathered together the pieces into which he had been divided, and buried them here and there in various parts of the land, and in these places temples were erected. Later, Isis gave birth to Horos. Now, Horos was also a higher being, and his birth was brought about through spirit influence which descended upon Isis from Osiris, who had meanwhile passed into another world. The mission of Horos was to vanquish Typhon, and in a certain sense re-establish control of the life-current emanating from Osiris, which would continue to flow and influence mankind.

A legend such as this must not be regarded simply as an allegory, nor as a mere symbolism; in order to understand it rightly, we must enter into the whole world of Egyptian feeling and perception. It is far more important to do this than to form abstract concepts and ideas; for by thus opening the mind, we can alone give life to the sentiments and thoughts associated with the ideal forms of Osiris and Isis. Further, it is useless to attempt to explain these two outstanding figures by saying that Osiris represents the Sun, and Isis the Moon, and so forth—thus giving them an astronomical interpretation, as is the custom of the sciences of to-day outside of Spiritual Science—for such a theory leads to the belief that a legend of this nature is a mere symbolical portrayal of certain events connected with the heavens, and this is not true. We must go far back to the primeval feelings of the Egyptians, and from these as a starting-point try to realize the whole peculiar nature of their uplifted vision of the supersensible, and conception of those invisible forces beyond man’s apprehension which underlie the perceptual world. It is the spiritual interrelation of these factors that finds expression in the ideal forms of Osiris and Isis.

The old Egyptians associated these two figures with ideas similar to the following: There is a latent higher spiritual essence in all mankind which did not emanate from that material environment in which it now functions; at the beginning of earth-life it entered into physical bodily existence in condensed form, there slowly to unfold and grow throughout the ages. Man’s human state was preceded by another and more spiritual condition, and it is from this primordial condition from which the human being gradually developed. The Egyptian said:—‘When I look into my soul, I realize that there is within me a longing for spiritual things; a longing for that true spirituality from which I have descended, and I know that certain of the supersensible forces which operate in the region from which I come still live within me, and that the best of these are intimately related to the ultimate source of all superperceptual activity. Thus do I feel within me an Osiris power, which placed me here—a spirit embodied in external human form. In times past, before I came to this state, I lived wholly in a spiritual realm, where my life was confused, dim and instinctive in character. It was ordained that I be clothed with a material body, so that I should experience and behold a physical world, in order that I might develop therein. I know of a verity that in the beginning I have lived a life which compared to this physical perceptual existence, was indeed of the spirit.’

According to ancient Egyptian concepts the primordial forces underlying human evolution were regarded as dual, the one element being termed Osiris, while the other was known as Isis; hence we have an Osiris-Isis duality. When we give ourselves over to inner contemplation and are moved by the feelings and perceptions of the old Egyptians concerning this dualism, we at once find that we are involved in a process of active and suggestive thought, leading to certain conclusions. In order to follow this mental process we have only to consider the manner in which the mind operates when we think of some object, such for instance as a triangle. In this case, active thought must precede the actual conception of the figure. After the soul has been thus engaged in primary contemplation, we then turn our minds passively to the result of our thought concepts, and finally see the fruit of our mental activity pictured in the soul. The act of thinking has the same relation to final thought, as the act of conceiving to the final concept, or activity to the result of activity or its ultimate product. If we contemplate our mental process when we picture the Egyptian past, and are mindful of the mood of these ancient peoples, we realize that they looked upon the relation between Osiris and Isis in a somewhat similar manner to our conception of the order and outcome of thought activity. For instance, we might consider that activity should be regarded as a Male, or Father-Principle, and that therefore the Osiris-Principle must be looked upon as an active Male-Principle, a combative principle, which imbues the soul with thoughts and feelings of potency and vigour.

[We can form an idea of the old Egyptian concept concerning Osiris and Isis from the following considerations]:—In the physical body of man are certain components such as those that are active in the blood and those which are the basis of bone formation. The whole human system owes its being to the interaction of forces and matter, which combine to create and to enter the material form; these elements can be physically recognized, they were, however, at one time dispersed, and spread throughout the universe. A similar idea prevailed among the ancient Egyptians concerning their conception of Osiris-Force, which was conceived as actively pervading the entire cosmos, as Osiris. Even as the elements which form the physical body enter into it, there to combine and become operative, so did those olden peoples picture the Osiris-Force, as descending upon man to flow into his being and inspire within him the power of constructive thought and cognition—the veritable Osiris-Force. On the other hand, the expression Isis-Force was applied to that universal living cosmic influence which flows directly into the thoughts, concepts and ideas of mankind—it was this influence that was termed the Isis-Force. It is in the above manner that we must picture the uplifted vision in the souls of the old Egyptians, and it was thus that they regarded Osiris and Isis.

In that creation which surrounds us during our material existence, the ancient consciousness could find no words wherewith to express concepts such as these; for everything which is about us appeals alone to the senses, and has only meaning and value in a perceptual world, proffering no outer sign suggestive of a superphysical region. In order, therefore, to obtain something in the nature of a written language, which could express all such thoughts as moved the soul strongly, as for instance, when man exclaimed:—‘The Osiris-Isis-Force works within me,’ the ancients reached out to that script which is written in the firmament by the heavenly bodies, and said:—That supersensible power which man feels as Osiris, can be apprehended and expressed in perceptual terms if regarded as that active force emanating from the sun and spread abroad in the great cosmos. The Isis-Force may be pictured as the sun’s rays reflected from the moon which waits upon the sun, so that she may pass on the power of his radiance in the form of Isis-Influence. But until she receives his light the moon is dark—dark as a soul untouched by active uplifting thought. When the old Egyptian said:—‘The sun and the moon that are without reveal to me how I can best express, figuratively, my ideas concerning all that I feel within my soul,’ he knew that there was some hidden bond, in no way fortuitous, between these two heavenly bodies which appear so full of mystery in the vast universe—the light-giving sun and the dark moon every ready to reflect his splendour. And he realized that the light dispersed in space, and that reflected, must bear some unknown but definite relation to those supersensible powers of which he was conscious.

When we look at a clock we cannot see what it is that moves the hands so mysteriously, apparently with the aid of little demons, for all that can be seen is a piece of mechanism; but we know that underlying the whole mechanical structure, is the thought of the original designer, which thought had its origin in the soul of a man; so that in reality the mechanism owes its construction to something spiritual. Now, just as the movements of the hands of a clock are mutually related, and fundamentally dependent upon certain mechanical laws which exist in the universe, and finally upon those that are operative in the soul of a man (as when he speaks of experiencing the influence of the Osiris-Isis-Force), so are the movements of the Sun and Moon interrelated, and these bodies appear to us as indicators on the face of a mighty cosmic clock. The Egyptian did not merely say:—‘The Sun and Moon are to me a perceptual symbol of the relation between Osiris and Isis,’ but he felt and expressed himself thus:—‘That force which gives me life and is within, underlies the mysterious bond existing between the Sun and Moon, and it likewise endowed them with power to send forth light.’

In the same way as Osiris and Isis were regarded with reference to the Sun and Moon, so were other heavenly bodies looked upon as related to different gods. The ancient Egyptians considered that the positions of the various orbs in space were not merely symbolical of their own supersensible experiences, but likewise of those which tradition told them had been the experiences of seers belonging to the remote past. Further, they saw in the cosmic clock an expression of the activity of those forces, the workings of which they felt in the ultimate depths of the human soul. Thus it came about that this mighty clock, this grand creation of moving orbs, so wondrously interrelated with others that are fixed, was to the Egyptians a revelation of those mysterious spiritual powers which bring about the ever-changing positions of the heavenly bodies, and thus create an universal script, which man must learn to know and to recognize as a means whereby superperceptual power is given perceptual expression.

Such were the feelings and perceptions which had been handed down to the old Egyptians from their ancient seers, regarding a higher spiritual world of the existence of which they were wholly convinced, for they still retained a last remnant of primeval clairvoyant power. These olden peoples said:—‘We human beings had our true origin in an exalted spiritual realm, but we are now descended into a perceptual world, in which manifest material things and physical happenings, nevertheless, we are indeed come from the world of Osiris and of Isis. All that is best and which strives within us, and is fitted to attain to yet higher states of perfection, has of a verity flowed in upon us from Osiris and from Isis, and lives unseen within as active force. Physical man was born of those conditions which are of the external perceptual world, and his material form is but as a garment clothing the Osiris-Isis spirit within.’

Predominant in the souls of the old Egyptians was a profound sentiment concerning primeval wisdom, which filled their whole soul-life. The soul may indeed incline towards abstract notions, particularly the mathematical concepts of natural science, without in any way touching the moral and ethical factors of its life, nor affecting its fate or state of bliss. For instance, there may be discussion and debate relative to electrical and other forces, without the soul being moved to enter upon grave questions concerning man’s ultimate destiny.

On the other hand, we cannot ponder upon feelings and sentiments such as we have described regarding the Spirit-World and the inner relation of the soul’s character to Osiris and Isis, without arousing thoughts involving man’s happiness, his future, and his moral impulses. When the mind is thus occupied, man’s meditations are prone to take this form:—‘There dwells in me a better self, but because of what I am within my physical body, this “better self” is repressed and draws back, it is therefore not at first apparent. An Osiris and an Isis nature are fundamental to me; these, however, belong to a primordial world—to a by-gone golden age—to the holy past; now they are overcome by those forces that have fashioned the human form. But the Osiris-Isis power has entered and persists within that mortal covering which is ever subject to destruction through the external forces of Nature.’

The ‘Legend of Osiris and Isis‘ may be expressed in terms of feeling and sentiment in the following manner:—Osiris, the higher power in man, which is spread throughout cosmic space, is overcome by those forces which bring about utter degeneration in all human nature. Typhon confined the Osiris-Force within the body, as in a coffin formed to receive man’s spiritual counterpart; there the Osiris-Element lies concealed—invisible and unheeded by the outer world. (The name Typhon has linguistic connection with the words—‘Auflösen‘, to dissolve; and ‘Verwesen‘, to decompose.) The Isis-Nature, hidden within the confines of the soul, was always mysterious to the Egyptians. They considered that at some future period its influence would bring mankind back to that state which he enjoyed in the beginning; and that this return would ultimately be brought about through the penetrative force of intellectual power; for they fully recognized that in humanity there is a latent disposition which ever strives to re-endow Osiris with life.

The Isis-Force lies deep within the soul, and its profound purpose is to lead mankind, step by step, away from his present material state, and bring him back once more to Osiris.

It is this Isis-Force which—so long as man does not cling to his physical quality—makes it possible for him (even though he remain outwardly a physical man in a material world) to detach himself from his perceptual nature, and henceforth and for ever more to look upward from within his being to that more exalted Ego, which in the opinion of the most advanced thinkers, lies so mysteriously veiled at the very root of man’s powers of thought and action. This being, not the outer physical one, but the true inner man who has ever the stimulus to strive towards higher spiritual enlightenment, is as it were, the earth-born son of that Osiris who did not go forth into the material world, but remained as if concealed in the realms of the spirit. In their souls, the Egyptians regarded this invisible personality that struggles toward the attainment of a higher self, as Horos—the posthumous son of Osiris. It was thus that these old Egyptians visualized, with a certain feeling of sadness, the Osiris-origin of man; but at the same time they looked inward and said:—‘The soul has still retained something of the Isis-Force which gave birth to Horos, the possessor of that never-ceasing impulse to strive upward towards spiritual heights, and it is there, in that sublimity, that man shall once again find Osiris.’

It is possible for present-day humanity to bring about this mystic meeting in two ways. The Egyptian said:—‘I have come from Osiris, and to Osiris I shall return, and because of my spiritual origin, Horos lies deep within my being and Horos leads me on, back to Osiris—to his Father—who may alone be found in the world of spirit; for he can in no way enter into man’s physical nature; there he is overcome by the powers of Typhon, those external forces which underlie all destruction and decay.’

There are but two paths by which Osiris may be attained, the one is by way of the Portal of Death; the other passes not through the Gateway of Physical Dissolution, for Osiris may be reached through Initiation and the consecration of life to Sacred Service.

Under the title of Christianity as a Mystical Fact, I have gone more fully into this belief. The Egyptian conception was as follows:—When man has passed through the Portal of Death, and after certain necessary preparatory stages have been completed, he comes to Osiris, and being freed from his earthly envelope, there awakes in him a consciousness of actual relationship with that supreme deity; and he realizes that henceforth he will be greeted as Osiris, for this form of salutation is always bestowed upon those who have experienced death and entered into the World of Spirit.

The other pathway which likewise leads back to Osiris, that is to say, into the Spiritual Realms is, as we have already stated, by way of Initiation and Holy Devotion. Such was regarded by the Egyptians as a method through which knowledge might be gained of all that is supersensible and lies concealed in man’s nature, in other words of Isis, or the Isis-Power. We cannot penetrate into the depths of the soul, and thus reach the Isis-Force within, in virtue of mere earthly wisdom born of the experiences of daily life, but nevertheless, we have a means at hand whereby we may break through to this inner power and descend to the true Ego; there to find that this same Ego is ever enshrouded by all that is material in man’s physical disposition. If, indeed, we can but pierce this dark veil, then do we find ourselves at last in the Ego’s veritable spiritual home.

Hence it was that the old Egyptians said:—‘Thou shalt descend into thine own inner being—but first cometh thy physical quality, with all that it may express of that self that is thine, and through this human disposition must thou force a way. When thou regardest the stones, and the justness of their fashion—when thou considerest the plants, the inner life thereof and wonder of their form and when thou lookest upon the animals about thee—there of a verity, in these three Kingdoms of Nature, beholdest thou the outer world as begotten of spiritual and supersensible powers. But when thou standest before man, look not alone upon the outer form, but seek that which is within, where abideth the soul’s strength—even as the Isis-Forces.’ Therefore, in connection with the rites of initiation, there was included certain instruction as to what things should be observed during such time as the soul might remain incarnated.

The experiences of all who have in truth descended into their innermost being, have been fundamentally the same as those which come about at the time of passing, differing only in the manner of their occurrence. [One might say that if this method of approaching the spirit realms be followed, then]—Man must pass through the Portal of Death while he yet lives. He must learn to know that change from the physical to the superphysical outlook, from the material to the spiritual world—in other words, he must acquire knowledge of that metamorphosis which takes place at the time of actual death. And in order that he may obtain such enlightenment, he that would become initiated must take that way which leads him into the very depths of his being, for thus alone may true understanding and experience be attained. When this method is employed, the first real inner experience is connected with the blood, as formed by Nature, and the blood is the physical agent of the Ego, just as the nervous system forms the material medium in connection with [the three ultimate modes of consciousness], Feeling, Willing and Thinking. We have already referred to this matter in a previous lecture.

According to the ancient Egyptians, he who desires to descend into his being in order to realize profound association with the primary material media, must first pass down into his physical-etheric sheath and enter the etheric confines of his soul; he must learn to become independent of that force in his blood upon which he normally relies; he can then give himself up to the workings and the wonder of the blood’s action.

It is essential that man must first thoroughly understand his higher nature in regard to its physical aspect. To do this he must learn to view his material being as a detached and wholly separate object. Now, man can only recognize and be fully conscious of an object, as a specific thing, when external to it; hence he must learn to bring about this relation in respect to himself, if he would indeed comprehend the actuality of his being. It was for this reason that Initiation was directed towards the development of such powers as enabled the Soul-Forces to undergo certain experiences independently of the physical media, or agents. So that finally the aspirant could look down upon such media objectively, in the same way as man’s spiritual element looks down upon the material body after death.

The primary duty of one who would know the Isis-Mysteries was to acquire knowledge concerning his own blood; after which he underwent an experience that can be best described as—‘Drawing nigh unto the Threshold of Death.’ This was the first step in the Isis-Initiation; and he who would take it must have power to regard his blood and his being externally, and pass into that sheath which is the medium of the Isis-Nature. Further, the neophyte was led before two doors—within some Holy Sanctuary—the one was closed, the other open; and as he stood in that place there came before him visions depicting the most intimate experiences of his very life, and he heard a voice saying:—‘It is thus that thou art, so dost thou appear when thou beholdest thy true self pictured in the soul.’ How remarkable are these teachings the echoes of which are still heard after thousands of years have passed, and how wonderfully they harmonize with man’s present-day beliefs, even though they have since received materialistic interpretation.

According to the ancient Egyptian seer—when man takes the initial step and comes upon the world of his inner form he is there confronted by two doors—‘Through two doors shalt thou enter thy blood and thy innermost being.’ The anatomist would say:—‘Through two inlets situated in the valves on either side of the heart.’ [There are two pairs of valves in the heart, one pair on one side and one on the other; in each case when one of these valves is open, in order to let the blood-stream flow into a part of the system, that which is adjacent is closed (Ed.)]. Hence, he who desires to penetrate beneath his outer form must pass through the open door; for the gateway which is closed merely confines the blood to its proper course. We thus find that the results of anatomical investigation are certainly analogous to those born of clairvoyant vision in olden times; and although not so clear and accurate as are the conclusions of the modern anatomist, nevertheless they portray what the clairvoyant consciousness actually apprehended, when it regarded man’s inner form from an external stand-point.

The next step in the Isis-Initiation was what one might term the proving or profound study of Fire, Air and Water. During this period the Initiate gained complete knowledge of the Sheath-Quality of his Isis-Being, of the properties of Fire and how, in a certain form, it flows in the blood, using it as medium, and becomes fluid. He further received instruction concerning the manner in which Oxygen is infiltrated into the system from the air. All this wisdom descended upon him—the understanding of Fire, Air, Water, the warmth of his breath, and the true nature of the fluidity of his blood.

Thus it came about that the aspirant, in virtue of the knowledge he acquired of his Sheath-Quality through his newly-born comprehension of the elements of Fire, Air and Water, became so purified that when his vision at last penetrated beneath the enfolding envelope, he entered into his veritable Isis-Nature. We might say that at this point, the Initiate felt for the first time that he was in contact with his actual being, and that he was able to realize that he was indeed a spiritual entity, no longer limited by his external relation to humanity, and that he truly beheld the wonder of the spiritual realms.

It is a definite law that we can only look upon the sun in the daytime, for at night it lies concealed by matter; but the powers in the spiritual world are never thus veiled to those who have acquired the true gift of sight, for they are best discerned when the physical eyes are closed to all material things. Symbolically, in the sense of the Isis-Initiation, we would say:—‘He who is purified and initiated into the Isis-Mysteries, may discern that spiritual life and power to which the sun owes its origin, even though there be darkness as at midnight, for, metaphorically speaking, he may at all times behold the great orb of day and come face to face with the spirit beings of the superperceptual world.’

Such was the description of the method, or as one might say, the path leading to the Isis-Forces within, and we are told that it could be traversed by all who, during earthly life, would but earnestly seek the deepest forces of the soul. There were, however, yet higher mysteries, The Mysteries of Osiris, in which it was made clear that through the medium of the Isis-Forces, and in virtue of those supersensible primordial spiritual powers to which man owes his origin, he could exalt himself and thus attain to Osiris. In other words, he was initiated into those methods by which the human soul might be so uplifted, that it could at last enter upon the presence of that supreme deity.

When the Egyptians wished to portray the nature and character of the relation between Isis and Osiris, they had recourse to that special script which is written in the firmament by the passage of the Sun and Moon; while in the case of other spiritual powers, reference was made to the movements and interrelations existing between the various stars. Most prominent among the astronomical groups in such portrayals was the Zodiac, with its condition of comparative immobility, and the planets which move across its constellations. It was in the revelations of the Heavens, as manifested in spiritual symbols, that the old Egyptian found the true method of expressing those deep feelings which touched his soul. He knew that no earthly means were competent to indicate clearly the vital purpose of that urgent call to seek the Isis-Forces, that mankind might, through their aid, draw nearer to Osiris. He felt that in order to describe this purpose fittingly, he must reach out and make use of those bright groups of stars that ever shine in the firmament.

Hence we must regard Hermes, The Great Wise One, who according to Egyptian tradition, lived upon the Earth in the dawn of antiquity—and was endowed with the most profound clairvoyant insight concerning man’s relation to the Universe—as having possessed in high degree the power of apprehending and explaining the true nature of the connection between the constellations and the forces of the Spirit-World; and of interpreting the signs portraying events and happenings, as expressed in the language of the stars, in terms of their mysterious interrelations. Now, if in those olden days it was desired to enlighten the people with regard to the nature of the bond existing between Osiris and Isis, this matter was put forward in the form of an exoteric legend; but in the case of the Initiates the subject was treated more explicitly by means of symbolical reference to the light which emanates from the Sun and is reflected by the Moon, and the remarkable conditions governing its changes during the varying phases of the latter. In these phenomena the Egyptians found a practical and genuine analogy, expressive of the sacred link between the Isis-Force within the human soul and that supreme spiritual figure—Osiris.

From the movements of the heavenly bodies and the nature of their interrelations, there originated what we must regard as the very earliest form of written characters. Little as this fact is as yet recognized, we would nevertheless draw attention to the following statement:—If we consider the consonants of the alphabet, we note that they imitate the signs of the Zodiac, in their comparative repose; while the vowels and consonants are connected in a way which may be likened to that relation which the planets and the forces which move them bear to the constellations of the Zodiac as a whole. Hence it would appear that in the beginning, written characters were brought down to earth from the vault of heaven.

The sentiments which moved the ancient Egyptians when their thoughts turned to Hermes were such as we have described, and they realized that his great illumination came from those spiritual powers which called to him out of the heavens, prompting him with counsel concerning that activity which persisted in the souls of mankind. Ay! and more than that—he was instructed even in the deeds of everyday life, and in those directions in which such sciences were needed as Geometry and Surveying, both of which Pythagoras learnt from the Egyptians, who ascribed all this knowledge to the primordial wisdom of Hermes. One might say that ‘The Old Wise One’ saw in the interrelation of all things spread abroad upon the earth a counterpart of that which exists in the firmament, and finds expression in the mystic writings of the stars. It was Hermes—’The Thrice-Blessed‘—who first gave this Stellar Script to the world, and through its aid, and in the dawn of Egyptian life, he instilled into the minds of the people the elements of the science of mathematics, while he adjured them to look up to the heavens, there to seek guidance even regarding mundane matters.

The very life of the Egyptian nation in that olden time was dependent upon the overflowing of the Nile, and the deposits which it swept down from the mountainous country to the South. We can therefore readily understand how absolutely essential it was that there should be a certain pre-knowledge of the date of the coming of flood periods, so that they might anticipate the accompanying changes in natural conditions thus brought about in the course of any particular year. In those early days the Egyptians still reckoned time according to that Stellar Script which was written in the canopy of heaven. When Sirius, the Dog Star, was visible in the Sign of Cancer, they knew that the Sun would shortly enter that part of the Zodiac from whence its rays would shine down upon the earth and conjure forth, as if by magic, that life brought thereto by the deposits of the overflowing Nile. Hence, they looked upon Sirius as ‘The Watcher‘, who gave them warning of what they might expect; and the movements of Sirius formed part of their celestial clock. They gazed upward with thankful hearts, for the timely warnings of their ‘Watcher‘ enabled them to cultivate and to tend their land in such manner that it might best bring forth all things necessary to external life.

When questions of import arose such as the above, these old Egyptian peoples sought enlightenment and guidance from those writings which they saw spread across the firmament; the while they looked back into that dim grey past, when first they learnt that the passage of the stars was in truth an expression as of movements among the parts of some mighty cosmic clock. In Thoth, or Hermes, they recognized that Great Spirit who, according to their ancient traditions, set down the very earliest chronicles concerning cosmic wisdom. From that inspiration which came to him through the wondrous Stellar Script, Hermes conceived the forms underlying the physical alphabet, and through their aid taught mankind the principles of Agriculture, Geometry and Surveying; indeed, he instructed them in all things needful for the conduct of physical life. Now, physical life is nought but the embodiment of that spiritual life so deeply interwoven throughout the cosmos—and it was from the cosmos that the spirit of wisdom descended upon Hermes. It was evident to the Egyptians of that period to which we refer, that the influence of The Great Wise One was still active throughout their civilization, and they felt that this mystic bond was both profound and intimate in character.

The method adopted by the old Egyptians for the purpose of time calculations, and which continued in use for many centuries, was most convenient in operation and lent itself readily to all simple computations of this nature. They regarded the year as made up of exactly 365 days, which they divided into 12 months each of 30 days, thus leaving 5 days over, which were separately included. But modern Astronomy tells us that if this method be employed, then one quarter day every year is not taken into account [the actual difference is 6 hours, 9 min., 9 sec.]. Therefore, the Egyptian year came to an end one quarter day too soon. This difference gradually spread backward through the months until a coincidence was reached at the beginning of a certain year; and such coincidence took place every four times 365 years. Hence, after the lapse of each 1,460 years, the terrestrial time estimate would be for a moment in agreement with astronomical conditions, because at that particular moment the sum of the annual differences would be equivalent to one whole year.

Let us now suppose that at a certain time in 1322 B.C. an Egyptian looked up into the heavens, there, at that moment any visible constellation would occupy a definite position in the firmament [which position could be used as a basis of computation]. If we calculate backwards over a period of three times 1,460 years from 1322 B.C., we come to the year 5702 B.C., and it was some time prior to this date to which the Egyptians ascribed the dawn of that primordial Holy Wisdom which came to them in the beginning. They said:—‘In bygone times man’s power of clairvoyance was truly at its highest, but with the passing of each great Sun-Period‘ [of 1,46o years, which brought about the balance of terrestrial reckoning] ‘the divine gift of “clear seeing” gradually faded, until in this fourth stage in which we now live it is weak and ever-failing. Our civilization reaches far into the remoteness of antiquity, where the voice of tradition is all but stilled. In thought we hark back beyond three long Cosmic Periods, to that glorious and distant past when our greatest teacher, his disciples, and his successors, imparted to us the elements of the ancient wisdom which now finds expression—albeit in strangely altered form—in the character of our script, our Mathematics, Geometry, Surveying, our general conduct of life, and also in our study of the heavens. We regard the cosmic adjustment of our human computation, with its convenient factors of twelve times 30 days with five supplementary thereto, as a sign that we are ever subject to correction by the divine powers of the Spirit-World, because through error of thought and reason we have turned away from Osiris and from Isis. We cannot with exactitude measure the year’s length, but when our eyes are raised on high we can gaze into that hidden world from whence those spirit powers that ever guide the courses of the stars, remedy our faults and bring harmony where man has failed to find the truth.’

From the above it is clear that the old Egyptians realized the feebleness of man’s powers of intellect and understanding, so that, even in the case of their Chronology, they sought the aid of those higher spiritual forces and beings beyond the veil. Beings who correct, watch over, and protect mankind during the activities and experiences of earth life, bringing to bear upon these problems the mystic laws of the Great Cosmos. Hermes, or Thoth, was held in greatest veneration as One inspired by the ever vigilant heavenly powers, and in the souls of these ancient peoples this outstanding personality was looked upon, not merely as a great teacher, but as a being who was indeed exalted, and whom they regarded with the most profound feelings of reverence and thankfulness, so that they cried out:—‘All that I have cometh from Thee. Thou went on High in the dim grey dawn of antiquity and Thou hast sent down, by those who were the carriers of Thy traditions, all that flows throughout external civilization, and which is of greatest human service.’ Hence, with reference to the actual Creator of all supersensible forces, and those who watch over them, as well as Osiris and Hermes, or Thoth, the Egyptians felt in their souls not merely that they were imbued with knowledge begotten of wisdom, but they experienced a sentiment in deepest moral sense, of greatest veneration and gratitude.

The graphic descriptions of the past tell us that the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians was permeated throughout with a certain religious quality and mood, particularly noticeable in olden times, but by degrees these characteristics became less and less marked. In those days the people felt all knowledge to be closely associated with holiness, all wisdom with piety and all science with religion. As this attitude waned it gradually decreased in purity of form and expression. A similar change has taken place throughout the evolution of mankind among all those various civilizations whose mission has been to alter the trend of spiritual thought, and lead it in some wholly new direction. When each nation had reached the pinnacle of achievement, and its task was ended, there followed a period of decadence.

The greater part of our knowledge concerning ancient Egyptian culture is connected with an epoch of this nature, and the significance of all that lies beyond is merely a matter of conjecture and supposition. For instance, what is the true meaning of that extraordinary, and to us grotesque, worship of animals in that by-gone age, and of the curious feeling of awe we experience when our thoughts dwell upon the pyramids? The Egyptians themselves tell us that there was an era during which not only mankind, but also beings from the higher spiritual realms descended upon the earth. This was in the beginning before the knowledge and wisdom that was then vouchsafed had truly developed and become active.

If we would indeed know man’s innermost nature, we must not alone regard the outer form, but penetrate to the true self within. All external qualities with which we come in contact are but stages of manifestation which have remained ‘in situ‘, as one might say, and are seen as if representing in powerful, albeit diminutive imagery, ancient principles which are dominant in the three kingdoms of nature. Consider the world of minerals and of rocks—here we find those same relations of form which man has used in the architecture of the pyramids; while the inner forces of plant-life are expressed in the beauty of the Lotus-Flower; and lastly, distributed along that path which culminates in man himself, we find in the brute creation existences which have not attained to the higher level of humanity; they are, as it were, a crystallization of divine forces that have been embodied and scattered abroad in separate and distinct animal shapes.

We can well imagine that the feelings of the old Egyptians gave rise to thoughts of the above nature, when they recognized in animal life a manifestation of the unaltered primordial forces of the gods. For they looked back into the grey past when all earthly things were begotten of divine supersensible powers, and developed under their guidance. From this concept they conjectured that among the creations in Nature’s three kingdoms certain of these higher primal forces, which had lived on unchanged over a long period, had ultimately undergone some intimate modification which had raised them to that higher standard exhibited in the human form. When considering these ancient peoples we must ever have regard for their feelings, perceptions and the necessities of their life. It is from these factors that we can best realize how close was the moral bond between their wisdom and the soul, so that the latter might not swerve from the path of rectitude and morality.

The Egyptians believed, that because of the manner in which the Spirit-World was created and fashioned by the divine supersensible powers, there must be some definite moral relation which extends to the creatures of the animal kingdom. The grotesque and singular modes in which this concept ultimately found expression came about, only, after the final decline of the nation had commenced.

From the study of the later periods of Egyptian culture, it is clear that human frailty and imperfection were unknown in primordial times, for we learn from this source that in the early dawn of Egyptian life civilization was of a high standard, and it was then that man knew and experienced the most intimate divine spiritual revelations. We must not fall into that error, so common in our days, of assuming that all forms of human culture had their inception under the most simple and primitive conditions. In reality it was only after the impulse imparted by those first glorious blessings had waned, and a period of decline set in, that man’s life became crude and uncultured.

Hence, we should not look upon the barbaric tribes merely as peoples in whom intellection is expressed in its most elementary form, but, on the contrary, we must consider the aboriginal races as representative of civilizations which have fallen away from some exalted primordial state. This assertion is not at all to the liking of that branch of science which would have us believe that all culture had its inception under the most elementary conditions, such as those which are still found among the savages of our time. Nevertheless, Spiritual Science affirms, in virtue of knowledge obtained through the medium of its special methods, that the primitive states of mankind are in truth manifestations of long perished civilizations, and that all human life had its inception under cultural conditions directly inspired by divine beings—mentors from the Spirit-World—who descended upon the earth in the dim dawn of antiquity, and over whose deeds is cast a veil impenetrable to external history.

Man has long believed that if we trace life’s course backward through the ages we should in the end arrive at childish conditions, similar to those found among barbaric peoples. It was certainly not expected that in so doing we would find ourselves confronted with noble and exalted concepts and theories. Now, Spiritual Science definitely asserts that if we peer into the past, then, at the beginning of human life we shall not find rudimentary cultural states, but lofty and glorious civilizations, which at some later period fell away from their first high spiritual standard. At this point we might well ask:—‘Does this asservation, as advanced by Spiritual Science, bring it into conflict with the results of modern scientific research—the logical methods of which delve deeply and without prejudice, into all matters that come within the scope of its investigations?‘ Let us see how external science itself replies to this question.

With this object I will give a literal quotation from a recent work by Alfred Jeremias [Licentiate Doctor and Lecturer at the University of Leipzig], entitled The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East.¹ From the text we learn that external science while engaged in the gradual unfoldment of ancient history, has reached back into the remote past, and there found traces of a highly spiritual primeval civilization, whose culture was imbued with the most momentous and intellectual conceptions. It is further emphasized that those cultural states, which we are so accustomed to term barbaric, should in reality be regarded as typical of primordial civilizations that have fallen away from some higher level. The actual quotation to which I have referred is as follows:—²

‘The earliest records, as well as the whole ancient civilized life about the Euphrates valley, indicate the existence of a scientific and at the same time religious theoretical conception, which was not merely confined to the occult doctrines of the temple; but in accordance with its precepts, state organizations were regulated and conducted, justice declared and property administered and protected. The more ancient the period to which we can look back, the more absolute does the control exercised by this concept appear. It was only after the downfall of the primal Euphratean civilization that the influence of other powers began to make itself felt.’

From the above excerpt it is clear, that external science has truly made a beginning toward the opening up of new paths that tend to bring harmony and agreement into those matters [so often regarded as controversial] which it is the province of Spiritual Science to bring forward and impress upon our present civilization. In a previous lecture we have drawn attention to a similar progress in connection with the science of Geology. If in the future we continue to advance in like fashion, we shall gradually be compelled to recede ever further and further from that dull and lifeless conception which would have us regard all primordial civilization as primitive and childish in its nature. Then, indeed, shall we be led back to those great personalities of the remote past, who seem to us the more transcendent, because it was their divinely inspired mission to endow a yet clairvoyant people with those priceless blessings which are evident throughout all cultural activity in which we now play our part. Such noble spirits in human form as Zarathustra and Hermes at once claim and rivet our attention. They appear to us so exalted and so glorious, because it was THEY who in the dim dawn of human life gave to mankind those first most potent and uplifting impulses. The old Egyptian sage had this sublime concept in mind when he spoke to Solon concerning ‘doctrines grey with age‘. (Vide p. 86.)

Thus do we honour and revere Hermes, even as we venerate the great Zarathustra. To us he shines forth as one of those grand outstanding individualities—veritable leaders of mankind—the very thought of whom engenders a feeling of enhanced power within, and begets the indubitable conviction through which we know that the Spirit is not merely abroad in the world, but weaves beneath all earthly deeds, and is ever active throughout the evolution of humanity. Then are our lives strengthened, a fuller confidence is in our every action, hopes are assured and destiny stands out the more clearly before us. It is at such times that we exclaim:—‘Those yet to be born will of a surety lift up their hearts to the glorious spirit mentors who were in the beginning, and will seek the verity of their being in the gifts which are of the inner forces of the soul. They shall acknowledge and discern in the ever recurrent impulses which come as an upward urge to mankind the workings of a divine power, and the eternal manifestations of those Great Ones from the Spirit-World.’

ADDENDUM

The above lecture was delivered in Berlin on the 16th of February, 1911. In the interim, external science has probed further into the secrets of that highly advanced primal civilized life about the valley of the Euphrates, to which reference has been made on page 123. The following brief outline will indicate some of the results of Archæological research carried out in Mesopotamia at the site of the olden city known as ‘Ur of the Chaldees‘. At this place, most important discoveries have been made in connection with ancient Euphratean civilization, as the outcome of a Joint Expedition arranged by the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in 1922, under the direction of C. Leonard Woolley, M.A., Litt. D. In a lecture given before ‘The Royal Society of Arts’ on the 8th of November, 1933, and which duly appeared in their Journal, Dr. Woolley said: ‘Certainly the discoveries that we made at Ur in the last ten years have tended to set scientists by the ears rather than satisfying them with the new information obtained ... few surprises in recent years have been so great as that occasioned by the excavation of the great cemetery lying beneath the ruins of Ur.’

In the tombs of Kings, in vaulted chambers of rubble masonry, dating as far back as 3500 B.C. were found treasures of gold, silver, mosaic, etc., wrought by the Sumerian workers and of a degree of technical excellence unsurpassed by the craftsmen of to-day. In one case, when referring to an especially fine specimen of polychrome art which had been discovered, and is now known as ‘The Ram Caught in a Thicket‘, Dr. Woolley drew attention to the fact, that this particular polychrome sculpture, while characteristic of the work of the ancients in 3400 B.. in the Near East, was actually suggestive of that of some rather late Italian Renaissance artist. As the investigations proceeded it became abundantly clear, that the ancient people who had so skilfully fashioned the strange and wonderful treasures brought to light, ‘were not tyros, they must have had behind them long traditions, long apprenticeship‘.

With the view of obtaining an insight into the history of this by-gone and highly developed civilization, excavations were commenced at a point which was actually the ground level of 3200 B.C., where through a depth of over sixty feet relics of the dim past were unearthed in clearly marked strata. Traces of eight superimposed cities were revealed, and deep down beneath the remains of an ancient pottery factory, so Dr. Woolley tells us, the excavators suddenly came upon a mass, eleven feet thick, of water-laid sand and clay, perfectly uniform and clean, which was undoubtedly the silt thrown up by “The Flood”.—‘We can,’ said Dr. Woolley, ‘actually connect it with the flood which we call Noah’s Flood‘. The verge of this deluge was found to be up ‘against the flank of the mound on which stood the earliest and most primitive city of Ur ‘. Below this deposit were ‘the remains of antediluvian houses ... the lowest human buildings rested upon black organic soil ... and that in turn went down below sea-level‘.

The excavations proved that the ancient Sumerian architects were familiar with concrete at the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C., and possibly earlier. They were acquainted with every basic form of modern architecture, and Dr. Woolley further states that there is no doubt that, ‘the arch, the vault, the apse, and the dome, used in Europe for the first time in the Roman period’, specimens of which were found among the ruins, ‘are a direct inheritance from the Sumerian peoples of the fourth millennium B.C. at least, and they may well go hack to a date still more remote’. (The italics are ours.) Further, it has been shown that continuity in Sumerian civilization undoubtedly extended from the fifth millennium B.C., up to the sixth century B.C. This fact has come to light as a result of discoveries made by digging beneath the foundations of the massive staged tower, known as the Ziggurat of Ur, the main religious building of the city; and by tracing the dates and character of cylinder seals of different periods, carried by these by-gone peoples for the purpose of signing written documents.

Toward the close of his most interesting lecture, Dr. Woolley stated that imports into Egypt before the First Dynasty, seemed to indicate that the Sumerians imparted to the then barbarous people of that country an impulse, which enabled them to develop their remarkable civilization. He further said: ‘Civilized as the Babylonians were, they made no new discoveries at all; they hardly advanced beyond what their predecessors had known and they preserved civilization rather than invented it. We know, too, that the Sumerians sent out the ancestors of the Hebrews with all the traditions of law, civilization, religion and art, which they had themselves enjoyed in their home country and which the Hebrews never entirely forgot, but by which they were profoundly influenced.’

Thus has this Joint Archæological Expedition, under the able leadership of Dr. Woolley, thrown the light of modern external science upon one of those glorious spiritual civilizations of the dim grey past, so often referred to by Rudolf Steiner, which endured just so long as its people opened their hearts to the guidance of the Spirit, but fell away and perished when they left the true path, and gave themselves up to material things. [Ed.]

Notes for this lecture:

1. Manual of Biblical Archaeology, 2 Vols. Translated from the second German Edition, by C. L. Beaumont. Edited by the Rev. Canon C. H. W. Johns, Litt.D. Published by Williams and Morgate, 1911.

2. Der Einfluss Babyloniens auf das Verständnis des Alten Testamentes, von Alfred Jeremias. ‘Die ältesten Urkunden sowie das gesamte euphratensische Kulturleben setzen eine wissenschaftliche und zugleich religiöse Theorie voraus, die nicht etwa nur in den Geheimlehren der Tempel ihr Dasein fristet, sondern nach der die staatlichen Organisationen geregelt sind, nach der Recht gesprochen, das Eigentum verwaltet und geschützt wird. Je höher das Altertum ist, in das wir blacken können, um so Ausschliesslicher herrscht die Theorie; erst mit dem Verfall der alten euphratensischen Kultur kommen andere Mächte zur Geltung.’