The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Evolution. The Cosmic View of the Organs and their Coarsening in Modern Times.

At various points in this cycle of lectures we have tried to present the facts of post-Atlantean evolution, and we have indicated that in our time there is a kind of repetition or resurrection of the experiences that mankind went through during the Egypto-Chaldean culture. It has been stated that the Indian period will repeat itself in the seventh period, the Persian in the sixth, the Egyptian in our time, and that the fourth, the Greco-Latin, stands by itself, so to say. Now, connecting the Egyptian time and our own, we shall try to indicate how a certain recrudescence of outer and inner experiences is to be seen when we bring our time into connection with the Egyptian.

We have seen that in the spiritual worlds there exist mysterious forces, to which there correspond certain other forces in the physical world which effectuate the appearance of these repetitions. Thus do these resurrections of outer and inner experiences originate. In the middle between these stands the Greco-Latin period, during which the Christ appeared upon the earth and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. It was also pointed out that not only the external evolutionary relationships on the physical plane had changed, but that also the relationships in the spiritual world had become different. I have described how the soul was in the Egyptian time, when it looked upon the gigantic pyramids, how different it was when it reincarnated in the Greco-Latin period, and how different it is in our time. We have seen that not only does this occur, but that also for the period between death and a new birth, in kamaloka and Devachan, there takes place a sort of progress or transformation, so that the soul does not experience the same thing when it enters into kamaloka or Devachan from an Egyptian, a Greek, or a modern body. Externally the world of the physical plane alters, but progress also occurs in the spiritual world so that the soul always experiences something different there.

It is primarily from the standpoint of this “beyond” that today we shall consider the mighty event of the Christ's appearance on our earth. We shall approach in a much deeper way the question, What significance has the advent of the Christ on our earth? What significance has the Christ's appearance for the dead souls, for the life on the other side, the spiritual side, of existence? For this purpose we must explore many different things that affected souls in the Egyptian period both within and beyond the physical plane.

From our studies of the earlier great epochs of earth evolution we can derive that the Egypto-Chaldean period furnishes a mirroring in knowledge and experience of what happened in the Lemurian time, of what happened on the earth during and after the departure of the moon. What men experienced then, they experienced again as a memory in what the Egyptian initiates gave them. The Egyptian initiate himself experienced during his initiation events that man otherwise experiences only when he passes through the portal of death. To be sure, the Egyptian initiate experienced this in a different way than does the ordinary person who dies. He experienced it differently and in a much fuller way. It will be well for us now, as a basis for these considerations, to describe the essence of Egyptian initiation in a few words. This initiation is essentially different from that of the time after Christ, for through his advent initiation was fundamentally altered.

We have seen that men had to descend further and further into the material world, gaining increasing interest in the physical world. In the same proportion, however, the experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth became more pale and shadowy. The livelier man's consciousness became in the physical world, the more he enjoyed being there, the, more he discovered the laws of the physical plane, the dimmer his consciousness in the spiritual world became. The consciousness in the spiritual world reached its low point in the Greco-Latin time. But even before man had fully descended into these depths of matter, it had become impossible for him, within the physical body, to experience completely what one must experience if, during the period between birth and death, one seeks to gain insight into the spiritual world.

The initiation event may be briefly described, and it is the same for initiations before and after Christ, although the conclusion is different. Initiation is nothing other than man's gaining the capacity of developing organs of vision in his higher bodies. Today man sees darkness when it is night; he is in the dark. This is because man has no organs of perception in his astral body. As the eyes and ears have formed themselves into physical organs of perception, so super-sensible organs must be developed out of the higher members and assimilated into them. This occurs through certain exercises of concentration and meditation being given to the pupil. These exercises are performed after the pupil has first surveyed the knowledge of the spiritual worlds that can be given by the initiates. It has always been the case that the pupils had to learn what we today would call elementary theosophy. Much more strongly than today it was required that the pupils become acquainted with the truth in a regular progression. When there was enough theoretical preparation, and when the pupils were sufficiently mature, the exercises were given to them. These exercises have a definite purpose.

When in his daily life man lets the impressions of the senses work upon him, these impressions bring certain fruits for the ordinary life on the physical plane. These impressions pass over into the astral body, which in turn transmits them to the ego. But these impressions are such that man cannot hold them fast when, with his astral body and ego, he slips out of his physical and etheric bodies during the night. What man receives in this way from the physical plane does not penetrate into him so strongly that he can retain it as a permanent impression. But when a person performs the exercises of meditation and concentration, these are so adjusted, in accordance with thousands of years of experience, that the astral body no longer loses the impressions, but retains them when it slips out of the physical body in the night. Through the exercises the astral body receives plastic impressions, which shape and member it as the physical organs have been membered. Thus the astral body is worked on for certain periods through these exercises. Thereby the super-sensible organs of vision are imprinted on the astral body. It would be a long time, however, before man could use his organs of vision if they were imprinted only into his astral body. Something further must take place so that the astral body, when it returns into the etheric body, may stamp upon that body, like the impression of a seal, what has taken shape within itself. Only when what has taken shape in the astral body imprints itself upon the etheric body, only then does the illumination take place that makes it possible for the person to see the spiritual world as he sees the physical world today.

Here we can begin to grasp what kind of an impulse we have received through the appearance of Christ on earth. In the old initiations the astral body had the strength to work upon the etheric body only when the etheric body had been lifted out of the physical body. This was because at that time the etheric body, had it remained connected with the physical body, would have exerted so much resistance that it could not have received the imprint of what the astral body had formed within itself. In the ancient initiations, therefore, for a period of three and a half days, the candidate was put into a deathlike condition in which the physical body was deserted by the etheric body while this latter, freed from the physical, united itself with the astral body. The astral then stamped into the etheric all that had been built into the astral through the exercises. When the Hierophant again awakened the candidate, the latter was illuminated. He knew what took place in the spiritual world, for he had made a remarkable journey during the three and a half days. He had been led through the fields of the spiritual world. He had seen what went on there, and he knew from direct experience what another person could learn only through revelation. A person thus initiated could, out of his own experiences, give knowledge of the beings who were in the spiritual world, beyond the physical plane.

When man had not yet descended so far into the physical plane, he could learn what was experienced in the spiritual world. There the candidate became acquainted with the true form of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The initiate saw the contents of the myths during this journey into the spiritual world. He could then transmit this to other persons when he had dressed it as myth or saga. He saw all this; he saw in what a special way the Osiris influences had shaped themselves when the moon had withdrawn from the earth; he saw how Horus issued from Isis and Osiris; he saw the four human types, the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the true man. He also saw what happened to man between death and a new birth. The Sphinx appeared to him as a real form; he experienced it. He could say, “Oh, I have seen the Sphinx, man as he was when he still had an animal-like form, and his etheric body—similar to the human—only projected out of this animal-like form!” The Sphinx was a real experience for the initiate. He even heard the question of the Sphinx with its enigmatic content. He saw how the human body prepared itself out of the animality, at a time when the head was only an etheric form, the ether-head of the Sphinx. This was truth for the initiate, as were also the older forms of the gods, who had, so to speak, taken a different course of evolution.

It has recently been said that certain beings pursued a different path in evolution. The individuality of Wotan, for example, takes such a different course. Up to a certain stage it travels together with man, but then it does not descend so deeply. Man descends further into matter and only later will he again join these beings, who are completing their evolution in the earth-time. We have seen that a time came when Wotan no longer walked on our earth. Such beings, however, were not like Osiris and Isis. These latter were beings who had branched off still earlier, who completed their evolution on a higher level in full invisibility. These forms went through their special experiences.

Let us look back into the Lemurian period. At that time the etheric was not yet manlike in its form. In his etheric body man was still similar to the animals, and the gods who descended then had to accommodate themselves to the same animal forms in which man lived on the earth. If a being wishes to enter into a certain plane, it must fulfill the conditions of that plane. This is also the case here. The divine beings who were connected with the earth during the departure of the sun and moon, who were on the earth, had to take on a form that was possible at that time, an animal-like form. And since the Egyptian religious views present in a certain way a recapitulation of the Lemurian time, the Egyptian initiate looked upon the gods, Osiris and Isis for example, as having animal-like forms. He still saw the higher gods with animal heads. Therefore from an occult view it was quite correct when such forms were represented with the head of a hawk or a ram in accordance with what the initiates knew. The gods were portrayed in the forms they had when they walked the earth. The outer images could only resemble what the initiate saw, but they were faithfully reproduced. The various divine beings changed a good deal. The forms in Lemuria were different from those in Atlantis. In those times beings went through much more rapid changes than they do now. In addition, these forms were still filled with spirit. When one looks back on them one sees them in their three bodies, but illuminated and rayed through by the astral and etheric light. This was accurately portrayed in the pictures. Modern men may laugh over the forms that were represented, but they do not know how realistic they were.¹

There was one being who performed special services in that period of human evolution when, through the cosmic-tellurian powers, the combining intellect was being organized in man. At that time the physical brain was prepared in such a way that man was able to develop intelligence later. This capacity was implanted in man and reckoned as one of the deeds of the god Manu. What was worked into man as intelligence was connected with this. If today we examine a person in whom a well-formed ability for judging and combining is present, if we examine him clairvoyantly, we find a strong expression and reflection of this fact in a green glittering and shining of the astral body, of the astral aura. The capacity for combining shows itself in green colors in the aura, especially in those who have keen mathematical understanding. The ancient Egyptian initiates saw the god who implanted the faculty of intelligence in men, and in portraying him they painted him green² because they saw the green shimmering of his luminous astral and etheric form. Today this is still the color that glitters in the aura when the person's intelligence is stirred. Much time could be devoted to these connections if people really wanted to study this wonderful realism of the forms of the Egyptian gods. These representations of the divine forms, through the fact that they were so realistic and not at all arbitrary, had magical power; and one who could see more deeply would perceive that many mysteries were present in the coloring of these ancient forms. Here one can, see deep into the workings of human evolution.

We have seen how what the initiates saw was retained in the Sphinx. Of course, this was not retained in a photographic way, yet it was realistic. But the forms were always changing. The form of the Sphinx gives an image of how man once looked. His present form has been shaped by man himself. We know that through evolution on the earth various animal forms have been split off. What is an animal form? It is a form that has remained static, while man proceeded further in evolution. In these forms we see arrested stages of evolution, to the extent that these forms have become physical. In the spiritual something else has taken place. What man is spiritually has nothing to do with his physical forebears. Only the physical is connected with that. Man does not descend from the animals; the animal forms have remained unchanged. In man, however, the shape has been transformed to a certain level. The animals are previous physical human forms fallen into decadence. The situation is different in another realm of evolution. Not only have the physical forms of the animals remained unchanged, but also the rudiments of the etheric and astral forms as well. Just as the lion, at the time when it split off, looked quite different than now, so certain soul-spiritual forms degenerate in the course of time when they remain at a particular stage. It is a law of the spiritual world that anything that stands still on the same level of spirit or soul becomes more and more decadent.

If, for example, the Sphinx stands still, it degenerates and receives a form that is like a caricature of what it originally was. The Sphinx has been preserved in this way on the astral plane up to our own time. To those who, as initiates or in some other lawful manner, penetrate into the higher worlds, these decadent forms have little interest, being only decayed vagabonds in the spiritual world. But when, in exceptional cases, persons equipped with inferior clairvoyant gifts are led into the astral world, such decadent forms approach them. The true Sphinx approached Oedipus, but it has not died even yet. Up to today it has not died; it only approaches man in another form. When persons who have remained standing at a certain stage of evolution, among the peasants perhaps, rest in the fields at midday in the hot glow of the summer sun, and fall asleep, they may have what could be called a latent sun-stroke. Through such an impact on the physical body, the astral and etheric are loosened from a part of the physical. Then such persons are translated to the astral plane and they see this last decadent offspring of the Sphinx. This apparition is called by different names. In certain regions it is called the midday woman. Many people in the country will recount that they have met the midday woman. She appears in many regions under many different names. She is a descendent of the ancient Sphinx, and as the ancient Sphinx put questions to the men who experienced her, so this midday woman also asks questions. You may hear it told how the midday woman asks endless questions of the men whom she meets. This torment by questions is a relic of the old Sphinx. The midday woman has grown out of the ancient Sphinx. This indicates how evolution proceeds beyond the physical world, how whole tribes of spiritual beings decline until at last they are mere shadows of what they were originally. Here we see another characteristic of the way in which things are connected in evolution. We have mentioned this so it may be seen how manifold evolution is.

Now, to understand everything correctly, we must give some thought to the fact that in the course of time man has organized the fourth member, the ego, into what he brought with him at the beginning of earth evolution as his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. I have shown how this ego permeates the astral body, claims it for itself so that it dominates it as higher spiritual beings formerly dominated it. It is a deed of the higher beings that this ego was implanted in the astral body. If evolution had proceeded further in accordance with the views of certain higher beings, it would have been a different evolution from what has actually taken place. However, certain beings remained unchanged. They had not become capable of collaborating in implanting the ego in the astral body.

When man appeared on the earth he consisted of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, all of which he shaped further. Now he was endowed with egohood by certain sublime beings who had their dwellings mainly on the sun and moon. These beings collaborated, so to speak, on the ego. But there were certain other beings who, during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, had not raised themselves so far that they could take part in this organizing of the ego. They could do only what they had learned on the moon. They had to limit themselves to working on the astral body, hence there was implanted in man's astral body something that did not belong to his noblest qualities, did not come from the higher sublime beings but from the retarded intruders who had remained behind. Had these beings done this on the moon, it would have been something lofty. But through the fact that they did this on earth as stragglers, they worked into the astral body something that placed it lower than it would have been otherwise. It became endowed with instincts and passions, and with egoism. We must heed this fact that man was influenced from two sides, that he received impacts in his astral body through which the latter became debased.

Such a thing does not influence the astral body alone. Man is so constituted that the astral body transmits such an influence to the etheric body, and this again to the physical body. The astral body is active in all parts, hence these spirits work on the etheric and physical through the astral body. Had these spiritual beings not been able to exercise such an influence, something would not have appeared in man at that time. This is an enhanced selfhood in man, an increased ego-feeling. What this caused in the etheric body was all that appeared as darkening of judgment, as the possibility of error. All that the astral body accomplished in the physical body is the basis of what appeared as illness. That is the spiritual cause of illnesses in man; among animals, becoming ill is something different. We see how illness has been transplanted into man; illness is connected with the causes we have indicated here. And since the physical and etheric bodies are connected with the facts of heredity, so the principle of illness proceeds through the hereditary line. Let us again emphasize, however, that we must distinguish between inner illnesses and external injuries. If a man is run over, that is something entirely different. Also, certain internal illnesses can be connected with external causes; for example, if one eats something that upsets the stomach, that is something external.

Before the above-mentioned beings gained influence over man in the course of evolution, he was so organized that he reacted far more powerfully than today toward evil pressing upon him from without. But in proportion to the influence that they gained over him, he lost the instincts he had possessed for what was not right. Formerly, man's whole organization was such that he had fine instincts as to what was not right for him. Substances that are taken into the stomach today and there cause illness were then rejected simply through instinct. Gazing backward in time we come to periods when man stood in a delicate relationship to the forces of his environment, reacting sensitively to the forces in his surroundings. In this respect man grew ever less sure, less capable of rejecting what was not serviceable to him.

This is connected with something else. As man grew more inward, something occurred in the world outside; what we know as the three other kingdoms of nature arose. The three kingdoms around us arose gradually. At first, only man was present. Then the animal kingdom was added; then the plant kingdom, and finally the mineral kingdom. If we were to look back on the primeval earth when the sun was still united with it, we would find a human being in and out of whom all the substances of the physical world moved. Man still lived in the womb of the gods: everything still agreed with him, so to say. Then he had to leave behind what was precipitated as the animal kingdom. Had he carried this with him, he would not have been able to develop further. He had to expel the animal kingdom, and later the plant kingdom. What exists outside in the animals and plants is nothing other than temperaments, passions, certain traits of men that they had to expel. And when man formed his bones he expelled the mineral world. After a certain length of time, man could look upon his environment and say, “Formerly I could endure you; formerly you went in and out of me as air now does. When I still lived in the water-earth I could endure you; I digested you. Now you are outside, and I can no longer endure you, no longer digest you.” As man became enclosed in his skin, as he became a self-contained separate being, he saw, in the same proportion, these kingdoms around him.

If these beings had not worked on man, something else would not have happened. As long as man is healthy, he will stand in a normal relationship to the outer world. When he has disturbed forces within him, these must be driven back by the powers that man has. If his powers are too weak for this, if he cannot provide the normal resistance, then something must be infused into him from outside. Something must be implanted into him to furnish the resistance that he still had at the time the forces from outside breathed in and out of him. It may be necessary, when a person is ill, that the forces of a metal, for example, should be injected into him. It is because man was in connection with metals earlier, in connection with plant juices and similar things, that we are justified in applying them as medicaments.

When the Egyptian initiates could look back over the whole course of world evolution, they knew precisely how the individual organs of the human body corresponded with the substances of the external world. They knew which plants and which metals had to be administered to the patient. A great treasure of occult wisdom in the domain of medicine will be raised to light one day, wisdom that mankind formerly possessed. Not only are many things bungled in medicine today, but often special healing powers are ascribed to this or that in a one-sided way. The true occultist will never be one-sided. How often must we reject efforts that would make a compromise with the science of the spirit! The latter cannot support a one-sided method: on the contrary, it seeks to establish diversified research. It is one-sided to say, “Away with all poisons!” People who say this do not know the true healing forces. Naturally many stupid things are done today, for the professionals in most cases cannot grasp all the relationships, and a certain tyranny in medical science excludes what can proceed from occultism. If there were no campaigns against the oldest methods of medicine, against the injection of metals, there could be a reform. With modern experimentation nothing is discovered that can hold its own against the traditional remedies, which only a lay ignorance can oppose as strongly as is often done. The ancient Egyptian initiates excelled in these secrets. They had an insight into the real relationships of evolution, and if today certain physicians speak in a condescending way of Egyptian medicine, you can soon tell from their tone that they know nothing about it. Here we touch upon something in the Egyptian initiation that should be known.

It was such things as these that went over into the folk-consciousness. Now we must reflect that the same souls that are in our bodies today were also incarnated in that ancient time. Let us remember that these souls saw all the images that the initiates made of what they knew through vision in the spiritual world. We know that what a soul takes into itself from incarnation to incarnation, ever and again bears fruits in one or another way. Even though man cannot remember it, it is still true that what lives in the soul today lives in it because it was deposited there earlier. The soul is formed both within and beyond the physical life. When it was between birth and death, when it was between death and a new birth, Egyptian ideas were influential and modern ideas have proceeded from these. Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world. He remembers that it was said to him, “Our ancestors were animal forms.” But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism. The figures of the gods appear in materialistic form. Thus there is an intimate spiritual connection between the old and the new, between the third and the fifth cultural periods.

Now it is not the whole destiny of our time that man should see in material form what previously he saw in the spiritual. That would have been our fate had not the Christ-impulse entered into human evolution in the meantime. This was not significant only for life on the physical plane. Today we shall see what significance the events of Palestine had for the other side of life, where the souls of the Egyptians sojourned after death. Here on the physical plane occurred the things we have already discussed. But the three years of Christ's activity, like the event of Golgotha and the baptism in Jordan, were of significance equally to the souls incarnated on earth and to those who were in the condition between death and a new birth.

Let us recall the fact that the external physical expression for the ego is the blood. What works physically in the forces of the blood is the physical expression of the ego. In the course of evolution too strong a measure of egoism made its appearance, which means that the egohood impressed the blood too powerfully. This “surplus” of egoism had to be expelled again if spirituality was to be restored to mankind. On Golgotha the impulse was given for this expulsion of egoism. In the same moment when the Redeemer's blood flowed on Golgotha, still other events were taking place in the spiritual world. The Redeemer's blood flowed out in the material world, while the superfluity of egoism passed over into the spiritual world. The superfluous egoism had to vanish from the world, and the impulse for this was given on Golgotha. In place of egoism, universal human love entered into mankind.

But what was this event of Golgotha? What was this event of a three-and-a-half-day death on the physical plane? It was the enactment on the physical plane of what also had been experienced in spiritual development by one who was initiated. He was dead for three and a half days. One who had gone through this symbolical death could say to mankind, “There is a conquering of death. There is something eternal in the world.” Death was conquered by the initiates, and they felt themselves to be victors over death. The event of Golgotha signifies that what had often taken place in the mysteries of ancient times became, for once, an historical event: the conquering of death through the spirit. This was taken out into the world on the physical plane. If we let this work upon our souls, we sense what happened with the Mystery of Golgotha as something new, but also as an image of the ancient initiation. We feel this unique event entering into the world historically.

What was the consequence of this? What could the initiate do? Out of his own experiences he could say to his fellow men, “I know there is a spiritual world, that man can live in the spiritual world. I have lived in it for three and a half days and bring you tidings thence. I bring you the gifts of the spiritual world.” These gifts were useful and healing to mankind.

On the other hand, one who had lived as an initiate in the physical world could bring nothing similar to the dead. To the dead he could only say, “All that happens on the physical plane is so ordered that man ought to be redeemed.” Thus it was when, in the spiritual world, the ancient initiates held converse with the dead, to whom they could give only the teaching that “Life is suffering; only redemption will bring healing.” Thus did Buddha still teach. Thus did the initiate teach both the living and the dead. But through the event of Golgotha death was conquered in the physical world, and this signified something for those who had died and were in the spiritual world. Those who take up Christ in their innermost parts illuminate again their shadowy life in Devachan. The more man experiences here of the Christ, the brighter it becomes over there in the spiritual world. After the blood had flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer—this is something that belongs to the mysteries of Christianity—the Christ-spirit descended to the dead. This is one of the deepest mysteries of mankind. Christ descended to the dead and said to them, “Over there something has happened, of which it cannot be said that what happens there is not so important as what happens here. What man brings with him into the spiritual realm as a consequence of this event is a gift that can be brought out of the physical world into the spiritual world.” These are the tidings that Christ brought to the dead in the three and a half days. He descended to the dead in order to redeem them.

In the ancient initiation one could say that the fruits of the spiritual were reaped in the physical. Now an event occurred in the physical world that produced its fruits and did its work in the spiritual world. One can say that it was not in vain that man completed his descent to the physical plane. He completed it so that here in the physical world fruits could be produced for the spiritual world.

That these fruits could be produced came to pass through Christ, who was present among the living and among the dead, who gave an impulse so intense and so powerful that it shook the whole world.

• 1. Fantastic speculation on the reason why the Egyptians worshipped animal-headed gods began in classical times. See Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, Sec. 72.
• 2. For pictures of the Green Osiris, see the frontispieces in both volumes of Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, and in Volumes II, X, and XII of Maspero and Rappaport, History of Egypt (London, Grolier, 1901). See also text in Budge, Vol. II, p.355.

The Christ Impulse as Conqueror of Matter.

In order to complete the task that we have envisioned, we must now study the character of our own time in the same sense in which we have studied the four post-Atlantean epochs up to the appearance of Christianity. We have seen how, after the Atlantean catastrophe, there evolved the ancient Indian epoch, the ancient Persian epoch, and the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. In the description of the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, we have seen that in a certain connection man at that time worked his way into the physical plane and that this working into the physical world then reached its low point. Why is this time, which from one side we call the low point of human evolution, nevertheless so attractive, so sympathetic, for the modern observer'? Because this low point became the point of departure for many significant events of the present cultural epoch. We have seen how, in this Greco-Latin culture, a marriage was achieved between spirit and matter in Greek art. We have seen how the Greek temple was a building where the god could dwell, and that man could say, “I have brought matter so far that for me it can be an expression of the spirit, so that in every detail I can feel something of this spirit.” Thus it is with all Greek works of art. Thus it is with everything we have to say about the life of the Greeks. This world of artistic creations, into which the spirit was implanted, made matter so terribly attractive that among us in Middle Europe the great Goethe, in his Faust tragedy, sought to portray his own union with this epoch of culture.

If in the succeeding time the progress of culture had continued in the same direction, what would have been the result? We can make this clear through a simple sketch. In the Greco-Latin time man had descended to his lowest point, but in such a way that in no piece of matter was the spirit lost to him. In all the creations of this time, the spirit was incorporated in matter. When we look at the figure of a Greek god, we see everywhere how the Greek creative genius imprinted the spiritual on the external matter. The Greek had conquered matter, but the spirit had not been lost. The normal course of culture would have been that man should descend below this level, plunging down below matter so that the spirit would become the slave of matter. We need only turn an unprejudiced glance on our environment and we shall see that, on one side, this has actually happened. The expression of this descent is materialism. True, in no period has man mastered matter more than in our time, but only for the satisfaction of bodily needs. We need only consider with what primitive means the gigantic pyramids were built, and then compare this with the boldness and loftiness with which the Egyptian spirit moved among the mysteries of world-existence. We need only think of the deep sense in which, for the Egyptians, their pictures of the gods were images of what took place in the cosmos and on earth in the remote past. One who, at that time in Egypt, could look into the spiritual world, lived in something that became invisible in the Atlantean time but was a fact of evolution in the Lemurian time. One who was not an initiate, who belonged to the common people, could still participate in these spiritual worlds with his whole feeling and his whole soul. Yet how primitive were the means with which these men had to work externally on the physical plane. Compare this with our own time. We need only read the innumerable eulogies that our contemporaries write about the enormous strides made in modern times. The science of the spirit makes no objection to this. Human achievements are increasing through the conquest of the elements. But let us look at the thing from another side.

Let us look back to far-distant times when men ground their corn between simple stones, yet could look up into tremendous heights of the spiritual life. The majority of men today have no inkling of the heights that were surveyed at that time. They have no inkling of what a Chaldean initiate experienced when, in his special manner, he saw the stars, animals, plants, and minerals in connection with man, when he recognized the healing forces. The Egyptian priests were men to whom the physicians of today could not hold a candle. The men of today cannot penetrate into these heights of the spiritual world. Only through the science of the spirit can an idea be formed of what the ancient Chaldean-Egyptian initiates saw. For example, what we are offered today by way of interpretation of the inscriptions, in which deep mysteries are contained, is only a caricature of the ancient significance. Thus we find that in ancient times man had little power over the tools and equipment for labor on the physical plane, but he had enormous forces in relation to the spiritual world.

Man is descending ever more deeply into matter, and more and more he devotes his spiritual powers to conquering the physical plane. Can we not say that the human spirit is becoming the slave of the physical plane? In a certain way man descends even below the physical plane. Man has devoted enormous spiritual force to inventing the steamship, the railway, and the telephone, but what does he use these for? What a mass of spirit is thus diverted from life for the higher worlds. The spiritual scientist understands this and does not criticize in our time, because he knows that it was necessary to conquer the physical plane. Yet it is true that the spirit has plunged down into the physical world. Is it important for the spirit that, instead of grinding our own corn in a quern, we should be able to call Hamburg by long-distance telephone and order what we want to be sent from America by steamer? Great spiritual force has been applied to building up such connections with America and many other foreign lands, but we may ask whether the aim of all this is not the satisfaction of the material life, of our bodily needs. Since everything in the world is limited, there is not much spiritual force left over whereby man may ascend to the spiritual world after he has devoted so much to the material. The spirit has become the slave of matter. The Greek incorporated the spirit in his works of art, but today the spirit has descended very far. We have proof of this in the many technical and mechanical arrangements of our industry, which serve only material needs. Now let us ask whether this process is completed and whether man has descended too far.

This would have been the case were it not for the occurrence that we discussed in the preceding lectures. At the low point of human evolution something was infused into mankind, through the Christ-impulse, that gave the stimulus to a new ascent. The entry of the Christ-impulse into human evolution forms the other side of culture thereafter. It showed the way to the overcoming of matter. It brought the force through which death can be overcome. Thereby it offered to humanity the possibility of again raising itself above the level of the physical plane. This mightiest impulse had to be given, this impulse which became so efficacious that matter could be overcome in the magnificent way that is described in the Gospel of John, in the Baptism in Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha.

Christ Jesus, who was foretold by the prophets, gave the most powerful impulse of all human evolution. Man had to separate himself from the spiritual worlds in order to attach himself to them again with the Christ-being. But we cannot yet understand this if we do not penetrate still more deeply into the connections of human evolution as a whole.

We must point out that what we call the advent of the Christ on earth is an event that could occur only at the low point, when man had sunk so far. The Greco-Latin period stands in the middle of the seven post-Atlantean epochs. No other period would have been the right one. When man became a personality, God also had to become a personality in order to save him, to give him the possibility of rising again. We have seen that in his Roman citizenship the Roman first became conscious of his personality. Earlier, man still lived in the heights of the spiritual world; now he had descended entirely to the physical plane, and now he had to be led upward again through God himself. We must go more deeply into the third, the fifth, and the intermediate period. We shall not study Egyptian mythology in an academic way, but we must pick out the characteristic points in order to get deeper into the feeling-life of the ancient Egyptians. Then we may ask how this illuminates our own time. There is one thing here that must be weighed carefully.

We have seen how, in the Egyptian myths and mysteries, all the mighty pictures of the Sphinx, of Isis, of Osiris, were memories of ancient human conditions. All this was like a reflection of ancient events on earth. Man looked back into his primeval past and saw his origin. The initiate could experience again the spiritual existence of his forebears. We have seen how man grew out of an original group-soul condition. We could point out how these group-souls were preserved in the forms of the four apocalyptic beasts. Man grew out of this condition in such a way that he gradually refined his body and achieved the development of individuality. We can follow this historically. Let us read the Germania of Tacitus.¹ In the times described there, in the conditions of the Germanic regions in the first century after Christ as there portrayed, we see how the consciousness of the individual is still bound up with the community, how the clan spirit rules, how the Cherusker, for example, still feels himself as a member of his clan. This consciousness is still so strong that the individual seeks vengeance for another of the same group. It finds expression in the custom of the blood-feud. Thus a sort of group-soul condition prevailed. This condition was preserved into late post-Atlantean times, but only as an echo. In the last period of Atlantis the group-consciousness generally died out. It is only stragglers whom we have just described. In reality the men of that time no longer knew anything of the group-soul. In the Atlantean time, however, man did know of it. Then he did not yet say I of himself. This group-soul feeling changed into something else in the following generations.

Strange as it may seem, in ancient times memory had an entirely different meaning and power. What is memory today? Reflect on whether you can still recall the events of your earliest childhood. Probably you can remember very little, and beyond your childhood you cannot go at all. You will remember nothing of what lies before your birth. It was not like this in Atlantean times. Even in the first post-Atlantean time man could remember what his father, grandfather, and ancestors had experienced. There was no sense in saying that between birth and death there was an ego. The ego reached back for centuries in the memory. The ego reached as far as the blood flowed down, from the remotest ancestors to the descendants. At that time the group-ego was not to be thought of as extended in space over the contemporaries, but as proceeding upward in the generations. Therefore, the modern man will never understand what appears as an echo of this in the tales of the patriarchs: that Adam, Noah, and others grew to be so old. They counted their ancestors through several generations upward to their ego. The modern man no longer can form any conception of this. In those days there would have been no sense in giving a single man a name between birth and death. In the whole series of ancestors the memory continued upwards for centuries. As far as man could remember through the centuries, so far was he given his name. Adam was, so to say, the ego that flowed with the blood through the generations. Only when we are acquainted with these actual facts do we know how things really were. Man felt sheltered in this series of generations. This is what the Bible means when it says, “I and Father Abraham are one.” When the adherent of the Old Testament said this, only then did he rightly feel himself as man within the line of ancestry. Among the first post-Atlanteans, even among the Egyptians, this consciousness was still present. Men felt the community of the blood, and this caused something special for the spiritual life.

When a man dies today he has a life in kamaloka, after which comes a relatively long life in Devachan. But this is already a result of the Christ-impulse. This was not the case in pre-Christian times; then a man felt himself connected with the times of his forefathers. Today a man must wean himself in kamaloka from the wishes and desires to which he has accustomed himself in the physical world; the duration of this condition depends upon this. We cling to our life between birth and death; in ancient times man clung to much more than this. Man was connected with the physical plane in such a way that he felt himself as a member of the whole physical series of generations. Thus, in kamaloka, one did not merely have to work out the clinging to an individual physical existence, but one really had to traverse all that was connected with the generations, up to the remotest ancestor. One experienced this backwards. One result of this was the deep truth underlying the expression: “To feel oneself sheltered in Abraham's bosom.” One felt that after death he went upward through the whole row of ancestors, and the road that one had to travel was called “the way to the fathers.” Only when one had traversed this path could he ascend into the spiritual worlds and travel the way of the gods. At that time the soul traveled first the path of the fathers and then the path of the gods.

Now the various cultures did not come to abrupt ends. The essence of the Indian culture remained, although it underwent a change. It was preserved alongside the following cultures. In the continuation of the Indian culture that was contemporaneous with the Egyptian, something similar arose. Today we easily confuse what was later with what was earlier. Therefore it was emphasized that I was giving indications only out of the remotest periods. Among other things, the Indians now took up the view of the path of the fathers and the path of the gods.

As a man became more initiated, freed himself more from dependence on home and the fathers, became more homeless, the path of the gods became longer and the path of the fathers became shorter. One who clung closely to the fathers had a long father-path and a short god-path. In the terminology of the Orient, the way of the fathers was called Pitriyana and the way of the gods was called Devayana. When we speak of Devachan, we should understand that this is only a distorted form of the word Devayana, the path of the gods. An old Vedantist would simply laugh at us if we came to him with descriptions such as we give of Devachan. It is not so easy to find one's way into the oriental methods of thinking and contemplating. As to those who pretend to give out oriental truths, these truths often must be protected from just such people. Many a person today who accepts something as Indian teaching has no idea that he is receiving a confused doctrine. The modern science of the spirit does not claim to be an oriental-Indian teaching. In certain circles people love what comes from far away, perhaps from America, but the truth is at home everywhere. Antiquarian research belongs to scholars, but the science of the spirit is life. Its truth can be checked everywhere at any time. We must keep this before our minds.

What we have just mentioned was practice as well as theory among the ancient Egyptians. What was taught in the great mysteries was also practical., Something special was connected with this, as we shall learn as we penetrate further. The mysteries of the ancient Egyptians strove for something special. Today we may smile when we are told how the Pharaoh was at a certain time a kind of initiate, and how the Egyptian stood in relation to the Pharaoh and to his state institutions. For the modern European scholar it is particularly comical when the Pharaoh gives himself the name, “Son of Horus,” or even “Horus.” It seems singular to us that a man should be venerated as a god; nothing more abstruse could be thought of. But the man of today does not understand the Pharaoh and his mission. He does not know what the Pharaoh-initiation really was. Today we see in a people, only a group of persons who can be counted. To the man of today a people² is a meaningless abstraction. The reality is simply a certain number of persons filling a certain area. But this is not a people for one who accepts the standpoint of occultism.³ As a single member such as the finger belongs to the whole body, so do the single persons within the people belong to the folk-soul. They are as it were embedded in it, but the folk-soul is not physical; it is real only as an etheric form. It is an absolute reality; the initiate can commune with this soul. It is even much more real for him than are single individualities among the people, far more so than a single person. For the occultist spiritual experiences are entirely valid, and there the folk-soul is something thoroughly real. Let us examine briefly the connection between the folk-soul and the individuals.

If we think of the single individuals, the single egos, as little circles, for external physical observation they will be separate beings. But one who observes these single individualities spiritually sees them as though embedded in an etheric cloud, and this is the incorporation of the folk-soul. If the single person thinks, feels, and wills something, he radiates his feelings and thoughts into the common folk-soul. This is colored by his radiations, and the folk-soul becomes permeated by the thoughts and feelings of the single persons. When we look away from the physical man and observe only his etheric and astral bodies, and then observe the astral body of an entire people, we see that the astral body of the entire people receives its color-shadings from the single persons.

The Egyptian initiate knew this, but he also knew something further. When he observed this folk-substance, the ancient Egyptian asked himself what really lived in the folk-soul. What did he see therein? He saw in his folk-soul the re-embodiment of Isis. He saw how she had once wandered among men. Isis worked in the folk-soul. He saw in her the same influences as those that proceeded from the moon; these forces worked in the folk-soul. What the Egyptian saw as Osiris worked in the individual spiritual radiations; therein he recognized the Osiris-influence. But Isis he saw in the folk-soul.

Thus Osiris was not visible on the physical plane. He had died for the physical plane. Only when a man had died was Osiris again placed before his eyes. Therefore we read in the Book of the Dead how the Egyptian felt that he was united with Osiris in death, that he himself became an Osiris. Osiris and Isis worked together in the state and in the single person, as his members.

Now let us again consider the Pharaoh, remembering that this was a reality for him. Each Pharaoh received certain instructions before his initiation, to the end that he should not grasp this with his intellect only, but that it should become truth and reality for him. He had to be brought to the point where he could say to himself, “If I am to rule this people, I must sacrifice a portion of my spirituality, I must extinguish a part of my astral and etheric bodies. The Osiris and Isis principles must work in me. I must will nothing personally; if I say something, Osiris must speak; if I do something, Osiris must do it; if I move my hand, Osiris and Isis must be active. I must represent Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris.”

Initiation is not erudition. But to be able to do something like this, to be able to make such a sacrifice, pertains to initiation. What the Pharaoh sacrificed of himself could be filled up with portions of the folk-soul. The part of himself that the Pharaoh relinquished was just what gave him power. For justified power does not arise through a man's raising his own personality; it arises through his taking into himself something that transcends the boundaries of personality, a higher spiritual power. The Pharaoh took such a power into himself, and this was externally portrayed through the Uraeus-serpent.

Again we have peered into a mystery. We have seen something much higher than the explanations that are given today when the Pharaohs are discussed.

If the Egyptian cherished such feelings, what would have to be his particular concern? It would be his particular concern that the folk-soul should become as strong as possible, rich in good forces, and that it should not be diminished. The Egyptian initiates could not reckon with, what man possessed through blood-relationship. But what the forefathers had accumulated as spiritual riches, was to become the property of the individual soul. This is indicated for us in the judging of the dead, where the man is brought before the forty-two assessors of the dead. There his deeds are weighed. Who are the forty-two judges of the dead? They are the ancestors.⁴ It was believed that each man's life was interwoven with the lives of forty-two ancestors. Therefore he had to answer to them as to whether he actually had taken up what they had offered to him spiritually. In this way, what was contained in the Egyptian mystery-teachings was something that was to become practical for life, but which could also be turned to good account for the time beyond death, for the life between death and a new birth. In the Egyptian epoch man was already entangled in the physical world. But at the same time he had to look up to his ancestors in the other world, and cultivate in the physical world what he had inherited from them. Through this interest he was fettered to the physical plane, since he had to continue working on what his fathers had created.

Now we must reflect that the souls of today are reincarnations of the ancient Egyptian souls. For the souls of today, who experienced it in their Egyptian incarnation, what is the significance of what happened at that time? All that the soul experienced at that time between death and a new birth has been woven into the soul, weaves within it, and has arisen again in our fifth period, which brings the fruits of the third period. These fruits appear in the inclinations and ideas of modern times, which have their causes in the ancient Egyptian world. Nowadays all the ideas emerge which at that time were laid down in the soul as germs. Therefore it is easy to see that man's modern conquests on the physical plane are nothing more than a coarser version of the transfer of interest to the physical plane that was present in ancient Egypt, only people are now even more deeply ensnared in matter. In the mummifying of the dead we have already seen a cause of the materialistic views that we now experience on the physical plane.

Let us imagine a soul of that time. Let us imagine a soul that then lived as a pupil of one of the ancient initiates. Such a pupil's spiritual gaze had been directed to the cosmos through actual perception. The way Osiris and Isis lived in the moon had become spiritual perception for him. Everything was permeated by divine-spiritual beings. He had taken this into his soul. He is again incarnated in the fourth and fifth periods. In the fifth period such a person experiences all this again. It comes back to him as a memory. What happens to it now? The pupil had gazed up at all that lived in the world of the stars. This sight comes to life again in a certain person of the fifth period. He remembers what he saw and heard at that time. He cannot recognize it again, because it has taken on a material coloring. It is no longer the spiritual that he sees, but the material-mechanical relationships emerge again and he recreates the thoughts in materialistic form as memory. Where he had previously seen divine beings, Isis and Osiris, now he sees only abstract forces without any spiritual bond. The spiritual relationships appear to him in thought-form. Everything arises again, but in material form.

Let us apply this to a particular soul which at that time acquired insight into the great cosmic connections, and let us imagine that there arises again before this soul what it had seen spiritually in ancient Egypt. This appears again in this soul in the fifth post-Atlantean period, and we have the soul of Copernicus. Thus did the Copernican system arise, as a memory-tableau of spiritual experiences in ancient Egypt. The case is the same with Kepler's system. These men gave birth to their great laws out of Their memories, out of what they had experienced in the Egyptian time. Now let us think how such a thing arises in the soul as a faint memory, and let us think also how what such a spirit truly thinks was, in ancient Egypt, experienced by him in spiritual form. What can such a spirit say to us? That it seems to him as though he looked back into ancient Egypt. It is as though he stated all this in a new form when such a spirit says, “But now, a year and a half after the first dawning, a few months after the first full daylight, a few weeks after the pure sun had risen over these most wonderful contemplations, nothing holds me back any longer. I shall revel in holy fire. I shall scorn the sons of men with the simple confession that I am stealing the sacred vessels of the Egyptians to build with them an habitation for my God, far removed from the borders of Egypt.” Is this not like an actual memory, which corresponds to the truth? This is Kepler's saying, and in his works we also find the following: “The ancient memory is knocking at my heart.” Wonderful are the connections of things in human evolution. Many such enigmatic sayings take on light and meaning when one senses the spiritual connections. Life becomes great and powerful, and we feel our way into a mighty whole when we understand that the single person is only an individual form of the spiritual that permeates the world.

I have already pointed out that what has arisen in our time as Darwinism is a coarser materialistic version of what the Egyptians portrayed as their gods in animal form. I was also able to show that if one understands Paracelsus correctly, his medical lore is a recrudescence of what was taught in the temples of ancient Egypt. Let us contemplate such a spirit as Paracelsus. We find a remarkable statement by him. One who has steeped himself in Paracelsus knows what a lofty spirit lived in him. He made a remarkable statement, saying that he had learned much in many ways; least of all in the academies, but much from old traditions and from the common people during his journeys through many lands. It is impossible here to give examples of the deep truths that are still present among the common people but are no longer understood, although Paracelsus could still turn them to account. He said that he had found one book containing deep medical truths. What book was it? The Bible! Thereby he meant not only the Old Testament, but also the New. One need only be able to read the Bible to find therein what Paracelsus found. What became of the medicine of Paracelsus? It is true that it is a memory of the ancient Egyptian methods of healing. But through the fact that he absorbed the mysteries of Christianity, the upward impulse, his works are saturated with spiritual wisdom, they are filled with Christ. This is the path into the future. This is what everyone must do who, in modern times, will pave the way back out of the fall into matter. We must not under-value the great material progress, but there is also the possibility of letting the spiritual flow into it.

One who studies what material science can offer today, who plunges into material science and is not too lazy to steep himself in it, such a man acts wisely also in relation to the science of the spirit. Much can be learned from the purely materialistic investigators. What is found there we can permeate with the pure spirit, which the science of the spirit offers. If thus we permeate everything with the spiritual, then this is properly understood Christianity. It is a slander of the science of the spirit when men say that it is a fantastic view of the world. It can stand firmly on the ground of reality, and it would be only a most elementary beginning in the science of the spirit if one were to concentrate on a schematic representation of the higher worlds. It is not important that the student should simply know the things, learning the concepts by heart. This is not all that counts. The important thing is that the teachings about the higher worlds should become fruitful in men, that the true spiritual-scientific teachings should be introduced into everything, into the everyday life.

It is not so important that one should preach about universal brotherly love. It is best to speak of that as little as possible. Speaking in such phrases is like saying to the stove, “Dear stove, it is your duty to warm this room. Fulfill your duty!” So it is with teachings that are given through such phrases. The important thing is the means. The stove remains cold if I simply tell it that it should be warm. It gets warm when it has fuel. People also remain cold when they are admonished. But what is fuel for the modern man? The specific facts of spiritual teaching are fuel for man.⁵ One should not be so lazy as to remain content with “Universal brotherhood.” People must be given fuel. Then brotherhood will arise of itself. As the plants stretch out their blossoms to the sun, so must we all look up to the sun of the spiritual life.

The important thing is that the matters we have examined here should not be accepted merely as theoretical doctrines, but that they should become a force in our souls. For every man, in every position in practical life, they can give impulses for what he must create. People who look today at the science of the spirit with a certain scorn feel themselves superior to its “fantastic” teachings. They find “unprovable assertions” therein and say that one should cleave to the facts. If the spiritual scientist were made pusillanimous rather than bold through his life in the science of the spirit, it would be easy for him to lose his sureness and energy when he sees how just those persons who should understand the science of the spirit are the ones who utterly fail to grasp it.

Our times easily look down on what the Egyptians recognized as their gods. The latter are said to be meaningless abstractions. But modern man is far more superstitious. He clings to entirely different gods, who are authorities for him. Because he does not actually bend the knee before them, he does not notice what superstitions he cherishes.

My dear friends, when we have thus been together again we should always be mindful that when we disperse we should not take with us only a number of truths, but we should take away a collective impression, a feeling, that can properly take the form of an impulse of will, an impulse to carry the science of the spirit into life and to allow nothing to disturb our confidence in it.

Let us place a picture before our soul. One often hears it said, “Oh, these seekers for the spirit! They assemble in their lodges and pursue all kinds of fantastic rubbish. A man of really modern views can have no part in that.” The adherents of the science of the spirit sometimes seem to be a sort of pariah class, regarded as uneducated and untrained. Should we be discouraged because of this? No. We shall place a picture before our souls and arouse the feelings that are connected with it. We can recall something similar in past times; how something similar occurred in ancient Rome. We can see how, in ancient Rome, primitive Christianity spread among a despised class of people. We look with legitimate delight today on such things as the Coliseum constructed by imperial Rome. But we can also look at the people who then regarded themselves as the choicest of their time; we can see how they sat in the Circus and watched while the Christians were burned in the arena and incense was kindled to quench the stink of the burning bodies.

Now let us look at those despised ones. They lived in the catacombs, in underground passages. There the spreading Christianity had to hide. There they erected the first Christian altars on the graves of their dead. There below they had their wonderful symbols and shrines. A strange feeling seizes us today when we walk through the catacombs, through that despised underground Rome. The Christians knew what awaited them. That first germ of the Christ-impulse on earth, confined to the catacombs, was despised. But what remains of imperial Rome? It has disappeared from the earth, while what then lived in the catacombs has been exalted.

Let us hope that those who today wish to make themselves the bearers of a spiritual world-view may preserve the confidence of the first Christians. The representatives of the science of the spirit may be despised by contemporary academic learning, but they know they are working for what will bloom and thrive in the future. Let them learn to endure all the vexations of the present day. We are working into the future. This we may feel confidently and without arrogance, firm against the misunderstandings of our time.

With such feelings let us try to give permanence to what has passed before our souls. Let us take it away with us as a force, and let us continue to work together fraternally in the right direction.

• 1. he passage referred to is probably the following (pages 293 and 295 in the Loeb Classical Library Edition): “Sisters' children mean as much to their uncle as to their father; some tribes regard this blood-tie as even closer and more sacred than that between son and father . . . The more relations a man has and the larger the number of his connections by marriage, the more influence has he in his age; it does not pay to have no ties. It is incumbant to take up a father's feuds or a kinsman's not less than his friendship.”
• 2. The German word Volk has no convenient English equivalent. We shall translate it as people or folk in different contexts.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner's fullest discussion of this subject appears in the cycle of lectures, Mission of the Folk-Souls, delivered at Oslo in 1910.
• 4. A full description of these 42 gods is to be found in Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Volume I, pp. 316-317. For a fairly good picture, see pages 344-45 of the same work.
• 5. This thought is more fully expounded in Rudolf Steiner's booklet, Anthroposophical Ethics, comprising three lectures delivered in 1912 in Norrköping.

Spiritual Connections between the Culture-streams of Ancient and Modern Times

If we ask ourselves what spiritual science should be for men, then presumably, out of all sorts of reactions and feelings that we have developed in the course of our work in this field, we will place the following answer before our souls: Spiritual science should be for us a path to the higher development of our humanity, of all that is human in us.

Thus we set up a life-aim, which in a certain way is self-understood for every thinking and feeling person, a life-aim that includes the achieving of the highest ideals and also includes the unfolding of the deepest and most significant forces in our souls. The best men in all ages have asked themselves how man can rightly bring to expression what lies within him, and to this question the most diverse answers have been given. Perhaps none can be found that is terser or more telling than the answer Goethe gave out of a deep conviction in his Geheimnisse:

“From the power that binds all beings
That man frees himself who overcomes himself.”

Deep meaning lies in these words, for they show us clearly and pregnantly what lies at the heart of all evolution. This is that man develops his inner feeling through rising above himself. Thereby we lift ourselves, so to speak, above ourselves. The soul that overcomes itself finds the path that leads beyond itself to the highest treasures of humanity. This lofty goal of spiritual research should be borne in mind when we undertake to treat such a theme as the one that is to occupy us here. It will lead us beyond the ordinary horizons of life to sublime things. We will have to survey wide reaches of time if we take as our subject an epoch stretching from ancient Egypt down to our own day. We will have to pass millennia in review, and what we gain therefrom will really be something connected with the deepest concerns of our souls, something that grips our innermost soul-life. Only apparently does the man who strives toward the heights of life remove himself from his immediate surroundings; just through this he comes to an understanding of his daily concerns. Man must get away from the troubles of the day, from what his routine brings to him, and look up to the great events of the history of the world and its peoples. Then for the first time he finds what is most sacred for his soul. It may seem strange to suggest that connections, intimate connections, should be sought for between our own time and ancient Egypt, when the mighty pyramids and the Sphinx appeared. It can at first seem remarkable that one should understand his own time better by directing his gaze so far back. But just for this purpose we are going to look backward over much wider and more comprehensive epochs. This will bring the result we seek: The possibility of transcending ourselves.

To one who has already carefully studied the ideas of spiritual science, it will not seem strange that one should look for a connection between widely separated periods of time. It is one of our basic convictions that the human soul continually returns, that the experiences between birth and death occur repeatedly for us. The doctrine of reincarnation has become ever more familiar to us. When we reflect on this we may ask: Since these souls that dwell in us today have often been here before, is it possible that they were also present in ancient Egypt during Egyptian cultural epoch, that the same souls are in us which at that time looked up at the gigantic pyramids and the enigmatic Sphinxes?

The answer to this question is, Yes. Our souls have beheld the old cultural monuments that they see again today. The same souls that lived then have gone through later periods and have appeared again in our own time. We know that no life remains without fruit; we know that what the soul has gone through in the way of experiences remains within it and appears in later incarnations as powers, temperament, capacities, and dispositions. Thus the way we look on nature today, the way we take up what our times bring forth, the way we view the world, all this was prepared in ancient Egypt, in the land of the pyramids. We were then prepared in such a way that we now look at the physical world as we do. Just how these widely separated periods link themselves together is what we will now explore.

If we want to grasp the deeper meaning of these lectures, we must go a long way back in earthly evolution, We know that our earth has often changed. Before ancient Egypt there were still other cultures. By means of occult research we can see much further back into the gray primeval times of human evolution, and we come to times when the earth appeared quite other than it is today. Things were entirely different in ancient Asia and Africa. If we look back clairvoyantly into primeval times, we come to a point where a tremendous catastrophe, caused by water-forces, took place on our earth and fundamentally altered its face. If we go still further back, we reach a time when the earth had an entirely different physiognomy, when what now forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and America, was above water, was land. We come to a time when our souls lived in entirely different bodies than today; we reach ancient Atlantis, of which our external science can as yet say little.

The regions of Atlantis were destroyed through colossal deluges. Human bodies had different forms at that time, but the souls that live in us today lived also in the ancient Atlanteans. Those were our souls. Then the water-catastrophe caused a movement of the Atlantean peoples, a great migration from west to east. We ourselves were these peoples. Toward the end of Atlantis all was in movement. We wandered from the west toward the east, through Ireland, Scotland, Holland, France, and Spain. Thus the peoples moved eastward and populated Europe, Asia, and the northern parts of Africa.

It must not be imagined that those who, in the last great migration, wandered out of the west into the regions that have gradually developed into Asia, Europe, and Africa, did not encounter other peoples. Almost all of Europe, the northern parts of Africa, and large parts of Asia were already inhabited at that time. These areas were not peopled from the west only; they had already been settled earlier, so that this migration found a strange population already established. We may assume that when quieter times set in, special cultural relations arose. There was, for instance, in the neighborhood of Ireland, a region where, before the catastrophe that now lies thousands of years behind us, there lived the most advanced portions of the entire population of the earth. These portions then migrated, under the special guidance of great individualities, through Europe to a region of central Asia, and from that point cultural colonies were sent out to the most diverse places. One such colony of the post-Atlantean time was sent from this group of people into India, finding a population that had been seated there from primeval times and had its own culture. Paying due heed to what was already present, these colonists founded the first post-Atlantean culture. This was many thousand years ago, and external documents tell us scarcely anything about it. What appears in these documents is much later. In those great compendiums of Wisdom called the Vedas, we have only the final echoes of a very early Indian culture that was directed by super-earthly beings and was founded by the Holy Rishis. It was a culture of a unique kind, and we today can form only a feeble idea of it because the Vedas are only a reflection of that primeval holy Indian culture.

After this culture there followed another, the second cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean time. Out of this the wisdom of Zarathustra flowed and the Persian culture arose. Long did the Indian culture endure, long also the Persian, reaching a culmination in Zarathustra.

Then arose, under the influence of colonists who were sent into the land of the Nile, the culture that is comprised under the four names, Chaldean-Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian. This third post-Atlantean culture arose in Asia Minor and northern Africa, and reached its summit, on the one side, in the wonderful Chaldean star-lore and, on the other, in the Egyptian culture.

Then comes a fourth age, developing in the south of Europe, the age of the Greco-Roman culture, which dawns with the songs of Homer and goes on to produce the Greek sculptures and the art of poetry that appears in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Rome also belonged to this period. The epoch begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in 747 B. C., and lasts until the fourteenth or fifteenth century A. D. After that we have the fifth period, in which we ourselves live, and this in turn will be followed by the sixth and seventh periods.

In the seventh period, ancient India will appear in a new form. We shall see that there is a remarkable law that enables us to understand the working of wonderful forces through the various epochs and the relationships of the epochs to each other. If we begin by looking at the first period, that of the Indian culture, we will find that this first culture later recrudesces in a new form in the seventh period. Ancient India will then appear in a new form. Mysterious forces are at work here. And the second period, which we have called the Persian, will appear again in the sixth period. After our own culture perishes, we will see the Zarathustra religion revive in the culture of the sixth period. And in the course of these lectures we will see how, in our own fifth period, there takes place a sort of reawakening of the third period, the Egyptian. The fourth period stands in the middle; it is peculiar to itself, and neither earlier nor later does it have a parallel.

To make this mysterious law somewhat clearer, we should add the following. We know that India has something that strikes our humanitarian consciousness as strange. This is the division into definite castes, into priests, warriors, merchants, and laborer. This strict segregation is foreign to our modern views. In the first post-Atlantean culture it was not strange, it was entirely natural; in those times it could not be otherwise than that the souls of men should be divided into four grades according to their capacities. No harshness was felt in it for men were distributed by their leaders, who had such authority that what they prescribed was accepted without question. It was felt that the leaders, the seven Holy Rishis who had received their instruction from divine beings in Atlantis, could see where each man should be placed. Thus such a classification of men was something altogether natural. An entirely different grouping will appear in the seventh period. The division in the first period was effected by authority, but in the seventh period men will group themselves according to objective points of view. Something similar is seen among the ants; they form a state which, in its wonderful structure as well as in its capacity to perform a relatively prodigious amount of work, is not rivaled by any human state. Yet there we have just what seems to be alien to us, the caste system; for each ant has its particular task.

Whatever we may think of this today, men will see that the salvation of humanity lies in division into objective groups, and they will even be able to combine division of labor with equality of rights. Human society will appear as a wonderful harmony. This is something we can see in the annals of the future. Thus ancient India will appear again; and in a similar way certain traits of the third period will appear again in the fifth.

Glancing at the immediate implications of our theme, we see a large domain. We see the gigantic pyramids, the enigmatic Sphinx. The souls that belonged to the ancient Indians were also incarnated in Egypt and are again incarnated today. If we follow our general line of thought into detail, we will discover two phenomena that show us how, in superearthly connections, there are mysterious threads between the Egyptian culture and that of today. We have observed the law of repetition in the different periods of time, but it will seem far more significant if we follow it in spiritual regions. We are all familiar with a painting of great importance that has surely passed before all our souls at least once. I mean Raphael's famous painting of the Sistine Madonna, which by a chain of circumstances has come to be located among us in central Germany. In this picture, which is available in countless reproductions, we have learned to admire the wonderful purity poured out over the whole form. We have all felt something in the countenance of the mother, in the singular way the form floats in the air, perhaps also in the deep expression of the child's eyes. Then, if we see the cloud-forms round about from which numerous little angel-heads appear, we have a still deeper feeling, a feeling that makes the whole picture more comprehensible to us. I know it seems daring when I say that if one gazes deeply and earnestly on this child in the arms of the mother and on the clouds in the background forming themselves into a number of little angel-heads, then he has the feeling that this child was not born in the natural way, but that it is one of those that float round about in the clouds. This Jesus child itself is such a cloud-form, only become a little denser, as though one of the little angels had flown out of the clouds onto the arm of the Madonna. That would be a healthy feeling. If we make this feeling live within us, then our view will expand and free itself from certain narrow conceptions about the natural connections of life. Just out of such a picture our narrow vision can be expanded to see that what must happen in a certain way according to modern laws could at one time have been different. We will discern that there was once a form of reproduction other than the sexual one. In short, we will perceive deep connections between what is human and the spiritual forces in this picture. This is what lies in it.

If we allow our gaze to wander back from this Madonna into the Egyptian time, we are met by something similar, by an equally sublime picture. The Egyptian had Isis, the figure connected with the words: I am what was, what is, and what will be. No mortal has yet raised my veil.

A deep mystery, heavily veiled, manifests itself in the figure of Isis, the lovable goddess who, in the spiritual consciousness of the ancient Egyptian, was present with the Horus child as our Madonna is present today with the Jesus child. In the fact that this Isis is presented to us as something bearing the eternal within it, we are again reminded of our feeling in contemplating the Madonna. We must see deep mysteries in Isis, mysteries that are grounded in the spiritual. The Madonna is a remembrance of Isis: the Isis appears again in the Madonna. This is one of the connections that I spoke of. We must learn to recognize with our feelings the deep mysteries that show a superearthly connection between ancient Egypt and our modern culture.

Still another connection can be brought before you today. We recall how the Egyptian handled the dead; we remember the mummies, and how the Egyptian concerned himself that the outer physical form should be preserved for a long time. We know that he filled his tombs with such mummies, in which he had preserved the outer form, and that as mementos of the past physical life he gave to the deceased certain utensils and possessions suited to the needs of physical life. Thus what the person had had in the physical was to be retained. In this way the Egyptian bound the dead to the physical plane. This custom developed more and more and is a special earmark of the old Egyptian culture. Such a thing is not without consequences for the soul. Let us remember that our souls were in Egyptian bodies. This is quite correct; our souls were incorporated in these bodies that became mummies. We know that when man, after death, is freed from his physical and etheric bodies, he has a different consciousness; he is by no means unconscious in the astral world. He can look down from the spiritual world, even though today he cannot look up; he can then look down on the physical earth. It is not then indifferent to him whether his body has been preserved as a mummy, has been burned, or has decayed. A definite kind of connection arises through this. We shall see this mysterious connection. Through the fact that in ancient Egypt the bodies were preserved for a long time, the souls experienced something very definite in the period after death. When they looked down they knew—that is my body. They were bound to this physical body. They had the form of their body before them. This body became important to the souls, for the soul is susceptible to impressions after death. The impression made by the mummified body imprinted itself deeply, and the soul was formed in accordance with this impression.

These souls went through incarnations in the Greco-Latin period, and in our own time they are living in us. It was not without effect that they saw their mummified bodies after death, that they were repeatedly led back to these bodies; this is by no means unimportant. They attached their sympathies to these bodies, and the fruit of their looking down upon them appears now, in the fifth period, in the inclination that souls have today to lay great weight upon the outer physical life. All that we describe today as the attachment to matter stems from the fact that the souls at that time, out of the spiritual world, could look upon their own embodiment. Through this man learned to love the physical world; through this it is so often said today that the only important thing is the physical body between birth and death. Such views do not arise out of nothing.

This is not a criticism of the practice of mummifying. We only want to point to certain necessities that are connected with the repeated incarnating of the soul. Without this pondering on the mummies men would not have been equal to developing further. We would by now have lost all interest in the physical world had the Egyptians not had the mummy-cult. It had to be thus if a proper interest in the physical world was to be awakened. That we see the world as we do today is a consequence of the fact that the Egyptians mummified the physical body after death.

This cultural stream was under the influence of initiates, who could see into the future. Not through any whim did men make mummies. Particularly in those days mankind was led by high individualities who prescribed What was right. This was done under authority. In the schools of the initiates it was known that our fifth epoch was connected with the third epoch. These mysterious connections stood at that time before the eyes of the priests, who instituted mummification so that the souls might acquire the disposition to seek spiritual experience in the external physical world.

The world is guided through wisdom; this is a second example of such connections. That men think as they do today is a result of what they experienced in ancient Egypt. Here we glimpse deep mysteries that reveal themselves in the cultural streams. We have barely touched these mysteries, for what has been shown of the Madonna as a remembrance of Isis, together with what we have seen of mummification, gives only a feeble hint of the real spiritual connections. But we will throw more light upon these relationships; we will consider not only what appears outwardly, but also what lies behind the external.

External life runs its course between birth and death. Man lives a much longer life after death, in what we know as kamaloca and the experiences of the spiritual world. The experiences in the super-sensible worlds are no more uniform than the experiences here in the physical world. What did we experience as ancient Egyptians in the other world?

When our eyes looked on the pyramids and the Sphinx, how completely different was the course of our lives, how differently did our souls live between birth and death! That life cannot be compared to the life of the present day; such a comparison would have no meaning, and the experiences between death and a new birth have been far more dissimilar than the experiences of outer life. During the Egyptian epoch the soul experienced something quite different than in the Greek world, or in the time of Charlemagne, or in our own time. Also in the other world, in the spiritual world, evolution takes place, and what the soul experiences today between death and a new birth is something quite different from what the ancient Egyptian experienced when he laid aside his outer form at death. Just as mummification worked on in its peculiar way, causing the mood of the present day, just as this external life repeats itself from the third into the fifth period, so does evolution continue in those mysterious worlds between death and birth. This also we will have to study and here again we will find a mysterious connection. Then we will be able to grasp what lives in us as the fruit of that ancient time. We will be led into deep recesses of the labyrinth of the earth's evolution. But just through this we will recognize the full connection between what the Egyptian built, what the Chaldean thought, and what we today live. We will see what was then achieved flaring up again in what surrounds us, in what interests us in our environment. Physically and spiritually we will obtain clues to this connection. It will also be shown how evolution proceeds, how the fourth period forms a wonderful link between the third and the fifth. Thus our souls will lift themselves to the significant connections of the world, and the fruit will be a deep understanding of what lives in us.

If you combine the observations I made here yesterday with the other lectures I gave here a week ago, you will, in a sense, obtain an important key to much of spiritual science. I would just like to outline the main ideas we will need for our further considerations, so that we can orient ourselves. About eight days ago, I pointed out the significance of processes which, from the point of view of the physical world, are called processes of destruction. I pointed out that, from the point of view of the physical world, reality can only be seen in what arises, what emerges, as it were, out of nothing and comes into noticeable existence. So we speak of reality when a plant breaks free from its roots, develops leaf by leaf until it blossoms, and so on. But we do not speak of reality in the same way when we look at the processes of destruction, at the gradual withering, at the gradual fading away, at the final flowing away, one might say, into nothingness. For those who want to understand the world, however, it is absolutely necessary to also look at what is called destruction, at the processes of dissolution, at what ultimately results for the physical world as flowing into nothingness. For consciousness in the physical world can never develop where only sprouting, budding processes take place; consciousness begins only where what has sprouted in the physical world is in turn carried away, destroyed.

I have pointed out how the processes that life brings about in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. It is indeed the case that when we perceive anything external, our soul-spiritual nature must cause destructive processes in our nervous system, and these destructive processes then convey consciousness. Whenever we become conscious of anything, the processes of consciousness must arise from processes of destruction. And I have pointed out how the most significant process of destruction, the process of death, which is so important for human life, is precisely the creator of consciousness for the time we spend after death. Through this, our soul and spirit experience the complete dissolution and detachment from the physical and etheric bodies, the merging of the physical and etheric bodies into the general physical and etheric world, our spiritual soul draws the power from the process of death to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The words of Jakob Böhme: “And so death is the root of all life” thus gain their higher meaning for the entire context of world phenomena.

Now the question will often have come to your mind: What actually happens during the time that the human soul passes through between death and a new birth? It has often been pointed out that for normal human life this period is long in relation to the time we spend here in the physical body between birth and death. It is short only for those people who live their lives in a worldly manner, who, I would say, come to do only what can truly and genuinely be called criminal. In such cases, there is a short period of time between death and a new birth. But for people who are not solely devoted to selfishness, but spend their lives in a normal way between birth and death, there is usually a relatively long period of time between death and a new birth.

But the question must burn in our souls, I would say: What determines the return of a human soul to a new physical embodiment? The answer to this question is intimately connected with everything we can know about the significance of the processes of destruction I have mentioned. Just think that when we enter physical existence with our souls, we are born into very specific circumstances. We are born into a specific age, drawn to specific people. So we are born into very specific circumstances. You must realize quite clearly that our life between birth and death is actually filled with everything into which we are born. What we think, what we feel, what we experience—in short, the entire content of our life depends on the time into which we are born.

But now you will also easily understand that what surrounds us when we are born into physical existence depends on previous causes, on what has happened before. Suppose, if I were to draw this schematically, that we are born at a certain point in time and go through life between birth and death. (It was drawn.) If you add what surrounds you, it does not stand there in isolation, but is the effect of what came before. I mean to say: you are brought together with what came before, with people. These people are children of other people, who in turn are children of other people, and so on. If we consider only these physical generational relationships, you will say: When I enter physical existence, I take something from people; during my upbringing, I take a lot from the people around me. But they, in turn, have taken a great deal from their ancestors, from the acquaintances and relatives of their ancestors, and so on. One could say that, going further and further back, people must seek the causes of what they themselves are.

If we then allow our thoughts to continue, we can say that we can trace a certain current beyond our birth. This current has, as it were, brought everything that surrounds us in life between birth and death. And if we continue to trace this current upward, we would eventually arrive at a point in time where our previous incarnation took place. So, by tracing time back before our birth, we would have a long period of time in which we lingered in the spiritual world. During this time, many things happened on earth. But what happened brought about the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then, finally, we arrive in the spiritual world at the time when we were on earth in a previous incarnation. When we speak of these conditions, we are speaking of average conditions. There are, of course, numerous exceptions, but they all lie, I would say, within the line I indicated earlier for natures that come to earthly incarnation more quickly.

What determines that, after a period of time has elapsed, we are born again here? Well, if we look back at our previous incarnations, we see that during our time on earth we were also surrounded by certain conditions, and these conditions had their effects. We were surrounded by people, these people had children, they passed on to their children what their feelings and ideas were, the children in turn passed them on to the next generation, and so on. But if you follow historical life, you will say to yourself: there comes a time in the course of development when you can no longer recognize anything really the same or even similar in the descendants as in their ancestors. Everything is passed on, but the basic character that is present at a certain time appears weakened in the children, even more weakened in the grandchildren, and so on, until a time comes when nothing remains of the basic character of the environment in which one was in the previous incarnation. Thus, the stream of time works to destroy what was once the basic character of the environment. We observe this destruction in the time between death and a new birth. And when the character of the previous age has been wiped out, when nothing of it remains, when that which came to us, as it were, in previous incarnations has been destroyed, then the moment arrives when we enter earthly existence once again. Just as in the second half of our life our life is actually a kind of dismantling of our physical existence, so between death and a new birth there must be a kind of dismantling of earthly conditions, a destruction, a annihilation. And new conditions, a new environment into which we are born, must be there. So we are reborn when everything for which we were previously born has been destroyed and annihilated. Thus, this idea of being destroyed is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on earth. And what our consciousness creates at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our spiritual soul, is strengthened at this moment of death, at this viewing of destruction, for viewing the process of annihilation that must take place in earthly conditions between our death and a new birth.

Now you will also understand that those who have no interest in what surrounds them on earth, who are basically not interested in any human being or any creature, but are only interested in what is good for themselves and simply steal from one day to the next, are not very strongly connected to the conditions and things on earth. They have no interest in following their slow deterioration, but they return very soon to repair what they have done, in order to truly live with the conditions they must live with, so that they may learn to understand their gradual destruction. Those who have never lived with earthly conditions do not understand their destruction, their dissolution. Therefore, those who have lived very intensively in the basic character of any age, who have immersed themselves completely in the basic character of any age, have above all the tendency, unless something else intervenes, to bring about the destruction of that into which they were born and to reappear when something completely new has emerged. Of course, I would say that there are exceptions at the top. And these exceptions are particularly important for us to consider.

Let us assume that one lives in a movement such as the spiritual scientific movement today, at a time when it is not in tune with everything around it, when it is something completely foreign to its surroundings. This spiritual scientific movement is not what we were born into, but rather what we have to work on, what we want to see enter into the spiritual cultural development of the earth. It is then a matter above all of living with the conditions that are opposed to spiritual science, and of reappearing on Earth when the Earth has changed to such an extent that spiritual scientific conditions can truly take hold of cultural life. So here we have the exception upwards. There are exceptions downwards and upwards. Certainly, the most serious co-workers of spiritual science today are preparing to reappear in an earthly existence as soon as possible, while at the same time working during the course of this earthly existence to bring about the disappearance of the conditions into which they were born. So you see, if you take up the last thought, that you are in a sense helping the spiritual beings to guide the world by devoting yourselves to what lies in the intentions of the spiritual beings.

When we consider the circumstances of our time today, we must say that, on the one hand, we have something that is eminently heading toward decadence and decline. Those who have a heart and soul for spiritual science have been placed in this age, as it were, to see how ripe it is for decline. Here on earth, they are introduced to that which can only be known on earth, but they carry this knowledge up into the spiritual worlds, where they now see the decline of the age and will return when a new age is to be brought about, which lies precisely in the innermost impulses of spiritual scientific striving. In this way, the plans of the spiritual leaders, the spiritual guides of Earth's evolution, are promoted by what such people, who are concerned with something that is not, so to speak, part of the culture of the times, take into themselves.

You may be familiar with the accusations frequently made by people today against those who profess spiritual science, that they are concerned with something that often appears outwardly fruitless, that does not outwardly intervene in the circumstances of the time. Yes, there is indeed a need for people in their earthly existence to concern themselves with things that are important for further development, but not immediately for the present time. If one objects to this, one should only consider the following. Imagine that these were successive years: 1915, 1914, 1913, 1912.

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We could then continue. Suppose these were consecutive years and these were the grain crops (center) of the consecutive years. And what I am drawing here would always be the mouths (right) that consume these grains. Now someone might come along and say: Only the arrow pointing from the grains of corn into the mouths (→) has any meaning, because that is what sustains the people of the successive years. And he might say: Anyone who thinks realistically looks only at these arrows pointing from the grains of corn to the mouths. But the grains of corn care little about this arrow. They do not care about it at all, but only have the tendency to develop into the next year's grain. Only the grain kernels care about this arrow (→); they don't care at all that they will be eaten, they don't care about that at all. That is a side effect, something that happens incidentally. Every grain kernel has, if I may say so, the will, the impulse, to pass into the next year in order to become a grain kernel again. And it is good for the mouths that the grains of corn follow this arrow direction (→), because if all the grains of corn followed this arrow direction (→), then the mouth here would have nothing to eat next year! If all the grains of corn from 1913 had followed this arrow (→), then the mouths of 1914 would have nothing to eat. If someone wanted to apply materialistic thinking consistently, they would examine the grains of corn to determine their chemical composition so that they would produce the best possible food products. But that would not be a good observation, because this tendency does not lie in the grains of corn at all, but rather in the grains of corn lies the tendency to ensure further development and to evolve into next year's grain of corn.

So it is with the world process. Those who truly follow the world process are those who ensure that evolution continues, and those who become materialists follow the mouths that only see this arrow here (→). But those who ensure that the world continues need not be deterred in their efforts to prepare for the times to come, any more than the grains of corn are deterred from preparing for the next year, even if the mouths here demand arrows pointing in a completely different direction.

At the end of “The Riddles of Philosophy,” I pointed to this way of thinking, pointing out that what is called materialistic knowledge can be compared to eating a grain of corn, that what really happens in the world can be compared to what what happens to a grain of corn through reproduction until the following year. Therefore, what is called scientific knowledge is just as insignificant for the inner nature of things as eating is for the growth of grain, which has no inner significance. And today's science, which is concerned only with the way in which what can be known from things can be brought into the human mind, does exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, for what the grains of corn are when eaten has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grain. into the human mind, does exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, because what the grains of corn are when eaten has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grains of corn, just as external knowledge has nothing to do with what develops inside things.

In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the philosophical hustle and bustle, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood, or whether even such a very plausible thought will again and again be met with the foolish reply: Yes, Kant has already proven that knowledge cannot approach things. He only proved it with regard to knowledge that can be compared to the consumption of grains of corn, and not with regard to knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. But we must already familiarize ourselves with the fact that we must repeat again and again, in all possible forms—but not in hasty forms, not in agitational forms, not in fanatical forms—what is the principle and essence of spiritual science to our age and to the age that is coming, until it is drummed into people's heads. For it is precisely characteristic of our age that Ahriman has made people's skulls very hard and dense, and that they can only be softened again very slowly. So no one, I would say, needs to shrink back from the necessity of emphasizing again and again, in all possible forms, what is the essence and impulse of spiritual science.

But now let us look at another demand that was made here yesterday in connection with various prerequisites, namely the demand that in our time there must be a growing reverence for truth, a reverence for knowledge, not for authoritative knowledge, but for knowledge that is acquired. The attitude must grow that one should not judge out of nothing, but out of the knowledge one has acquired about the processes of the world.

Now, when we are born into a particular age, we are dependent on our environment, completely dependent on what is in our environment. But this is connected, as we have seen, with the whole stream of development, with the whole upward striving, so that we are born into circumstances that are dependent on previous circumstances. Just consider how we are placed there. Certainly, we are placed there through our karma, but we are nevertheless placed in what surrounds us as something very specific, as something that has a certain character. And now consider how this makes us dependent in our judgment. We do not always see this clearly, but it is really so. So that we must say to ourselves, even if it is connected with our karma: What would it be like if we had not been born at a certain time in a certain place, but fifty years earlier in another place? Then we would have acquired the form and inner direction of our judgments from the different circumstances of our environment, just as we have acquired them from the place where we were born, wouldn't we?

So that, on closer self-observation, we really come to the conclusion that we are born into a certain milieu, into a certain environment, that we are dependent on this milieu in our judgments and in our feelings, that this milieu reappears, as it were, when we judge. Now think how different it would be, I mean, if Luther had been born in the 10th century and in a completely different place! So even with a personality who has an enormously strong influence on their environment, we can see how they incorporate into their own judgments what is characteristic of the age, whereby the personality actually reflects the impulses of the age. And this is true of every human being, except that those in whom it is most evident are the least aware of it. Those who are most likely to reflect only the impulses of the environment into which they were born are usually the ones who talk most about their freedom, their independent judgment, their lack of prejudice, and so on. When, on the other hand, we see people who are not as thoroughly dependent on their environment as most people are, we see that it is precisely such people who are most aware of what makes them dependent on their environment.

And one of those who never got rid of the idea of dependence on their environment is the one we have just seen pass before our eyes, Goethe. He knew in the most eminent sense that he would not be who he was if he had not been born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749, and so on. He knew that, in a sense, his age spoke through him. This enlivened and moved his behavior in an extraordinary way. He knew that his judgment had been shaped by certain inclinations and circumstances he had observed in his father's house. His judgment had been shaped by his student days in Leipzig. His judgment had been shaped by his move to Strasbourg. This made him want to escape from his circumstances and enter into completely different ones, so that in the 1880s, one might say, he suddenly disappeared into the night and only told his friends about his disappearance when he was already far away, after it was impossible to bring him back under the circumstances at that time. He wanted to get out so that something else could speak through him. And if you take many of Goethe's statements from his formative years, you will notice this feeling, this sense of dependence on his environment everywhere.

Yes, but what should Goethe have strived for then, when he became fully aware that one is actually completely dependent on one's environment, when he connected his feelings and perceptions of this dependence with the thoughts we have expressed today? He would have had to say: Yes, what my environment is, is dependent on the whole current of history, right back to my ancestors. I will always remain dependent. I would have to transport myself back in my thoughts, in my soul experience, to a time when today's conditions did not yet exist, when conditions were completely different. Then, if I could put myself in those conditions, I would come to an independent judgment, not only judging how my time judges my time, but how I judge when I lift myself completely out of my time.

Of course, it cannot be a matter of such a person, who feels this to be necessary, transporting himself into his own former incarnation. But essentially he must transport himself to a time connected with a former incarnation, when he lived in completely different circumstances. And when he now transports himself back to this incarnation, he will not be dependent as he was before, because the circumstances have become completely different; the former circumstances have been destroyed, have come to an end. It is, of course, something else when I now transport myself back to a time whose entire environment, whose entire milieu has disappeared. What do you actually have then? Well, you have to say: before, you live your life there, you enjoy life; you are interwoven with life. You can no longer be interwoven with the life that has been destroyed, with the life of an earlier time; you can only live through this life spiritually and soulfully.

Then one could say: “We have life in its colorful reflection.” Yes, what would have to happen if such a person, who felt this, wanted to portray this emergence from the circumstances of the present and the arrival at an objective judgment from a standpoint that is no longer possible today? He would have to portray this in such a way that he is transported back to completely different circumstances. Whether this is exactly the previous incarnation or not is irrelevant; what matters are circumstances that were completely different on earth. And he would have to strive to fill his soul with the impulses that existed at that time. He would have to put himself into a kind of phantasmagoria, identify with this phantasmagoria, and live in it, live in a kind of phantasmagoria that represents an earlier time.

But this is what Goethe strives for when he continues his “Faust” in the second part. Think about it: he first places Faust in the circumstances of the present, where he lets him experience everything that can be experienced in the present. But deep down he feels that this cannot lead to any true judgment, because I am always influenced by what is around me; I have to get out, I have to go back to a time whose circumstances have been completely changed in our time and therefore cannot influence my judgment. That is why Goethe lets Faust travel all the way back to classical Greek times and lets him enter and experience the classical Walpurgis Night.

What he can experience in the present in the deepest sense, he has depicted in the Nordic Walpurgis Night. Now he must go back to the classical Walpurgis Night, because from the classical Walpurgis Night to the Nordic Walpurgis Night, all conditions have changed. What was essential to the classical Walpurgis Night has disappeared, and new conditions have arisen, symbolized by the Nordic Walpurgis Night. There you have the justification for Faust's return to the Greek era. The entire second part of Faust is the realization of what can be called: “In the colorful reflection we have life.”

First, there is still a passage through the conditions of the present, but these are conditions that are already preparing for destruction. We see what is developing at the imperial court, where the devil takes the place of the fool, and so on.

We see the creation of the homunculus, how the escape from the present is sought, and how, in the third act, Faust now enters the classical era. Goethe had already written the beginning at the turn of the 18th century; the other scenes were added in 1825, but the Helena scene had already been written in 1800, and Goethe calls it a “classical phantasmagoria” to indicate through the words that he means a return to conditions that are not the physical, real conditions of the present.

That is what is significant about Goethe's Faust poem: that it is, I would say, a work of striving, a work of struggle. I have emphasized clearly enough in recent times that it would be nonsense to regard Goethe's Faust poem as a finished work of art. I have done enough to show that there can be no question of a finished work of art. But as a work of striving, as a work of struggle, this Faust poem is so significant. Only then can one understand what Goethe achieved intuitively, when one allows oneself to be illuminated by what our spiritual science can shed on such a composition, and sees how Faust looks into the classical era, into the milieu of Greek culture, where conditions were completely different in the fourth post-Atlantean era than in our fifth post-Atlantean era. One really gains the highest respect for this struggle when one sees how Goethe began working on Faust in his early youth, how he gave himself over to everything that was accessible to him at the time, without really understanding it very well. Really, when approaching Faust, one must apply this point of view of spiritual science, because the judgments that the outer world sometimes makes are too foolish in relation to Faust.

How could the spiritual scientist fail to notice that time and again people who consider themselves particularly clever come up and point out how magnificently Faust expresses his creed, and say: Yes, in contrast to everything that so many people say about some kind of confession of faith, one should remember more and more the conversation between Faust and Gretchen:

... Feeling is everything;
Name is sound and smoke,
Enshrouding the glow of heaven.

Well, you know what Faust is discussing with Gretchen, and what is always cited when someone thinks they need to emphasize what should not be seen as religious profundity and what should be seen as religious sentiment. But they fail to consider that in this case Faust was forming his religious confession for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, and that all the clever professors are actually demanding that people never go beyond Gretchen's point of view in their religious beliefs. The moment one presents Faust's confession to Gretchen as something particularly sublime, one demands that humanity never rise above Gretchen's point of view. This is actually convenient and easy to achieve. One can also very easily boast that it is all feeling and so on, but one fails to notice that it is Gretchen's point of view.

Goethe, for his part, strove quite differently to make his Faust the bearer of a continuous struggle, as I have now indicated again with reference to this placing oneself in a completely earlier age in order to obtain the truth. Perhaps at the same time or slightly earlier, when Goethe wrote this “classical-romantic phantasmagoria,” this transposition of Faust into Greek antiquity, he wanted to clarify once again how his Faust should actually unfold, what he wanted to portray in Faust. And so Goethe wrote down a plan. It was based on his Faust at that time: a foundation, a number of scenes from the first part, and probably also the Helena scene. Goethe wrote down: “Ideal striving for influence and empathy with the whole of nature.”

So, as the century drew to a close, Goethe took up “the old Tragelaphen, the barbaric composition” again, as he said, at Schiller's suggestion. This is how he rightly described his Faust at the end of the century, for it had been written scene after scene. Now he said to himself: What have I actually done here? And he placed before his mind's eye this striving Faust, emerging from scholarship and drawing closer to nature.

Then he wrote down: I wanted to present:

1. “Ideal striving to influence and empathize with the whole of nature.
2. The manifestation of the spirit as world and genius of action."

This is how he sketched the manifestation of the earth spirit.

Now I have shown you how, after the manifestation of the earth spirit, Wagner, who appears, should actually be only a means for Faust's self-knowledge, should be only what is in Faust himself, a part of Faust. What is struggling within Faust? What is Faust doing now, with something struggling within him? He realizes: Until now, you have only lived in your surroundings, in what the outer world has offered you. He can see this best in the part of himself that is Wagner, who is completely content. Faust is in the process of achieving something in order to free himself from what he was born into, but Wagner wants to remain entirely what he is, wants to remain in what he is outwardly. What is it that lives out outwardly in the world from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch? It is the form into which human striving is imprinted. The spirits of form work outside on that into which we are to enter. But if man does not want to die in form, if he really wants to progress, he must always strive beyond this form. “Struggle between form and formlessness,” Goethe also writes.

But now Faust looks at the form: the Faust in Wagner there inside. He wants to be free of this form. This is a striving for the content of this form, a new content that can spring from within.

When we decided to erect a building here for the spiritual sciences, we could have looked at all possible forms, studied all possible styles, and then built a new building from them, as many architects of the 19th century did, and as we find everywhere outside. In that case, we would have created nothing new from the form that has come about in the development of the world: Wagnerian nature. But we preferred to take the “formless content,” we sought from what is initially formless, what is only content, to take the living experience of spiritual science and pour it into new forms.

Faust does this by rejecting Wagner:

Let him not be a loud fool!
It is reason and right sense
With little art that carry themselves forward.

“Preference for formless content,” Goethe also writes. And this is the scene he wrote when Faust rejects Wagner:

4. “Preference for formless content over empty form.”

But form becomes empty over time. If, after a hundred years, someone were to build exactly the same building as we have built today, it would again be an empty form. That is what we must take into account. That is why Goethe writes:

5. “Content brings form with it.”

That is what I want us to experience, and that is what we want with our building: content brings form with it. And: “Form,” writes Goethe, “is never without content.” Certainly it is never without content, but the Wagnerians do not see the content in it, so they accept only the empty form. The form is as justified as it can possibly be. But it is precisely in this that progress consists, that the old form is overcome by the new content.

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy with the whole of nature.
2. Manifestation of the spirit as genius of the world and of action.
3. Conflict between form and formlessness.
4. Preference for formless content over empty form.
5. Content brings form with it.
6. Form is never without content.

And now a sentence that Goethe wrote down to give his “Faust” the impetus, so to speak, a highly characteristic sentence. For the “Wagners” who think about it: Yes, form, content, how can I concoct that, how can I bring that together? - You can easily imagine a person in the present day who wants to be an artist and says to himself: Well, yes, the humanities, that's all very well. But it's none of my business what these muddle-headed people come up with as the humanities. But they want to build a house that, I believe, incorporates Greek, Renaissance, and Gothic styles; and there I see what they are thinking in the house they are building, how the content corresponds to the form. One could imagine that this would happen. It has to come if people think about eliminating contradictions, when the world is made up of contradictions and it is important to be able to place contradictions side by side. Goethe writes:

7. “These contradictions, instead of being united, must be made more disparate.”

That is, he wants to portray them in his “Faust” in such a way that they stand out as strongly as possible: “These contradictions, instead of being united, must be made more disparate.” And to do this, he once again juxtaposes two characters, one who lives entirely in form and is content when he clings to form, greedily digging for treasures of knowledge and happy when he finds earthworms. In our time, we could say: greedy for the secret of becoming human, and happy when he discovers, for example, that human beings originated from an animal species similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. Edinger, one of the most important physiologists of our time, recently gave a lecture on the origin of human beings from a primitive form similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. It is not true that the human world descended from apes, semi-apes, and so on; science has already moved beyond that. We must go further back, to where the animal species first branched off. There were once ancestors that resembled hedgehogs and rabbits, and on the other side we have humans as their descendants. Isn't it true that because humans are most similar to rabbits and hedgehogs in certain aspects of their brain structure, they must have descended from something similar? These animal species have survived, while the others have naturally all died out. So, dig greedily for treasures and be happy when you find rabbits and hedgehogs. That is one kind of striving, striving merely in form. Goethe wanted to portray this in Wagner, and he knows well that it is an intelligent striving; people are not stupid, they are intelligent. Goethe calls it “bright, cold, scientific striving.” “Wagner,” he adds.

8. “Bright, cold, scientific striving: Wagner.”

The other, the disparate, is what one wants to work out from within with every fiber of one's soul, after not finding it in form. Goethe calls it “dull, warm, scientific striving”; he contrasts it with the other and adds: “student.” Now that Wagner has confronted Faust, the student also confronts him. Faust remembers how he used to be a student, what he absorbed, such as philosophy, law, medicine, and unfortunately also theology, how he said when he was still a student: “All this makes me feel so stupid, as if a mill wheel were turning in my head.” But that is all in the past. He can no longer put himself back in that position. But it all had an effect on him. So:

9. “Dull, warm, scientific striving: student.”

And so it goes on. From then on, we actually see Faust becoming a student and then once again immersing himself in everything that enables one to take in the present.

Goethe now calls the rest of the first part, insofar as it was already finished and still needed to be completed, the following:

10. “The enjoyment of life as seen from outside; in dullness and passion, first part.”

This is how precisely Goethe understands what he has created. Now he wants to say: How should it continue? How should Faust really emerge from this enjoyment of life by the person into an objective worldview? He must come to the form, but he must now grasp the form with his whole being. And we have seen how far he must go back, to a place where conditions are completely different. There the form then confronts him as a reflection of life. The form confronts him in such a way that he now takes it up by becoming one with the truth that was valid at that time, and casts off everything that had to happen at that time. In other words, he tries to put himself into the time insofar as it was not permeated by Lucifer. He tries to go back to the divine standpoint of ancient Greece.

And when one lives into the external world in such a way that one enters into it with one's whole being, but takes nothing from the circumstances into which one has grown, then one arrives at what Goethe calls beauty in the highest sense. That is why he says: “enjoyment of deeds.” No longer enjoyment of the person, enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of action, going out, gradually removing oneself from oneself. Settling into the world is enjoyment of action outwardly and enjoyment with consciousness.

11. “Enjoyment of action outwardly and enjoyment with consciousness; second part. Beauty.”

What Goethe was unable to achieve in his struggle because his time was not yet the time of spiritual science, he nevertheless sketched out at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. For Goethe wrote some very significant words at the end of this sketch, which was a recapitulation of what he had done in the first part. He had already planned to write a kind of third part to his “Faust”; but only the two parts were completed, and they do not express everything Goethe wanted to say. For that he would have needed spiritual science.

What Goethe wanted to portray there is the experience of the whole of creation outside, when one has emerged from one's personal life. This entire experience of creation outside, in objectivity in the world outside, so that creation is experienced from within by carrying the truly inner outwards, is sketched out by Goethe, I would say, stammeringly with the words: “Enjoyment of creation from within” – that is, not from his point of view, in that he has stepped out of himself.

12. “Enjoyment of creation from within.”

With this “enjoyment of creation from within,” Faust would now have entered not only the classical world, but also the world of the spiritual.

Then there is something else at the end, a very strange sentence that refers to the scene Goethe wanted to create, did not create, but wanted to create, which he would have created if he had already lived in our time, but which was foreshadowed to him. He wrote: |

13. “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.”

I have heard very intelligent people discuss the meaning of this last sentence: “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.” People have said: So Goethe really had the idea in 1800 that Faust would go to hell and deliver an epilogue in chaos before entering hell? So it was only much, much later that he decided not to let Faust go to hell! I have heard many, many very learned discussions about this, many, many discussions! It means that in 1800 Goethe was not yet free from the idea of letting Faust go to hell after all. But they did not think that it was not Faust who delivered the epilogue, but of course Mephistopheles, after Faust had escaped to heaven!

Delivering the epilogue — we would say today — Lucifer and Ahriman on their way to hell; on their way to hell, they would discuss what they had experienced with the striving Faust.

I wanted to draw your attention once again to this recapitulation and to Goethe's exposition because it shows us in the most eminent sense how Goethe, with all that he was able to gain in his time, strove toward the path that leads straight upward into the realm of spiritual science.

One can only view “Faust” in its true sense if one asks oneself: Why has “Faust” remained, at its core, an imperfect work of literature, even though it is the greatest work of literature in the world and Faust is the representative of humanity in that he strives to break out of his milieu and is even carried back to an earlier age? Why, then, has this Faust remained an unsatisfactory work of literature? Because it merely represents the striving for what spiritual science is to incorporate into the development of human culture.

It is good to focus on this fact and to consider that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a work of literature emerged in which the figure at the center of this work, Faust, was to be lifted out of all the restrictive barriers that must surround human beings as they go through repeated earthly lives. The significance of Faust is that, however intensely he was born out of his folk culture, he nevertheless grew beyond it and into the universal human condition. Faust has none of the narrow barriers of folklore, but strives upward toward the universal human nature, so that we find him not only as the Faust of modern times, but also, in the second part, as a Faust who stands as a Greek among Greeks. It is an enormous setback in our time that, in the course of the 19th century, people began once again to place the greatest emphasis on the barriers to human development and even to see in the “national idea” something that could somehow still be a bearer of culture for our era. Humanity could wonderfully climb up to an understanding of what spiritual science should be, if one wanted to understand something like what is hidden in Faust.

It was not for nothing that Goethe wrote to Zelter, when he was writing the second part of Faust, that he had hidden much in Faust that would only gradually come to light.

Herman Grimm, of whom I have often spoken to you, pointed out that Goethe will only be fully understood in a thousand years. I must say that I believe this too. When people have delved even deeper than they have in our time, they will understand more and more of what lies in Goethe. Above all, however, they will understand what he strove for, what he struggled for, what he was unable to express. For if you were to ask Goethe whether what he put into the second part of Faust was also expressed in his Faust, he would say: No! But we can be convinced that if we were to ask him today: Are we, with spiritual science, on the path that you once strove for, as it was possible at that time? he would say: What spiritual science is, is moving along my paths.

And so, since Goethe allowed his Faust to go back to Greek times in order to show him as someone who understood the present, it is permissible to say: Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge that is wrested from the knowledge of the milieu, from the limitations of the environment, that is what we must acquire. And it is truly like a warning from current events, which are showing us how humanity is heading toward the opposite extreme, toward judging things as superficially as possible, and would prefer to go back only as far as the events of 1914 in order to explain all the terrible things we are experiencing today.

But those who want to understand the present must judge it from a higher vantage point than the present itself.

This is what I have wanted to place in your souls as a feeling during these days, a feeling that I have wanted to show you how it follows from a truly inner, living understanding of spiritual science, and how it has been sought by the greatest minds of the past, such as Goethe.

By not merely accepting what comes before our souls in these reflections as something theoretical, but by processing it in our souls, by letting it live in the meditations of our souls, it only then becomes living spiritual science. May we hold fast to this, to much, indeed to everything that passes through our souls as spiritual science!

You have just heard about the intimate connection between Christmas and the spiritual nature of things. It is true that this idea should penetrate our spiritual scientific work particularly deeply and warmly when we look at the tree decorated with lights in the dark middle of winter, on a winter night. Of all the symbols that have entered spiritual life from a certain elemental, not superficial, consciousness, the Christmas tree is actually one of the most recent. If we go back about two hundred years in the development of European spiritual life, we find the Christmas tree appearing here and there at most. It is not yet old as a Christmas symbol. With this thought, that the Christmas tree, which arouses the joy and impulse of gratitude in the child's heart, is one of the youngest Christian symbols, we easily combine the other thought that this Christmas tree has become infinitely dear to us in many of its branches, and that we do not want to do without it when we celebrate Christmas in our branches. Truly, this Christmas tree, even though it has only recently been transformed from the subconscious depths of the human heart into a Christian Christmas symbol, is connected with deep feelings and emotions about the nature and meaning of Christmas. In the Middle Ages, it became customary to perform Christmas plays around Christmas, New Year's, and Epiphany. Farmers, who prepared for this for a long time, went around the villages reenacting the birth of Christ. They reenacted the appearance of the three kings, the three magi, before the newborn Christ. But they also reenacted in the so-called Paradise plays what is described in the first book of Moses as the creation of our earthly world, the scene that so powerfully enlightens us, revealing the mysteries of our own soul, the scene at the beginning of the earth, into which the meaningful words resounded: You may eat of every tree in the garden, but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now all that remains as a reminder of the inner connection between the beginning of the creation of the earth and the Christmas festival is that our calendar shows “Adam and Eve” on December 24 and the birth of Christ Jesus on December 25.

And yet, as I said, not out of a thought but out of a feeling, one cannot help but wonder: Did the impulse to erect the ancient world tree, the tree from the middle of paradise, from which no one was supposed to eat, on the birthday of Christ Jesus perhaps arise from the dark depths of the human, Christian heart? The Paradise play was performed. What remained of the memory of Paradise was the tree of Paradise, and the tree of Paradise could be united with the feelings we have about the birth of Christ Jesus.

I do not want to develop theories here; today is not the day for that. Certainly, one can say other things about the reasons for the emergence of the Christmas tree, but out of the feelings that arise in us when we stand next to it, when we let those feelings shine in our souls that connect us to the most childlike feelings of human beings on this holiday, out of this feeling, one wants to speak when looking at the Christmas tree, because one sees in it something like a renewal of the tree of paradise. This Christmas tree does not actually appear to be a pagan symbol, nor does it appear to be a Norse pagan symbol. When our earth is covered with snow, when icicles hang from the eaves of houses and over the trees, and people take refuge from those areas of the earth where, for months on end, the greenery and colorful flowers have delighted the eye and the fruits necessary for human sustenance have been offered, when people have to take refuge from all that, what is outside, at least at first, according to his perception, what is there for him to occupy himself with, what he has to live with throughout the spring and summer, when he has to take refuge in those rooms through which the snow looks in, the icicles look in, and he has to warm them from the inside, then the heathen probably felt something of what what could become of the world if this world were left to itself. The heathen felt the great winter at the end of earthly existence when he was so abandoned by the spirits of nature, by everything he felt as gnomes, undines, and sylphs, when he had to flee into the warmth of the oven, flee from made him feel abandoned by his beloved nature, and when he could only glimpse through a small opening that which was impossible to inhabit. When he was able to experience this abandonment, he felt, in this wintertime, the end of earthly existence spreading out infinitely, flooding everything, drowning everything.

The Christian would have answered him, perhaps not out of theoretical understanding, but out of emotional understanding: You may be right, that is what would have happened to the earth if the tree had been allowed to unfold its power, from which humans unlawfully enjoyed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil through Lucifer's seduction. And when one thinks in this way about the development of the earth with this earthly goal after the desolation and loneliness of winter, after the cold and frost, also in relation to the soul life that would await everything earthly, and when one can connect this to the consequences of Lucifer's seduction, to the effects of the enjoyment of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then one can feel on the other side what the Christian idea actually means.

Before the idea of Christ, the idea of Easter came to the consciousness of people in Christian development, that idea which is so meaningfully recounted in the symbols of Easter, whereby man was freed from all that is in Lucifer's seduction. The grandeur of the Easter idea can shake and fill the soul in springtime with the awakening of nature. But it is different with the Christmas idea, this other side of the Christian idea. In order to understand the Easter idea, one must already have acquired certain knowledge. I would say that even the smallest children understand the Christmas idea intuitively. And what is this Christmas feeling when you explore it in children who are called to the Christmas tree after it has been decorated, the lights lit, and the presents laid out around it? What is this Christmas feeling when the children are led to the Christmas tree, when they receive their gifts, when they are told that the Holy Christ brought them — what is the essence of this?

The children may not know it, but they feel it unconsciously in those depths of the human soul that cannot always be brought to consciousness. What is this essence, when one really explores what actually lives in children — one does not usually do this — but when one explores what lives in children when they are called to the Christmas tree and hear that these gifts have been brought to them by a supernatural being? These are not gifts that they can pick themselves outside by the stream in summer or spring; no, these have come to them from the supernatural world. What is it that lives in children then? I think one can say that when one looks deeply into the hearts of children with those eyes that can be called the eyes of a seer, which one acquires little by little, the most significant, the most intense feeling that lives unconsciously in children's hearts is an infinitely deep gratitude. And when you empathize with them, you sense something like the thought that triggers this feeling of gratitude: Why does this gratitude take such a hold in the hearts and souls of children? Why? — Because, in fact, this heart says again in the deepest subconscious: We human children must be grateful that we have not been abandoned, that a being has inclined itself toward us from the heights of the spirit, that it has wanted to take up residence within human earthly existence; that on that earth, which should have remained dark as a result of the temptation of paradise, which should have grown cold and frozen as the great winter season, entered into this existence preparing for paralysis, the being whom we see entering anew every year into the time that also symbolically indicates to us the end of the earth in the frost of winter, in the darkness, in the gloom of winter. We must be grateful to the world spirit who descended, united himself with the earthly development of human beings, so that we need not fear the coming of the great winter, but may hope that when, through the outer natural course of the earth, the great winter follows in its earthly cosmic frost, there will be that being who approaches us every year in the form of a child and rejuvenates the earth, so that it is not carried away frozen to its further existence in the cosmos. Hence the infinite warmth that emanates from this Christmas festival. And hence, I would say, this peculiarly probative character of the Christmas festival. The Christmas festival has something that proves Christ. One can feel about Christmas that what it wants to represent is true, because as soon as the thought of Christmas is grasped in the soul of a human child, it immediately takes hold of the whole meaning of this child's heart, this childlike soul of the human being, and truly grasps everything childlike in the human being, regardless of whether this childishness manifests itself in childhood or in the latest age. It is precisely people who can feel so deeply, on the one hand, the outer nature with all its spring and summer beauty, who can also feel this peculiar desolation of wintertime, who can feel the solemn mood of the Christmas season, who also feel this proof of the Christmas festival.

A poet who spent his entire life observing nature in minute detail also spoke beautifully about Christmas in one of his poems. The poet who wrote these words said: People say that a thunderstorm is magnificent, that a storm is magnificent, that an earthquake or a volcanic eruption can be magnificent—I think that a ladybug running across a leaf is magnificent, if only one can feel its true nature. This is roughly what the poet Adalbert Stifter said. And from his familiarity with the greatness in the small things of nature, with that which spiritually pervades all of nature, his beautiful Christmas story emerged, which in its basic tone actually weaves and lives the essence of Christmas. The poet leads us into a lonely alpine valley that has a neighboring valley. There are villages in both valleys. As is customary in the Alps—at least in earlier times—the inhabitants of one valley have little contact with those of the other. However, it turns out that a resident of one valley, a cobbler, has married a woman from the other valley. She is regarded as a stranger, even though she was born only a short distance away across the mountains. They have children. The grandparents live in the other alpine valley. The grandfather does not think highly of his son-in-law, so he does not visit the children very often, but the grandmother used to come over more often. However, when the children grew a little older, although they were still small, the grandmother was already old and could no longer visit as often. So the children went to visit her. Once they were sent over, it was on Christmas Eve, to the other Alpine village, in weather that was quite safe. They went there. Being very young children, they had only stood a few times with any awareness in the nightly silence of the Alpine hut in front of the Christmas tree and heard a few words about the mystery of Christ, only a little. Now, while they were still relatively small children, they were sent away. They were to visit their grandmother. One could hope that the weather would remain favorable. They went to their grandmother in the neighboring village. Their grandmother gave them their presents and admonished them to be very careful on their way home. But lo and behold, snow began to fall. They had to cross the mountains to the other valley. They lost their way and could not find it again. They were lost. The boy, who was a little older, took care of the little girl. They even crossed glaciers. They were only able to keep going because they had some coffee with them that their grandmother had given them, which they unwrapped. The boy had once heard that coffee could prevent you from freezing. Yes, they couldn't find their way home. The night grew darker and darker, and they were high up in the middle of ice and snow, so that when the Christmas bells rang out everywhere at midnight, they couldn't even hear them. So they spent Christmas night in this way, while down in the village, of course, not only their parents but the whole village was seized with fear and anxiety. They had gone out to look for the children. But the children were up there in the solitude. They had to wait, keeping warm with everything they knew in their little cleverness, and wait until morning gradually came. As described at the beginning, they had the snow and ice beneath them and the stars above them. Then, as they looked up at the mountains, a wonderful light appeared over the mountains towards morning. The children were found, brought home half frozen, and put to bed. They had missed Christmas Eve, but they received their Christmas presents the next day. First, however, they had to recover from their numbness and were therefore put to bed. The mother—I will not recount all the various scenes that this poet describes in a way that touches the hearts of people so deeply—sits down at the little girl's bedside and asks her to tell her what terrible things the children have experienced. Then the little girl, who, as I said, had only heard a few words about the true meaning of Christmas, said: “Mother, when we were up there and it was so, so cold, and we saw nothing but snow and stars, I looked up at the stars, and do you know, Mother, what I saw when I looked up at the sky? I saw the Holy Christ!”

I said that such poetry has something probative about it, because it testifies to how intimately, even if a person has heard little about the Christian idea, the Christian idea is woven into the human heart in a natural, elementary way. Therefore, it must be deeply rooted in the human heart. It can be understood at every age, even at the most childlike age. The poet Adalbert Stifter spoke the truth. One understands it in such a way that even as a very small child, one can read in the writing of the stars how the Holy Christ speaks. It is truly connected with gratitude towards the fact of the world that a God wanted to descend to earth so that human beings would not be alone in the development of the earth. The divine helper has snatched us from loneliness. The child feels this. And this feeling of gratitude toward the world powers, which can be so deep, is that infinitely warm feeling that glows through the hearts of people during Christmas; it is what makes life during Christmas so warm in the cold of winter in a spiritual way, it is what makes life during Christmas so light in the winter darkness when the sun is at its lowest point.

And we who seek knowledge must seek it in a different way than it has been presented by the tempter. For we do seek knowledge. Yes, we seek spiritual knowledge. The tree of knowledge must be of value to us; it is indeed of value to us, if we feel correctly: the tree of knowledge. But we do not allow it to be handed to us by Luciferic powers. We accept it from Christ, who descended to earth. For this is how it can be accepted by the human heart, the human mind, the human striving for knowledge; this tree of knowledge can be accepted when Christ offers it to us. What Lucifer did not want to give to human beings, Christ gives to human beings. And so the tree of paradise is renewed: it becomes the Christmas tree. What Lucifer gave to human beings as a temptation, Christ gives back to human beings as reconciliation. And so even the most mature thought of the quest for knowledge is linked to the childlike thought of the Christmas tree. Just as a child accepts what it has seen coming from nature and society, accepting it as a holy gift on Christmas Eve, so we think of accepting what is holy and valuable to us, the gift from the tree of knowledge, from Christ, who wanted to unite his impulses with the impulses of the earth.

We will understand how to awaken, precisely in accordance with our worldview, that warm gratitude toward the Christ being who wanted to come to earth to free human beings from the loneliness symbolized by the darkness and cold of winter, while on the other hand symbolizing the spiritual warmth that human beings can share with the spiritual powers in what radiates true warmth from that consciousness which we can allow to penetrate our hearts from our spirit when we understand in the right sense the symbol of the Christmas tree, the renewed tree of knowledge, the tree of knowledge that is given to us by Christ Jesus, when we allow this Christmas symbol, which warms the coldness of the world, to speak to our soul, to our heart.

In the lectures given during this week there lies much which can lead us to understand the nature of man in its connection with the historical evolution of humanity in such a way as to enable us to gradually form a conception of necessity and free will. Such questions can be less easily decided by means of definitions and combinations of words than by bringing together the relevant truths from the spiritual world. In our age humanity must accustom itself more and more to acquire a different form of understanding for reality from the one so prevalent today, which, after all, holds to very secondary and nebulous concepts bound up with the definitions of words. If we consider what certain persons who think themselves especially clever write and say, we have the feeling that they speak in concepts and ideas which are only apparently clear; in reality however, they are as lacking in clarity as if someone were to speak of a certain object which is made, for example, out of a gourd, so that the gourd is transformed into a flask and used as such. We can then speak about this object as if we were speaking of a gourd, for it is a gourd in reality; but we can also speak of it as if it were a flask, for it is used as a flask. Indeed, the things of which we speak are first determined by the connections we are dealing with; as soon as we no longer rely upon words when we are speaking, but upon a certain perception, then everyone will know whether we mean a flask or a gourd. But then we may not confine ourselves to a description or a definition of the object. For as long as we confine ourselves to a description or definition of this object it can just as well be a gourd as a flask. In a similar way, that which is spoken of today by many philologists—persons who consider themselves very clever—may be the human soul, but it may also be the human body—it may be gourd or it may be flask. I include in this remark a great deal of what is taken seriously at the present time (partly to the detriment of humanity). For this reason it is necessary that a striving should proceed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for which clear, precise thinking is above all a necessity, a striving to perceive the world not in the way in which it is customary today (not by confusing the gourd and the flask) but to see everywhere what is real, be it outer physical reality, or spiritual reality.

We cannot in any case arrive at a real concept of what comes into consideration for the human being when we hold only to definitions and the like; we can do so only when we bear in mind the relationships of life in their reality. And just where such important concepts as freedom (free will) and necessity in social and moral life are concerned, we attain clarity only when we place side by side such spiritual facts as those brought out in these lectures, and always strive to balance one against the other in order to reach a judgment as to reality.

Bear in mind that over and over again—even in public lectures and also here—I have brought out with a certain intensity, from the most varied points of view, the fact that we can only rightly grasp what we call concepts when we bring them into relation with our bodily organism, in such a way that the basis of concepts in the body is not seen in something growing and flourishing, but just the opposite—something dying, something in partial decay in the body. I have expressed this in public lectures by saying that the human being really dies continually in his nervous system. The nerve-process is such that it must limit itself to the nervous system. For if it were to spread itself over the rest of the organism, if in the rest of the organism the same thing were to go on that goes on in the nerves, this would signify the death of man at every moment. We may say that concepts arise where the organism destroys itself. We die continuously in our nervous system. For this reason spiritual science is placed under the necessity of pursuing other processes besides the ascending processes which natural science of today considers authentic. These ascending processes are the processes of growth; they reach their summit within the unconscious. Only when the organism begins to develop the processes of decline does the activity of the soul appear which we designate as conceptual or indeed as perceptive activity of the senses. This process of destruction, this slow process of death, must exist if anything at all is to be conceived. I have shown that the free actions of human beings rest upon just this fact, that the human being is in a position to seek the impulses for his actions out of pure thoughts. These pure thoughts have [the] most influence upon the processes of disintegration in the human organism. What happens in reality when man enacts a free deed? Let us realize what happens in the case of an ordinary person when he performs an act out of moral fantasy—you know now what I mean by this—out of moral fantasy, this means out of a thinking which is not ruled by sense-impulses, sense-desires and passions—what really takes place here in man? The following takes place: He gives himself up to pure thoughts; these form his impulses. They cannot impel him through what they are; the impulses must come from man himself. Thoughts are mere mirror-pictures, they belong to Maya. Mirror-pictures cannot compel. Man must compel himself under the influence of clear concepts.

Upon what do clear concepts work? They work most strongly upon the process of disintegration in the human organism; they bring this about. So we may say that on the one side the process of disintegration arises out of the organism, and on the other, the pure deed-thought (Tat-Gedanke) comes to meet this disintegrating process out of the spiritual world. I mean by this the thought that lies at the basis of deed. Free actions arise by uniting these two through the interaction of the process of disintegration and willed thinking.

I have said that the process of disintegration is not caused by pure thinking; it is there in any case, in fact it is always there. If man does not oppose these processes of disintegration with something coming out of pure thinking, then the disintegrating process is not transformed into an up-building process, then a part that is slowly dying remains within the human being. If you think this through, you will see that the possibility exists that just through the failure to perform free actions man fails to arrest a death process within him. Herein lies one of the subtlest thoughts which man must accept. He who understands this thought can no longer have any doubt in life about the existence of human freedom. An action that is performed in freedom does not occur through something that is caused within the organism but occurs where the cause ceases, in other words, out of a process of disintegration. There must be something in the organism where the causes cease; only then can the pure thought, as motive of the action, set in. But such disintegrating processes are always there, they only remain unused to a certain extent when man does not perform free deeds.

But this also shows the characteristics of an age that will have nothing to do with an understanding of the idea of freedom in its widest extent. The age running from the second half of the 19th century to the present has set itself the particular task of dimming down more and more the idea of freedom in all spheres of life, as far as knowledge is concerned, and of excluding it entirely from practical life. People did not wish to understand freedom, they would not have freedom. Philosophers have made every effort to prove that everything arises out of human nature through a certain necessity. Certainly, a necessity underlies man's nature; but this necessity ceases as disintegrating processes begin, as the sequence of causes comes to an end. When freedom has set in at the point where the necessity in the organism ceases, one cannot say that man's actions arise out of an inner necessity, for they arise only when this necessity ceases. The whole mistake consists in the fact that people have been unwilling to understand not only the up-building forces in the organism, but also the disintegrating processes. However, in order to understand what really underlies man's nature it will be necessary to develop a greater capacity to do this than in our age. Yesterday we saw how necessary it is to be able to look with the eye of the soul upon what we call the human Ego. But just in our times human beings are not very gifted in comprehending this reality of the Ego. I will give an illustration.

I have often referred to the remarkable scientific achievement of Theodor Ziehen “Die physiologische Psychologie”—“Physiological Psychology.” On page 205 the Ego is also spoken of; but Ziehen is never in a position even to indicate the real Ego, he merely speaks of the Ego-concept. We know that this is only a mirror-picture of the real Ego. But it is particularly interesting to hear how a distinguished thinker of today—but one who believes that he can exhaust everything with natural scientific ideas—speaks about the Ego. Ziehen says:

It will perhaps occur to you that the Ego-concept which is expressed in the small word “I,” is a very complex threefold entity containing thousands and thousands of partial concepts. But I beg you to ponder this, the word is indeed short, but its conceptual content must be complex, as shown by the fact that each one of you would be at a loss if he were asked to render in thoughts the content of his so-called Ego-concept.

And now Ziehen attempts to say something about the thought-content of the Ego-concept. Let us now see what the distinguished scholar has to say concerning what we must really think when we think about our Ego.

You will immediately think of your body, [you notice that he says—you will think of your body] of your relationships to the outer world, [connection with the outer world] your family and personal relationships, [in other words you will soon begin to think of your bank account and to count your money!] of your name and title.

Now the distinguished scholar emphatically points out that we must also think of our name and of our title if we are to grasp or to encompass our Ego in the form of concept.

..... Your principal inclinations, predominating ideas and finally your past, and thus prove to yourself how extremely complex this Ego-concept is. Indeed, the reflective human being reduces this complexity of the Ego-concept to a relative simplicity by placing his own Ego as the subject of his feelings, thoughts and movements, against the outer objects and other Egos. Of course, this contrast and this sharpening of the Ego-concept has also its deeper scientific and philosophical basis, but considered purely psychologically this simple Ego is only a theoretical fiction.

Thus “this simple Ego” is only a “theoretical fiction” that means a mere fantasy-concept, which constructs itself when we put together our name, title, or let us assume our rank and other such things also, which make us important! By means of such points we can see the whole weakness of the present way of thinking. And this weakness must be held in mind the more firmly because of the fact that what proves itself to be a decided weakness for the knowledge of the life of the soul is a strength for the knowledge of outer natural scientific facts. What is inadequate for a knowledge of the life of the soul, just this is adequate for penetrating the obvious facts in their immediate outer necessity.

We must not deceive ourselves in regard to the fact that it is one of the characteristics of our times, that people who may be great in one field are exponents of the greatest nonsense in another. Only when we hold this fact clearly in mind—which is so well adapted to throw sand in the eyes of humanity—can we in any way follow with active thought what is required in order to raise again that power which man needs in order to acquire concepts that can penetrate fruitfully and healingly into life. For only those concepts can take firm hold of life as it is today, which are drawn out of the depths of true reality—where we are not afraid to enter deeply into true reality. But it is just this that many people shun today.

At present people are very often inclined to reform the spiritual reality, without first having perceived the true reality out of which they should draw their impulses.

Who today does not go about reforming everything in the world—or at least, believing he can reform it? What do people not draw up from the soul out of sheer nothingness! But at a time such as this only those things can be fruitful which are drawn up from the depths of spiritual reality itself. For this the Will must be active.

The vanity that wishes to take up every possible idea of reform on the basis of emptiness of soul is just as harmful for the development of our present time as materialism itself. At the conclusion of a previous lecture I called your attention to how the true Ego of man, the Ego which indeed belongs to the will-nature and which for this reason is immersed in sleep for the ordinary consciousness, must be fructified through the fact that already through public instruction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what

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struction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what spiritual forces and activities enter into our events and have an influence upon them. This cannot be accomplished with generalized, nebulous speeches about the spirit, but with knowledge of the concrete spiritual events, as we have described them in these lectures, where we have indicated, according to dates, how here and there certain of these powers and forces from the spiritual world have intervened here in the physical.

This brought about what I was able to describe to you as the joint work of the so-called dead and of the so-called living in the whole development of humanity. For the reality of our life of feeling and of will is in the realm where the dead also are. We can say that the reality of our Ego and of our astral body is in the same realm where the dead can also be found. The same thing is meant in both cases. This, however, indicates a common realm in which we are embedded, in which the dead and the living work together upon the tapestry which we may call the social, moral, and historical life of man in its totality; the periods of existence which are lived through between death and a new birth also belong to this realm. We have indicated in these lectures how between death and a new birth the so-called departed one has the animal kingdom as his lowest kingdom, just as the mineral kingdom is our lowest kingdom. We have also pointed out in a certain way, how the departed one has to work within the being of the animal kingdom, and has to build up out of the laws of the animalic the organization that again forms the basis for his next incarnation. We have shown how as second kingdom the departed one experiences all those connections which have their karmic foundation here in the physical world and which, correspondingly transformed, continue within the spiritual world. A second kingdom thus arises for the departed one, which is woven together of all the karmic connections that he has established at any time in an earthly incarnation. Through this, however, everything that the human being has developed between death and a new birth gradually spreads itself out, one might say, quite concretely over the whole of humanity.

The third kingdom through which the human being then passes can be conceived as the kingdom of the Angels. In a certain sense we have already pointed out the role of the Angels during the life between death and a new birth. They carry as it were the thoughts from one human soul to another and back again; they are the messengers of the common life of thought. Fundamentally speaking, the Angels are those Beings among the higher Hierarchies of whom the departed one has the clearest living experience—he has a clear living experience of the relationships with animals and human beings, established through his karma; but among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies he has the clearest conception of those belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who are really the bearers of thoughts, indeed of the soul-content from one being to another, and who also help the dead to transform the animal world. When we speak of the concerns of the dead as personal concerns, we might say that the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels must strive above all to look after the personal concerns of the dead. The more universal affairs of the dead that are not personal are looked after more by the Beings of the Kingdom of the Archangeloi and Archai.

If you recall the lectures in which I have spoken about the life between death and a new birth, you will remember that part of the life of the so-called dead consists in spreading out his being over the world and in drawing it together again within himself I have already described and substantiated this more deeply. The life of the dead takes its course in such a way that a kind of alternation takes place between day and night, but so that active life arises from within the departed. He knows that this active life which thus arises is only the reappearance of what he has experienced in that other state which alternates with this one, when his being is spread out over the world and is united with the outer world. Thus when we come into contact with one who is dead we meet alternating conditions, a condition, for instance, where his being is spread out over the world, where he grows, as it were, with his own being into the real existence of his surroundings, into the events of his surroundings. The time when he knows least of all is when his own being that is in a kind of sleeping state grows into the spiritual world around him. When this again rises up within him it constitutes a kind of waking state and he is aware of everything, for his life takes its course within Time and not in space. Just as with our waking day-consciousness we have outside in space that which we take up in our consciousness, and then again withdraw from it in sleep—so from a certain moment onward the departed one takes over into the next period of time the experiences which he has passed through in a former one; these then fill his consciousness. It is a life entirely within Time. And we must become familiar with this.

Through this rhythmic life within Time, the departed enters into a very definite relationship with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. He has not as clear a conception of these Archangeloi and Archai Beings as of the Angels, of man, and of the animal; above all he always has this conception that these Beings, the Archai and Archangeloi, work together with him in this awaking and falling asleep, awaking and falling asleep, in this rhythm which takes place within the course of time. The departed one, when he is able to do so, must always bring to consciousness what he experienced unknowingly in the preceding period of time; then he always has the consciousness that a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archai has awakened him; he is always conscious that he works together with the Archai and Archangeloi in all that concerns this rhythmic life.

Let us firmly grasp the fact that just as in a waking state we realize that we perceive the outer world of which we know nothing during sleep, just as we realize that this outer world sinks into darkness when we fall asleep, so in the soul of the so-called dead lives this consciousness—Archai, Archangeloi, these are the Beings with whom I am united in a common work in order that I may pass through this life of falling asleep and awaking, falling asleep and awaking, and so forth. We might say that the departed one associates with the Archangeloi and Archai just as in waking consciousness we associate with the plant and mineral world of our physical surroundings. Man cannot however look back upon this interplay of forces in which he is interwoven between death and a new birth. Why not? We may indeed say, why not, but just this looking back is something which man must learn; yet it is difficult for him to learn this owing to the materialistic mentality of today. I would like to show you in a diagram why man does not look back upon this.

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Let us suppose that you are facing the world with all your organs of perception and understanding. This will give you a conceptual and perceptive content of a varied kind. I will designate the consciousness of a single moment by drawing different rings or small circles. These indicate what exists in the consciousness during the space of a moment. You know that a memory-process takes place when you look back over events—but in a different manner than modern psychologists imagine this. The time into which you can look back, to which your memory extends, is indicated by this line; it really indicates the space which here reaches a blind alley. This would be the point in your third, fourth or fifth year that is as far back as you can remember in life. Thus all the thoughts which arise when you look back upon your past experiences lie within this space of time. Let us suppose that you think of something in your thirtieth year for instance, and while you are thinking of this you remember something that you experienced ten years ago. If you picture very vividly what is actually taking place in the soul you will be able to form the following thought. You will say, if I look back to the point of time in my childhood which is as far back as I can remember, this constitutes a “sack” in the soul, which has its limits; its blunt end is the point which lies as far back in my childhood as I am able to remember. This is a sort of “sack” in the soul; it is the space of time which we can grasp in memory. Imagine such a “soul-sack” into which you can look while you are looking back in memory; these are the extreme limits of the sack which correspond in reality to the limit between the etheric body and the physical. This boundary must exist, otherwise ... well, to picture it roughly, the events that call forth memory would then always fall through at this point. You would be able to remember nothing, the soul would be a sack without a bottom, everything would fall through it. Thus, a boundary must be there. An actual “soul-sack” must be there. But at the same time this “soul-sack” prevents you from perceiving what you have lived through outside it. You yourself are non-transparent in the life of your soul because you have memories; you are non-transparent because you have the faculty of memory.

You see therefore—that which causes us to have a proper consciousness for the physical plane is at the same time the cause of our being unable to look with our ordinary consciousness into the region that lies behind memory. For it does really lie behind memory. But we can make the effort to gradually transform our memories to some extent. However we must do this carefully. We can begin by trying to keep before us in meditation with more and more accuracy something which we can remember, until we feel that it is not merely something which we take hold of in memory, but something which really remains there. One who develops an intensive, active life of the spirit will gradually have the feeling that memory is not something that comes and goes, comes and goes—but that memory contains something permanent. Indeed, work in this direction can only lead to the conviction that what rises within memory is of a lasting nature and really remains present as Akashic Record, for it does not disappear. What we remember remains in the world, it is there in reality. But we do not progress any further with this method; for merely to remember accurately our personal experiences, and the knowledge that memory remains—this method is in a higher sense too egotistical to lead farther than just to this conviction. On the contrary, if you were to develop beyond a certain point just this capacity of looking upon the permanency of your own experiences, you would obstruct all the more your outlook into the free world of spirit. Instead of the sack of memories, your own life stands there all the more compactly and prevents you from looking through.

Another method may be used in contrast to this; through it, the impressions in the Akashic Record become remarkably transparent, if I may use this expression. When we are once able to look through the stationary memories, we look with a sure eye into the spiritual world with which we are connected between death and a new birth. But to attain this we must not use merely the stationary memories of our own life; these become more and more compact, and we can see through them less and less. They must become transparent. And they become transparent if we make an ever stronger attempt to remember not so much what we have experienced from our own point of view, but more what has come to us from outside. Instead of remembering for instance what we have learned, we should remember the teacher, his manner of speech, what effect he had upon us and what he did with us. We should try to remember how the book arose out of which we learned this or that. We should remember above all what has worked upon us from the outer world. A beautiful and really wonderful beginning, indeed an introduction to such a memory, is Goethe's Wahrheit and Dichtung (his autobiography) where he shows how Time has formed him, how various forces have worked upon him. Because Goethe was able to achieve this in his life, and looked back on his life not from the standpoint of his own experiences, but from the standpoint of others and of the events of the times that worked upon him, he was able to have such deep insight into the spiritual world.

But this is at the same time the way that enables us to come into deeper touch with the time which has taken its course between our last death and our present birth.

Thus you see that today I am referring you, from another point of view, to the same thing to which I have already referred—to extend our interests beyond the personal, to turn our interests and attention not upon ourselves, but upon that that has formed us, that out of which we have arisen. It is an ideal to be able to look back upon time, upon a remote antiquity, and to investigate all the forces that have formed these “fine fellows”—the human beings.

Indeed, when we describe it thus, this offers few difficulties; it is no simple task, but it bears rich fruit because it requires great selflessness. It is just this method that awakens the forces which enable us to enter with our Ego the sphere which the dead have in common with the living. To know ourselves, is less important than to know our time; the task of public instruction in a not too distant future will be to know our time in its concrete reality, not as it now stands in history books ... but time such as it has evolved out of spiritual impulses.

Thus we are also led to extend out interest to a characteristic of our age and its rise from the universal world process. Why did Goethe strive so intense to know Greek art, to understand his age, through and through, to weigh it against earlier ages? Why did he make his Faust go back as far as the Greek age, as far as the age of Helen of Troy, and seek Chiron and the Sphinxes? Because he wished to know his own age and how it had worked upon him, as he could know it only by measuring it against an earlier age. But Goethe does not let his Faust sit still and decipher old state-records, but he leads him back along paths of the soul to the impulses by which he himself has been formed. Within him lies much of that which leads the human being on the one hand to a meeting with the dead, and on the other hand with the Spirits of Time, with the Archangels (this is now evident through the connection of the dead with the Archangels). Through the fact that man comes together with the dead, he also comes in touch with the Archangels and with the Spirits of Time.

Just the impulses that Goethe indicated in his Faust contain that through which the human being extends his interest to the Time Spirit, and that which is preeminently necessary for our times. It is indeed necessary for our times to look in a different way for instance upon Faust. Most of those who study Faust hardly find the real problems contained in it. A few are able to formulate these problems, but the answers are most curious.

Take for example the passage where Goethe really indicates to us that we should reflect. Do people always reflect at this point? Yet Goethe spares no effort to make it clearly understood that people should reflect upon certain things. For instance you know that Erichtho speaks about the site of the Classical Walpurgis-night; she withdraws and the air-traveler Homunculus appears with Faust and Mephistopheles. You will recall the first speeches of Homunculus, Mephistopheles and Faust. After Faust has touched the ground and called out. “Where is she?”—Homunculus says:—

It's more than we can tell
But to enquire would here be well.
Thou 'rt free to hasten, ere the day,
From flame to flame, and seek her so:
Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

Homunculus says:—

Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

How does he know that Faust has been with the Mothers? This is a question which necessarily arises; for if you will look back through the book you will find that there is nowhere any indication that Homunculus, a distinct and separate being from Faust, could have known that Faust had been with the Mothers. Now suddenly Homunculus pipes out that, “Who to the Mothers found his way, has nothing more to undergo.” You see, Goethe propounds riddles. With clear-cut necessity it ensues that Homunculus, if he is anything at all, is something within the sphere of consciousness of Faust himself, for he can know what is contained in the sphere of Faust's consciousness only if he himself belongs to this same sphere of consciousness.

Call to mind the various expositions we have given of Faust:—how Homunculus is really nothing else than what must be prepared as astral body, in order that Helen may appear. But for this reason he is in another state of consciousness; his consciousness is spread out over the astral body. When we know that Homunculus comes within the sphere of Faust's consciousness we can understand his knowledge. Goethe makes Homunculus come into existence because, through the creation of Homunculus, Faust's consciousness finds the possibility of transcending itself as it were, not merely of remaining within itself, but of being outside. He, too, is where Homunculus is to be found; Homunculus is a part of Faust's consciousness. Goethe as you see takes alchemy very seriously. There are many such riddles in Faust which are directly connected with the secrets of the spiritual world. We must allow Faust to work upon us so that we become aware of the depths of spiritual reality which are really contained in it. We can only understand a man like Goethe when we realize on the one hand, that he had studied what had formed him really as if he had viewed it from outside, as can be seen in his autobiography (Wahrheit and Dichtung)—and that on the other hand, he knew that this must lead back to distant perspectives, to distant connections with the dead. Faust enters the life of very ancient civilizations of humanity, the life of spiritual Beings lying far back in the past.

[But if one wants to see clearly what is necessary in a positive sense for the present, then one must also have an eye and a feeling for the negative in many respects, one must develop the right feeling for the negative. One must have an eye for everything that prevents the necessary coming together of living people in a common plan with the work of the dead. You can discover these obstacles everywhere today. You find them at every turn. You find them precisely where education — forgive me for using this ugly word — is spread today.¹

How can a person today feel truly intelligent, deeply intelligent, enlightened, when he can write something like this: “Swedenborg, whose dark and enigmatic personality even Goethe explored with reverent hesitation, communicated with angels beyond the earth. He said that these supernatural beings, armed with thoughts, even walk around dressed in robes. The struggle for knowledge and enlightenment is not foreign to them, for they have set up a printing press from which they sometimes send a few sheets to particularly fortunate people. The newspapers of the hereafter are then covered with Hebrew letters. A peculiar feature of the venerable biblical symbols is that every line, every edge, every curve conceals a mysterious spiritual value. Man only has to learn to read the angelic squiggles correctly in order to be initiated into the truth of the hereafter, into the reversed, eternally sunlit life, into the blissful festivity and exhilarating paradise of the hereafter. Swedenborg, who sometimes managed to die to earthly life while still alive and to make the transition to the afterlife before physical death, asked the angels many questions and reported on them. Centuries before him, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Jews practiced the same craft of exploration. Generations after him, even to this day, it is done by those beings on earth who are dissatisfied, who want to seek counsel from God about their future, who do not want to renounce the company of their dead, and who finally believe that the bridge built from their dream-filled beds to the realms of the incomprehensible is a solid, seraphic path, cemented and supported by spirits.

And so the person in question, who considers himself very clever, continues his reflections, indulging in cheap mockery of those who try to build a bridge to the hereafter; for this very clever man has read the book of another person who considers himself very clever and writes about it: “This beyond of the senses, inhabited by the soul, is what the weighty book by Max Dessoir wants to describe anew, after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path to the afterlife. This time, therefore, it is a philosopher who speaks, who has strived more for knowledge of human nature than for the separation of orphaned schools of thought, an art lover who has not shied away from interpreting the enigmatic moment of an artist's birth, a man who has occasionally searched the bones and nerves of human beings with a knife in his hand in order to find his way through the numerous earthly hiding places of the soul.”

Because Dessoir is so multifaceted in his protection against the rashness of fanatics and the coldness of arrogant rationalists, his judgment on matters of the hereafter, which he has been preparing for more than thirty years, deserves respect and attention even from those who cannot follow him on his path,” and so on.

I had to discuss this individual, Max Dessoir, in the second chapter of my book, “Von Seelenrätseln” (On the Riddles of the Soul), because this university professor had the audacity to discuss anthroposophy as such. I had to undertake the task of proving that the whole way Max Dessoir works is the most unscrupulous, superficial way imaginable. This man has the audacity to pass a disparaging judgment based almost exclusively on nonsensical quotations that he extracts from a few of my books and always quotes in such a way that they are distorted in the most absurd manner. One must state the facts in this way if one wants to see the scandal that is possible within what is today often called science. I have only seen Dessoir once in my life; it was in the early 1990s. At that time, he made a very clever remark to me. My “Philosophy of Freedom” had not yet been written. Max Dessoir said at the time—it was at a Goethe dinner in Weimar: “Yes, you do have one fault, you concern yourself with too many sciences.” That was the great mistake, trying not to be one-sided!

Among the other absurdities that Max Dessoir commits in his book is, for example, that he now refers to my Philosophy of Freedom as my “first work.” It was written about ten years after my actual first work; I had been a writer for ten years before Philosophy of Freedom. All this and much more is equally false in Dessoir's book. How many people will read the necessary, factual refutations in my book Von Seelenrätseln (On the Riddles of the Soul), which show what hot air Dessoir's scholarship is! But how much journalistic rabble of the sort found in Max Hochdorf in Zurich is gathering to trumpet Max Dessoir's nonsensical book Vom Jenseits der Seele (Beyond the Soul) in such a way that one says, “This beyond the senses, which is inhabited by the soul, is what Max Dessoir's weighty book wants to 'Vom Jenseits der Seele' (Beyond the Soul), after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path into the hereafter,” and so on.

It is necessary to focus on such things. It is well known that what is attempted on the basis of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is distorted in the most unprecedented ways here and there, sometimes by people who know very well that the opposite of what they say is true. But these are mostly poor wretches who have been unable to satisfy their personal interests within society, who believed they could satisfy them, and whom one can pity, but about whom there is no need to talk further. And they themselves know best how it stands with the objective truth of what they say. But poison such as that spread by Max Dessoir must be taken more seriously, and I had to do my part to clarify, sentence by sentence, so to speak, the entire philosophical worthlessness of Dessoir's arguments. Until a healthy judgment prevails in the widest circles about such alleged science as that of Max Dessoir—and there are many such Max Dessoirs—and until a healthy judgment prevails about such followers of Max Dessoir, such as the author of this article, who of course cannot resist concluding his article with the words: “Because the path to the afterlife is so completely blocked” — of course, for the blocked mind of this Mr. Max Dessoir, the path to the afterlife is blocked! — ‘people have tried again and again over the millennia to break down the barriers.’ Dessoir calls these fighters for the desperately fixed yet intangible spirit realm ”magical idealists.” He lists them all, these faith healers, apostles of numbers, Egyptian magicians, Negro saints, anthroposophists, neo-Buddhists, Kabbalists, and Hasidim. He is a highly captivating chronicler of all those generations who have submitted to miracles and yet rebelled against them. A peculiar society forms when one lists all the men, wise and foolish, who wanted to gather around the pure spirit. Cagliostro and Kant, Hegel and even the modern sorcerer Svengali meet there as they wander aimlessly on their way to the afterlife.

It is, of course, impossible to prevent people from writing in this way, but in the widest circles a healthy judgment must prevail which prevents what comes into the public domain in this way from being accepted as authoritative. For it goes without saying that thought forms of this kind, spraying around in our social organism, prevent any possibility of beneficial progress for humanity. For oneself, when one has had to attack scientific rubbish such as that of Max Dessoir, one can wash one's hands and declare oneself satisfied. But this scientific rubbish flows and flows, and today there are far too many channels through which this rubbish can flow. Sometimes one has to nail down an example. In this case, it had to be done again, because you can imagine how many people's minds will once again be filled with a judgment about anthroposophy when a feature article such as the one that appeared on December 14, 1917, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is written by someone who is considered quite clever and who bases his views on someone else who is considered just as clever, namely Max Dessoir!

These things must be regarded as cultural-historical facts, and their cultural-historical significance must be taken into account. Certainly, there is unfortunately only a slight possibility today of bringing something like this chapter I have written, “Max Dessoir on Anthroposophy,” to the attention of the general public. For even in the Anthroposophical Society there is only a small circle that truly understands its task: the task of enlightening humanity about the way science is often practiced today, of enlightening it in the right and proper way. And what is practiced today as science is only a symptom of general thinking. For just as things are in science — of which Max Dessoir, with all his followers, is a glaring example — so they are in other fields. And if you ask the question: What deeper forces have led to today's catastrophe? — you will always remain on the surface if you do not go into these deeper reasons, into what lies in the contortion, in the deliberate contortion and in the deliberate superficiality, charlatanism, a charlatanism that seeks to maintain itself by attributing serious intellectuality precisely to charlatanism. This must be seen in its true form in a healthy sense. I cite the example of Max Dessoir only because it is so obvious. But it is an example of much that exists as negative in our time. If anyone in humanity wants to have a heart for the positive aspects of growing together with the spiritual world, then they must also have a heart for rejection, for strong, heartfelt rejection wherever possible, of the inauthentic, the superficial, the useless.

We are experiencing this very much in our own day, that often those who are portrayed in the worst light in public life are precisely the most decent people. There is no need to view these things with pessimism, but there is a need to seek forces within one's own soul that will produce and nurture a healthy judgment about these things in that soul.]

• 1. The section in brackets was not available in the original translation.

We have often looked back to the views of earlier times, and we want to do so again today, in a certain sense, with the aim of gaining some insights into the history of humanity and human development. When we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times we refer to in our terminology as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was completely different from the way we look at things today, even if we take a period of time that is very far removed from our own. When we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. People saw nature in such a way that they still perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual parts of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that initially surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been unthinkable for a person of those older times to speak of nature as we do. For they would have felt as we would feel if we were sitting in front of a collection of corpses — the image is somewhat grotesque, but it corresponds quite well to the facts — and then said that we were among human beings. What presents itself to human beings today as nature would have been perceived by people thousands of years before our era as nothing more than the corpse of nature. For they perceived spiritual and soul elements in everything that surrounded them.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a soul nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times, when it needed something other than having the spiritual world presented to it in images, after nature had been deprived of its soul for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian period had taken in the breath, held it back in his own body, so to speak, in order to feel in this breathing: The divine impulse of the I lives within you. As yoga students, people experienced God within themselves through the breathing process. Later times came. People no longer experienced the divine impulse within themselves in the breathing process. But they had learned to think, and they said: Through the breath, the soul entered into human beings. The ancient yoga students experienced this. Later humans said: And God breathed the living breath into humans, and they became souls. — The older yoga students experienced this, later humans said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew times, people already experienced in a certain abstract sense what they had previously experienced concretely. But people did not look at it in ancient Hebrew times, they looked at it in ancient Greek times. One thing always takes place in one part of the world, another in another part. People no longer experienced God within themselves as the old yoga student did, but instead they experienced the existence of God in human beings in images. And this experience of the existence of God in human beings was very much present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the mystery of Golgotha. But in return, the image was now discarded. The image became a mere image, just as the process of breathing was now only described in thought. The entire human soul state became different.

Man saw the outer world as dead, and for him it was elementary, natural, that he saw the outer world as dead. He saw it de-deified. He saw himself as the outer world, as the physical outer world, de-deified. But he had the consolation that once, in this de-deified world, the real God had come down, Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection had passed into the whole of earthly evolution as the Christ impulse. And so human beings were now able to develop a certain view in the following way. They could say to themselves: I see the world, but it is a corpse. Of course, they did not say this to themselves, for it remained in the unconscious; human beings do not know that they see the world as a corpse. But gradually the image of the corpse on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus, formed in their view. And when one looks at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then one has nature. One has the image of nature, that nature in which man is crucified. And if one looks at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then one has what was seen in ancient times in the whole of nature. Certainly, in a multiplicity, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all kinds of other beings of the earthly hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and animated. Now, however, people felt the urge, through the intellectualism that was already sprouting, to summarize what was scattered in nature. They summarized it in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus they see everything that they have lost in outer nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, conquered death, and now every human soul can participate in His essence. One has lost the ability to see the divine-spiritual in the surroundings of nature. One has gained the ability to find this divine-spiritual in Christ again in view of the mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

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In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

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In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

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What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.