The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A Christmas Gift

It could easily seem as if the simple, loving joy that has expressed itself in hundreds and hundreds of hearts over long periods of time, when such a play about the divine child and his destiny on earth passed by these hearts , it might easily seem as if this simple, loving joy were affected by our spiritual-scientific worldview, by the seemingly so complicated, so much-evoked insights of Christ Jesus, to which we must strive within our worldview. Every heart and every mind will certainly be joyfully seized when it can become aware of such a play again, as it has been throughout the centuries during this Christmas season in the hearts of people, both in the cities and in the most lonely deserts, of those people who have gone through a certain spiritual life and of those people who remained in the simplicity of rural life, how all these hearts felt drawn to the divine child, in whom they perceived the forces that once entered into the becoming of humanity and saved this becoming from the spiritual death to which it was otherwise believed to be subject by virtue of the eternal laws of the world. Every heart, every mind must be seized when it sees again how this divine child has been worshiped.

And yet, it is only apparent if one wanted to believe that through our increasingly complicated knowledge of the miracle of Bethlehem, this direct warmth, this elementary feeling, could somehow be affected. It is, I say, only seemingly looked at the circumstances if one can think so. For we live in a very different world today, and will increasingly live in a very different world from the centuries that passed such plays in their seasons, not in the way we do, but in the way of direct life. Our complicated time, which has looked so deeply into scientific thinking and imagining, needs a different impulse of the soul in order to be able to look up again to the divine child who has brought the greatest impulse into the becoming of humanity. Only seemingly more complicated is our view, which speaks of the two Jesus children, of the Solomon-like and the Nathan-like Jesus child. For we see in the Nathanian Jesus child, as it were, the child of the whole of humanity, that being of humanity which remained behind when the other humanity began its earthly path, remained behind in spiritual worlds, before the tempter, the Luciferic principle, approached humanity. We see that it remained, as it were, at the stage of human childhood and was retained as the spiritual childhood impulse of humanity in the spiritual realm until 'the time was fulfilled', when it was born as an exceptional human being in the Nathanian Jesus child and appeared as a human that did not pass through the incarnations on earth before, but that appeared for the first time in an earthly embodiment and that, immediately after birth, addressed his mother in a language that only she understood, a language that sounded like it came from the heights of heaven. And more and more people will be convinced that, in order to understand the different way in which humanity is understood in our time, we need to look up to the divine child, whom we revere in the boy Jesus, the son of Nathan, who remained behind on the childhood stage of humanity in the spiritual realm, who was born with those human qualities, with those original characteristics that all human beings would have had if they had not entered into earthly existence through the luciferic temptation. It was with all these qualities, which were the very property of humanity before the luciferic temptation, that the Nathanic Jesus-child entered into humanity.

We need to know this today, we need to know that we have the childhood of all humanity in this boy Jesus, so that we can feel from the depths of our soul the same feelings that simple people of the past felt – but only felt, which we can know if we want to continue along the spiritual path – when they encountered the glorification of the divine child in such games. What speaks most to our soul in such a play, as it has come to us, is precisely the child's deepest innocence, humanity's own divine child innocence in the face of what the tempter in the guise of Lucifer or the later Ahriman, who is to be seen as the medieval “devil”), has made of humanity. The contrast between Herod, who was seduced by the devil and then killed by him, and the child of humanity who preserves the principle of human innocence and leads to eternal life, is deeply moving.

Such ideas, as they live in such plays, they truly did not come from superficial feelings. They arose from the intuitive recognition of the deepest secrets of the world, which were known, even if only intuitively, from the Middle Ages, from the cities to the deserts of the mountains and the countryside. Only the way in which human souls turned to those secrets was different from the way in which we must fathom them again.

And it is easy for the soul's gaze to turn from such a play to representations in which, one might say, with all the means of the highest art, as they arose in the 13th and 14th centuries from the abundance of Christian feeling, the whole mystery of the coming of humanity to earth and the relationship of the human soul to that which lives as the eternal divine in the human being was depicted. So today, when we want to celebrate the holy Christmas in our own way, I would like to turn my gaze away from these games to a magnificent representation, in which we are able to admire the very origins that lead from the highest feeling and, one might say, from “scientific-artistic knowledge” for the Middle Ages, to such simple games. I would like to direct our view to one such supreme artistic representation, which contains, as it were, the very origins of what is then found in such simple games.

In Pisa, the western Italian city, is the famous cathedral where, as we have mentioned several times, Galileo observed the swinging church lamp, and through his genius discovered the laws without which modern physics would be unthinkable. Adjacent to this church, we find the famous Camposanto, enclosed by high walls, on which medieval art has embodied what was thought about the divine secrets and the connection of man with these divine secrets, with the eternal spiritual principle thought in the human being. Some of these medieval secrets are picturesquely depicted on the walls of the Camposanto of Pisa. This churchyard was covered with soil that the crusaders brought from the tomb of Jesus Christ. And anyone who visits this churchyard today and picks up a handful of earth can get the feeling that there is something under this earth that the crusaders once brought from Palestine to spread out on this churchyard, which was to be considered particularly sacred.

Among the paintings on the walls of the Camposanto is one called “The Triumph of Death”. However, it has only been called that since 1705. Before that, everyone who saw it and knew it and spoke of it called it “Purgatory”. And there certainly were also a “heaven” and a “hell” on the walls of the Camposanto. But this Purgatory contains most profoundly the way in which the medieval soul viewed the mystery of the human soul and its connection with the eternal in the human being. Today, much of this image has already been corrupted. But through the corrupted, one can still see what the painter, unknown to history today, wanted to conjure up on the wall of the great mysteries of becoming human.

First we see a procession of kings and queens emerging from a mountain cave and developing mightily, full of self-confidence and arrogance and imbued with the feeling: We know what one is on earth if one belongs to such a class! The procession emerges from a mountain cave and, as it comes out of the cave, it encounters three coffins guarded by a hermit. Suddenly, the hunting party finds itself standing before these three coffins. The contents of the coffins are characteristically different: one contains a skeleton, the second a corpse that has already begun to decompose, with worms gnawing at it, and the third a recently deceased person who has only just begun to decompose. The procession stops before these three coffins. A hermit is sitting in front of these coffins, as if to indicate with his gesture: Stop! Look at what you really are as human beings at this memento mori. Further up, above the mountain, on a second ascending hill, we see three hermits sitting, some of them bringing food, but some of them also deeply absorbed in their books, pondering the secrets of becoming human. The whole thing is arranged in such a way that the one mountain at the top forms the ceiling, as it were. Where the hunting procession encounters the coffins, the three hermits are seated at the top, representing peace and having the ability to enter the depths of the human soul to find the connection between that human soul and the realms of the eternal. And if we look further, we see all kinds of dismembered people immediately joining the hunt, which is standing in front of the memento mori. Further on, we see people listening to the sounds of a harp; behind the harp stands a figure with a finger to its mouth. Above them, we see a host of angelic beings on one side, and devilish ones in hideous images – the painter has used all his imagination to depict the devils – on the other. So that on the far right of the picture we see the angels leaning down to the people listening to the harp. Between them and the mountain, from whose crater fire is coming, we see the devils developing.

But all this is actually there for the one who looks at it, to draw attention to something that one might not want to notice on superficial examination, but which gradually leads to an insight into the deepest human secrets. What is it that is supposed to be depicted here? It is characteristic of the medieval science when we see how the hunting party stops in front of the three corpses: first a skeleton, then the second, a corpse already eaten away by worms, and then the third, a bloated body, one that has only recently died – a motif that we often find in the Middle Ages. We understand it only when we ask: Why do people come out of the mountains? What are those who are there in the hunt? — and when we know: These are not the living, these are the deceased who are in Kamaloka! The image says: Such bodies do you have on you - the skeleton as the physical body, the corpse eaten by worms as the etheric body, and that which belongs to the recently deceased as the astral body. Remember, you who are living, what you should see of the secrets of existence after death! Thus we see the mystery of the three human covers expressed in a medieval way.

One would like to say: strange and wonderful. The hermit, who is sitting a little elevated directly in front of the three coffins, indicates to us through his whole gesture that man needs to penetrate into the mysteries of existence in order to recognize how he is connected to the eternal sources for his temporary existence. The picture is completed by the mountain itself arching over the whole, and the hermits sitting at the top, in silent contemplation and a peaceful life in nature, showing us, as it were, how one can connect with the inner workings of human nature by turning inward.

That is what the painter wanted to depict, and not a “triumph of death”, as the painting was later called when its meaning was no longer understood. From the painting itself, we can see how right those were who spoke of the Purgatory, that is, of what we call Kamaloka. What the painter intended was to show that we, as we are in life, do not always belong to those who recognize the meaning of life after death and relate to the eternal in human nature in the right way , as the painter shows us in those who are no longer in life but in the life after death; for we are dealing with those who are in the hunting procession with people who are in Kamaloka, who have already died. They see what happens to the body after death.

And when we look at the sick, at the ailing people, we see on the one hand what is physical, and on the other hand we see how the devils and the angels depart with the human souls. And we see the depths that are revealed before us: Every devil has a soul in his claws, which he leads away, and every angel carries a soul under his wings, but these souls are different. And that is what I would like to point out at this Christmas hour. The souls that are taken by the devils, who are rightly deformed but formed with the right understanding, are souls that have the form of older people. And those who are taken by the angels to the bliss of heaven are souls that the painter shaped as children. In this we sense the view that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages: that something in man must remain childlike throughout his earthly existence, that people can retain something, however old and outwardly aged they become , of childlikeness, of innocence of feeling throughout their whole life; that, on the other hand, there are people who grow old not only physically but also in soul, because they have accepted the soul-earthly. For only on earth do we grow old. Those who grow old can only do so through guilt, through that which distracts from the eternal heavenly. Therefore, their souls look like people who have grown old, whereas the souls of those who remain connected to that which maintains the connection with the eternal in the spiritual world retain the childlike form.

That is what speaks so powerfully to the observer in this image from the Camposanto in Pisa: that there is something in human nature that we can recognize as expressing the eternal in man in the first three years of childhood, which I tried to show in the little book 'The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity'. This sense of being at home with the divine spiritual heights that occurs in childhood was felt in the Middle Ages. This was expressed even in such magnificent works of art as in this picture of the Camposanto in Pisa, which is perhaps the most interesting picture of the early Middle Ages in this respect, and which was so magnificent that it was attributed to Giotto and many other great contemporaries, which is impossible because it was painted after Giotto. The way in which the medieval human being related to the child is most magnificently expressed in this picture. We encounter this feeling everywhere. We find it so wonderfully expressed in these simple Christmas carols, we find it in the fact that the legend of the Christ Child has found its way into all hearts with inexpressible warmth, and how this legend of the child has made people aware of their connection to the Christ impulse. People needed the certainty that the principle of the child had come to save the eternity of the human soul. Just as the human being who has preserved his or her own eternity is brought by the angels into the realm of the blessed as a human being in the form of a child, as depicted by the painter, so too must one imagine that in the form of the innocent child, that which we know to have united itself with the Christian divine impulse, with the Christian divine essence, in his thirtieth year.

Thus, I would say, the connection between the heights of medieval spiritual life, as they present themselves to us in such a picture in the Camposanto at Pisa, and the simple games, which, admittedly, only originated later in the way one was presented here, but which all contain the impulses that express what we are again seeking in the tone and manner of our time. So it was not just — as people today would like to persuade people — how the souls of people in earlier centuries related to the child Jesus. Just as we must now assimilate the teaching of the Nathanic Jesus Child, who in His twelfth year of life took up the I of Zarathustra and in His thirtieth year the Christ-being, as we must understand it in order to realize what had to happen in the process of becoming human, In order to save the eternal in his being, medieval man did not need all the science that is given in concepts and 'theories, but rather what was given in such grandiose views of the nature of the human soul, as expressed in the image just characterized. Different times demand different ways of presenting eternal mysteries, and different times have had their different ways of presenting eternal mysteries. Time and again, it is the manifestation of the fact that man may have great hope for his soul. In the time before the mystery of Golgotha, it was the hope that there would come what corresponds spiritually in man to what the sun is physically in our planetary system. What we can know today, was felt deeply at all times.

In spring we see life, the plants sprouting from the earth and sprout and see them grow towards summer. We look up at the sun and know: they emanate from the sun, the forces that fertilize the earth, so that it can bring forth the living life of the sprouting and sprouting plants and the other beings. And in addition to what takes place so regularly from year to year in a sacred order, we see the regularity of the sun's path, which at its exact hour fills every place with the power of blessing, with which it must be filled, that which that belongs to the earth's atmosphere itself, such as the storms that sweep across the fields, the rain that pours down from the clouds, and the fog that spreads over the earth. We may see order and rule in what emanates from the sun for life on earth. In spring and summer, if we observe nature carefully, we have the feeling that the sun, triumphantly hurrying over the earth, is able to do something about the wind and weather that the earth, so to speak, allows to arise on its surface. But when we approach autumn and winter, and the power of the sun loses its strength and intervenes less in earthly existence, then we feel the changeable nature of our own earthly activities in a different way. And anyone who contemplates this alternation between spring and summer on the one hand and autumn and winter on the other with a little reflection can say: in spring, the sun with its holy order triumphs over the fickle effects that the egoism of the earth brings forth from the nature of the earth. But winter is the time when the earth forms that which is in the egoistic atmosphere, where that which is in it conquers that which blesses the earth from the cosmos.

The person who observes his inner being in thinking, feeling and willing sees how the impulses of feeling, the affects, the forces of will arise in him in a disorderly fashion from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep. He can feel how this changeable nature in his own inner being can only be compared to that which is in the earth's atmosphere. And indeed, just as the earth's atmosphere changes, so does what dominates our thinking, feeling and willing. Our soul has the same forces within it, albeit only in embryonic form, as those that work outside in air and weather and in the elemental forces. They dominate our thinking, feeling and willing as forces within us. Outside, they are elemental forces, demonic powers that live in air, water and fire and in what we have around us in lightning and thunder, in the changeable effects of our atmosphere. When we think, feel and will, we are fundamentally only related to what the earth develops out of its own selfishness in winter. And this has been felt at all times. When winter approached, when the earth's egoism became more effective with the elemental forces, which now did not follow the sun as they followed the ruling sun in spring and summer, then it was felt that all this was related to man's own inner being. O winter time, man felt, even if he did not express it clearly, you are related to my own inner being! But when the depth of the winter night came, when the time of the winter solstice came, then man felt by the way the sun now developed its new strength so that it could grow and grow more and more and gain strength towards spring and summer, man felt: the sun's power always conquers the selfishness of the earth. And then man felt courage and hope within himself and could say to himself: Just as in the physical world the cosmic sun always triumphs over the terrestrial forces of the earth, however the sun rises on a dark winter's night, if only we can feel it, so there must also be something in the depths of the soul that reigns as a spiritual sun, which will come and triumph — as the annual sun triumphs in the winter solstice — which will come as a spiritual sun in the great winter solstice! First it was hoped, then it was known, that the time of the great winter solstice had come, when one learned to understand the time of the Mystery of Golgotha as the rising of the spiritual sun within man.

And now we look back to those ancient times in the evolution of the earth, when there was an earthly spring and an earthly summer, before the Mystery of Golgotha had come. Then man still carried within him the legacy of the old times, the old clairvoyance, which made it possible for him to see into the spiritual world, where the consciousness of the connection with the divine-spiritual world still existed. But we live in the winter of the earth, that cannot be denied, in the time when it has really come about that we are not only surrounded more and more by mechanical forces outside, which are at work in machines, in industry, in the industry, in the commercial conditions of the earth's economy, but we also live in such a way that we no longer have the spiritual-divine world around us, as we did in the time of the earth's spring and summer. But what the human being felt as a symbol, the victory of the sun at the winter solstice as the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul, that is what today's humanity can feel in the face of the Mystery of Golgotha and its preparation through that birth, which we celebrate every year renewed at Christmas. Just as a person who lives through the winter need never despair of the power of the sun, but may hope that the joys taken from him by the fall will reappear after the depths of the winter night, so too may a person look at what has taken place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: Even if, like the winter storms on winter's winter night, so too may selfishness, the winter night of the human soul, rule without order in our own inner being. Yet we can never lose hope, for whatever may appear in our own soul that is contrary to the weather, must be counteracted by that which, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is connected with all human life on earth: the Christ impulse, which entered the evolution of humanity through the body of the Nathanian Jesus child , which could enter through the fact that in the Nathanic Jesus was born the child of humanity, the child with those qualities that belonged to the human soul when it had not yet gone through earthly incarnations, which had not yet been implanted with what comes from entering into earthly incarnations, the child that still had the qualities of the spiritual heights in which it may be eternal.

I wanted to present these ideas to you so that we can see from them how, in view of the human child's powers, which are at the same time his eternal powers, people can feel a supreme sense of what one has always felt and should continue to feel at the sight of the divine child at Christmas. And even if our knowledge must become different, even if we must gain the other conceptions in place of what the medieval conception saw in the picture that I indicated — the conception of the two Jesus children, the drawing over of the essence of the one into the other, the taking possession of the body of the Nathanian Jesus child by the Christ essence — then we can look with our most sacred feelings and with our strongest hopes to the realization that since the Mystery of Golgotha something lives in our human becoming that has been drawn into our earthly aura, to which we need only appeal in our joy of celebration, as hope for the indestructibility of our human being.

It is just as necessary for us to remember this as it was for the people who took joy in the simple games. Indeed, we may say something else: we take no less joy in the simple games. We feel connected to those people who found joy in these games because, in our way, we appreciate what was given to people when the child of humanity entered into earthly existence. We appreciate how they were given the strongest hope, the strongest impulse that human beings need to of Golgotha, can be sustained by the vision that, as in the physical cosmos the sun triumphs over earthly egoism, so in the depths of the human soul will live ever more and more the impulse that flowed out through the Mystery of Golgotha as the spiritual solar impulse of human evolution on earth. Once the event was there as a historical one, through which this impulse entered into earthly life, but it is meant to awaken again and again in remembrance, as can happen through such festivals. For it is true, on the one hand, that the Christ-being once entered into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha; and on the other hand, what Angelus Silesias said with the beautiful words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem

And not in you, you will remain lost forever!

What is born in Bethlehem should be born deeper and deeper in our own soul, so that we see fulfilled in this own soul what the medieval sensibility wanted to see fulfilled by seeing the destiny of souls permeated by the Christ impulse in those childlike figures, into the realms of the blessed and do not fall into the claws of Ahriman, to whom only those souls remain that have become so attached to earthly life that they appear old, while the destiny of the soul is not to grow old on earth, but to remain young. And only the fate of the body on earth is to grow old. Man's higher destiny is to preserve spiritual youth in this aging body in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, so that he may feel more and more within himself the hope that, however the winter storms may prevail in the soul and however the temptations temptations may live in the soul, the living confidence can never die that what has flowed into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha can arise from the depths of the soul, and what we want to revive in our souls through such festivals.

So I tried to summarize what we can feel as the Christmas spirit from a reflection that seeks to combine with these few words what we feel about Christmas from our anthroposophical worldview with what people in earlier times experienced from the message of the divine child in a play like the one we presented. The words express this:

In the depths of man's soul
The spiritual sun lives confident of victory;
The right powers of the mind
They are able to sense it
In the winter of the inner life,
And the heart's hope:
He sees the victory of the spiritual sun
In the Christmas blessing light,
As the symbol of the highest life
In the winter's deep night.

This Lecture was formerly part of GA 173 but has not been included in the new arrangement in three volumes.

Many people have the custom of celebrating every year the physical birth of that Being Who entered into earthly evolution in order to give meaning to this earthly evolution. In keeping with the task of our spiritual scientific movement, a task of which we must never cease to be aware, and in an effort to avoid falling into a merely routine celebration such as is found in many places today, it will be fitting to bring before our souls in these grave times some aspects of what is connected with the meaning of the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often contemplated with the eyes of our spirit the fact that in Christ Jesus two Beings flow together to form one: the Christ-Being and the human Jesus-Being. This is something that people on earth are capable of experiencing. As Christianity has developed, there has been much conflict, much dogmatic conflict about the significance of the uniting of Christ with Jesus in the body whose physical birth we celebrate in the Christmas festival. Let us start with what we know. In Christ we recognize a cosmic, super-earthly Being, One Who came down from spiritual worlds in order to give meaning to earthly evolution by being born in a physical human being. And in the human being Jesus we recognize one who was destined, in the manner known to us, to unite as a human being with the Christ-Being, to take this Being into himself after thirty years of preparation.

Not only is much argument, much dogmatic conflict connected with the manner in which Christ united with Jesus. There is also, in the relationship of Christ to Jesus, an indication of important mysteries relating to the whole of mankind's evolution on earth. In endeavouring to pursue what has happened so far, so as to understand something about this uniting of Christ with Jesus, and in considering what must still happen in human evolution in order to bring this relationship into a proper focus, we find ourselves touching on one of the greatest mysteries of human knowledge and human life.

As the time approached when human evolution was to take into itself the Christ-Being there came about a possibility, like an inheritance from the ancient days of clairvoyant wisdom, of gaining a picture, an idea of the whole lofty stature of the Christ-Being. There existed at this time a wisdom about which people often speak today in what could be called a sacrilegious way, though they have scarcely any idea of what it represented. It was something which has now been eliminated from human evolution by certain streams which are opposed to more profound Christian revelation. This was Gnosis,¹ a wisdom into which much of the knowledge revealed to mankind by ancient, atavistic clairvoyance had flowed. Every last fragment of Gnosis, both verbal and written, had been rooted out by western dogmatic Christianity, but not until Gnosis had also endeavoured to find an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

Today there is no longer a question of returning to Gnosis for, of course, the light of Gnosis has meanwhile gone out. But the elimination of Gnosis, root and branch, though a consequence of evil, ignorance and hostility towards knowledge and wisdom sprang, nevertheless, in a way from a necessity of earthly evolution. So the accusation that anthroposophical spiritual science intends to warm up ancient Gnosis is nothing more than one of the many malevolent attacks now being made on us. This accusation is made by people who know nothing about Gnosis and, similarly, little about Anthroposophy. We do not want to warm up Gnosis, but we do want to recognize that Gnosis was something powerful, something great, for that time nineteen centuries ago when it endeavoured to give some kind of an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

The eye of the Gnostic—his spiritual eye—saw the spiritual worlds. He thought of the spiritual hierarchies arranged in a wonderful way, rank upon rank. He also saw how Christ strode down through the world of the spiritual hierarchies in order to enter into the enveloping bodies of a mortal human being. All this was revealed to the soul of the Gnostic. And this soul strove to gain a picture of how Christ came down from spiritual heights and was received on earth. You can gain an idea of the scale of these events if you imagine that everything that has come into the world since the elimination of Gnosis has been small and petty in comparison with the mighty Christ-picture of the Gnostics. The Mystery-wisdom that lies behind the Gospels is infinitely great, greater than anything that subsequent theology has been capable of finding in them. In order to understand how small and insignificant is today's customary understanding of the Christ-Being compared with that of Gnosis, you might try to immerse yourselves in the Christ-idea of the ancient Gnostics. When you place this before your soul you will grovel in the dust before the greatness of this picture of the Christ-Being Who came down from spiritual heights, spiritual distances, spiritual breadths into a human body. So, long ago, there was once amongst human beings a lofty concept of Christ. It has receded now. For all those dogmas that came into being subsequently, the creeds of Arius or Athanasius or whatever,² are trifling compared with the Gnostic concept which combined wisdom about the structure of the universe with the view of the Christ-Being. Only remnants of this great Gnostic concept of Christ remain.

This is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus, namely, that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom which could have comprehended Him, which had endeavoured to comprehend Him, had already been stamped out. Yet, all along, those who spoke of Gnosis as an oriental fantasy which had to be stamped out for the good of western man considered themselves good Christians. In truth, it was only the incapacity of that time, its incapacity to link earthly concepts with heavenly concepts. You really need a sense of tragedy if you want to understand human evolution.

How long was it after the event of the Mystery of Golgotha that the Temple of Jerusalem, the place of peace, was destroyed? The city of Jerusalem surrounded the Temple of Solomon. What Gnosis was as wisdom, the Temple of Solomon was as symbol. In the Temple of Solomon were symbolized all the mysteries of the universe. The purpose was that those who entered the Temple of Solomon, where they were surrounded by pictures which were mirrored in their souls, should there absorb something into their souls which only then transformed them into true human beings. The Temple of Solomon was to pour the meaning of the universe into the souls of those who were permitted to enter there. What the Temple of Solomon contained was not directly contained anywhere on the earth, for it contained everything in the way of universal mysteries that shone down into the earth out of the breadths of the cosmos.

Why was the Temple of Solomon built? My dear friends, if you had asked an ancient initiate who knew about the Temple he would have replied: So that there shall be a sign here on earth which may be seen by those powers who accompany the souls who are seeking a way into earthly bodies. Let us grasp this rightly. These ancient initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew, as they accompanied the human beings down through all the signs of the Zodiac into their earthly bodies, that they must guide special souls to those bodies which were capable of mirroring in themselves the symbols of the Temple of Solomon.

Naturally enough, this could become a reason for succumbing to arrogance. If this was not taken in with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it became a reason for succumbing to the wisdom of the Pharisees! But the truth is as follows: The earthly eye looks up to the heavens and sees the stars. The spiritual eye of those who led souls down to the earth from the breadths of the universe was directed downwards and saw the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. It was for them a star by whose light they could accompany the souls into bodies of a calibre capable of comprehending the meaning of the Temple of Solomon. It was the star at the mid-point of the earth which shone out strongly into spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course, then this great Mystery of Golgotha was to be mirrored in every single human soul: ‘My kingdom is not of this world!’ So the external, physical Temple of Solomon first of all lost its significance, and its destiny fulfilled itself in a tragic way. Basically, there was no one left at that time who, by mirroring all the symbols of the Temple of Solomon, could really take in the full extent of the Christ-Being. But the Christ-Being Himself had entered into earthly evolution and was now within it. This—as has so often been repeated in our circles—is the fact which matters. The Gnostics were the last stragglers of those bearers of that wisdom which was extensive and intensive enough to understand something of Christ out of man's ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom.

That is one side of the relationship between Christ and Jesus. At that time the Christ-Being could have been comprehended by Gnosis. But this was not part of the plan of evolution, although in what had been Gnosis there had been contained the full wisdom of the Christ. But now it can be said that the path taken by Christianity through the countries of the South—through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on—was suited to extinguishing more and more the knowledge of what Christ really was. Rome in decline, Rome in disintegration was destined to extinguish the understanding of Christ.

It is a remarkable thing that, on the one hand, the relationship of Christ to Jesus worked in such a way that, in Gnosis, a high concept of Christ shines out and then dies away as Christianity passes through the Roman element, and that, on the other hand, when Christianity meets the peoples coming down towards it from the North, the concept of Jesus starts to take shape. The concept of Christ has died away in the South. Then, in the North, the concept of Jesus appears, certainly not in a lofty way, but in a way that speaks to the souls of human beings; something wonderful enters human souls at the thought of how a child is born in a consecrated night, a child who will take the Christ into himself. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was the feeling for Jesus. Nevertheless, the feeling was such that it deeply moved people's hearts; yet, in itself, it is not fully comprehensible. You have only to compare the greatness and majesty of what Christ Jesus means for human evolution with all the sentimental trifles contained in so many poems and songs about the ‘darling infant Jesus’, which move the hearts of those who, in their egoism, believe that they are experiencing heavenly ecstasies. If you make this comparison you gain an immediate impression of something that wants to enter into life but cannot quite do so, something that combines with that other in such a way that the whole deeper meaning and significance remains in man's subconscious.

Now what is it that remains in man's subconscious while the concept of Jesus, the feeling for Jesus, the experience of Jesus rises to the surface? It is extraordinary how this happened! The understanding of Christ sank down into the subconscious and the understanding of Jesus began to glow in the subconscious. In man's subconscious, not in consciousness, which was powerless, there was to be a meeting and a balancing out of the Christ consciousness which was fading and the Jesus consciousness which was beginning to glow in the subconscious. Why did the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from what is today northern Russia, not take up in Christianity the Christ idea which, to begin with, remained utterly unknown to them? Why did they take up the Jesus idea in Christianity? Why was it the Christmas festival which, above all, spoke to human hearts, awakening in them infinite feelings of holy tenderness? Why was this? What was there in this Europe which received from the South what was basically an utterly disfigured Christianity? What was there in this Europe that caused that idea to light up in people's hearts, that idea in which the Christmas festival with its deep, deep content of feeling is experienced?

The people had been prepared but, to a certain extent, they had forgotten what had prepared them. They had been prepared out of the ancient northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the meaning of the ancient northern Mysteries. To discover, out of the inner meaning of the northern Mysteries, that deep secret of how the feeling for Jesus entered into European soul life it is necessary to go very far back indeed.

These northern Mysteries were founded on something utterly different from the foundation of the Mysteries of Asia Minor, the Mysteries of the South. These Mysteries of the North were founded on something that was more intimately bound up with the life of the stars, with nature, with the earth's growth forces, rather than that which was shown in the symbols of a temple. Mystery-truths are not the trifles certain mystic sects play around with today. Mystery-truths are grand and powerful impulses within human evolution. Just as we cannot find our way back today through Anthroposophy to Gnosis, to the ancient Gnostics, neither can mankind return to what the ancient Mysteries of the North once meant for human evolution. It would be a foolish misunderstanding to believe that such Mystery-truths are being revealed now because of a desire to return in some way to what lived in them. For the sake of self-knowledge it is necessary for mankind today to know what lived in such Mysteries. For what in the northern Mysteries involved the whole evolution of the universe was connected with what came from the earth, whereas the Gnostic wisdom inspired by the cosmos was connected with what took place in the far reaches of the universe. The mystery of mankind in its connection to all the mysteries of the cosmos, how it works when man enters on the physical earth into his physical existence, all this, at a certain period of earthly evolution, lay more deeply than anywhere else at the basis of these ancient northern Mysteries.

But it is necessary to go a very long way back, approximately to the third millennium BC or perhaps even further, in order to understand what lived in those souls who later took into themselves the feeling for Jesus. Just about where the peninsula of Jutland is part of Denmark today, there existed a centre from which emanated in those ancient times very important Mystery-impulses. However people may judge this with their modern understanding, I can tell you that these Mystery-impulses were connected with the fact that, in the third millennium BC in this northern region, there lived certain tribes who only considered those people to be proper residents of the earth who were born during certain weeks in winter time. This came about because the temple priests of this secret Mystery Centre on the Jutland peninsula decreed that in certain tribes, the Ingaevones³ as Tacitus called them, the sexual union of human beings must only take place during the first quarter of the year. Every sexual union outside this period decreed by the Mystery centre was taboo; and anyone not born during the season of the darkest nights, in the coldest season towards the new year, was considered by these tribes of the Ingaevones to be an inferior human being. The impulse was sent out by the Mystery centre at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. This was the only time when those who felt truly connected with the spiritual worlds were allowed to practise sexual union. The forces which are used up in sexual union were saved for the whole remainder of each year and thus contributed to the growing strength of the people. Therefore, they were able to develop that remarkable power of which even the dying echo so astonished Tacitus—writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way the tribes of the Ingaevones, and the other Germanic tribes to a lesser extent, underwent at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox a particularly strong experience of the process of conception, not in a state of waking consciousness but through a kind of dream annunciation. They knew what this meant with regard to the connection between the mystery of man and the mysteries of heaven. A spiritual being appeared to the one who was conceiving and announced to her, as through a vision, the human being who was to come to the earth through her. There was no consciousness, only a semiconsciousness in that sphere which human souls experienced during the process of entering into physical, earthly reality. Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, the Vanir.⁴ They were not fully conscious in their intellect but lived in a ‘knowing dream-consciousness’.

Practices which exist at a certain time, and are fitting for that time, often survive into later times in external symbols. In olden times the holy mystery of birth was shrouded in the subconscious, which in turn meant that all births were crowded together in a certain part of the winter season, and it was regarded as sinful if human beings were born at other times. Later on this was partly preserved, but only fragments passed over into later consciousness, fragments of which the meaning has so far remained undiscovered by any learning. Indeed, it is openly admitted that no scholar has succeeded in discovering any meaning. Fragments remain in the so-called Ertha saga. Except for a few notes, everything now known externally about the Ertha, or Nerthus saga is contained in the writings of Tacitus, who reports about it as follows:⁵

‘The Reudigni, the Aviones, the Anglii, the Varini, the Eudoses, the Suardones, and Nuithones, Germanic tribes who are fenced in by rivers or forests’—these are more or less those tribes who together constitute the Ingaevones—‘venerate Nerthus, Ertha, or Mother Earth and believe that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her chariot.’

In olden times every woman who was to give the earth a new citizen knew in her dream consciousness, through the religious worship of the Vanir, that the goddess later worshipped as Ertha or Nerthus would appear to her. This godly being was perceived as male-female rather than purely female. Only later did a corruption lead to Nerthus becoming a wholly female principle. Just as the Angel Gabriel came to Mary so, in ancient times, did Nerthus come in her chariot to those who were to give the earth a new citizen. The women who were going to give birth saw this in spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long faded away, the people still celebrated the dying echo of this event in symbols. This is what Tacitus saw, and described as follows:

‘In an island of the ocean there is a sacred grove, and within it her consecrated chariot, covered over with a garment. Only one priest is permitted to touch it.’

This priest was thought of as the initiate of the Ertha Mystery.

‘He can perceive the presence of the goddess in this sacred recess, and walks by her side with the utmost reverence as she is drawn along by heifers. It is a season of rejoicing, and festivity reigns wherever she deigns to go and be received. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock; only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple.’

This was exactly what the vision was like. Such ancient documents describe things really quite exactly, only people no longer understand them. ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’ Thus it was indeed at the season which is now our Easter time. Out of their inner soul life people believed the season of the earth's fruitfulness to have come for them too, and those souls were conceived who were later born in the season which is now our Christmas time. The season of Easter was the time for conception. This was seen as a holy mystery of the cosmos and later it was symbolized in the worship of Nerthus. All of it was shrouded in the subconscious and was not allowed to break through into consciousness. This shimmers through in what Tacitus says about this worship:

‘Only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple. Afterwards the chariot, the vestments and the divinity herself are purified in a secret lake. Slaves perform the rite, who are instantly swallowed up by its waters.’ A penalty to ensure that all who know about these matters are submerged in the night of the unconscious. ‘Thus reigns a mysterious terror and a pious ignorance concerning the nature of that which is seen only by men doomed to die.’

Everything that takes place in the world comes to have a luciferic and an ahrimanic counter-image. The practices of the Ingaevones, which fitted properly into human evolution, related to the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what remained in ancient times of what had once been a dream experience took place later and later, and thus became ahrimanic. When the events of true, ancient Ertha worship had gradually moved to a time approximately four weeks later, they had become ahrimanic. It was ahrimanic because the union of the human woman with the spiritual world was sought in an unlawful way, that is, at an unlawful time. This then came to be caught and held in ‘Walpurgis Night’⁶ which falls on the night of 30 April to 1 May. This is purely the consequence of an ahrimanic time-shift. You know that a luciferic time-shift goes backwards; an ahrimanic one is the opposite, so here the equinox is shifted forwards so that the remnant from earlier times manifests later. Thus the ahrimanic, Mephistophelean reverse side of ancient Ertha worship, its reversal into something devilish, later became ‘Walpurgis Night’, which is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only this weak echo remains.

Much of these Mysteries lived on in the Scandinavian Mysteries.⁷ There in place of Ertha is Frigg, who in the symbolism of later ages—as spiritual science reveals—actually appears as a traitor to what really lay at the foundation.

Something else also should be mentioned in connection with the customs of these Mysteries. From the time of the spring full moon until the depths of winter the fruit ripened in the mothers' wombs. Then one such human being was the first to be born in the holy night. Among the tribes of the Ingaevones this human being, the first to be born in the holy night, was chosen to become, at the age of thirty, the leader for three years, for only three years. In most ancient times this occurred every third year. What then happened to him I might be able to tell you later on.

Careful research reveals that not only is Frigg, Frea, Frija a kind of secondary name for Nerthus, but that the name Ing, after whom the Ingaevones named themselves, is also a secondary name for Nerthus. Those connected with this Mystery centre called themselves ‘the ones who belong to the god, or goddess, Ing’: Ingaevones. In the external world only fragments remained of what was actually experienced. One of these are the words of Tacitus which I have read to you. Another fragment is the famous Anglo-Saxon rune-song⁸ consisting of only a few lines. Every student of German philology knows it but none understand its meaning:

‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’

This Anglo-Saxon rune-song contains an echo of what had happened in the ancient Mystery-custom of conception at Easter with the view to a time of birth at Christmas. What took place in this connection in the spiritual world was known, above all, on the Danish peninsula. That is why the rune song says quite rightly: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes.’ Then came times when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, so that only echoes and symbols remained. Altogether human evolution became more suffused with what came from warmer climes. From warmer countries comes something which is unlike what comes from colder climes, where the season of the year is intimately linked with what human beings experience in their inner being. In warmer climes the seed of man was sown all the year round. Of course this happened also in the colder countries even while the old atavistic clairvoyance still existed, but it was suffused in the ancient principles. It came to the the northern regions when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir and when, in the southern regions, the nature Mysteries had long been replaced by the temple Mysteries. It came northwards, of course still mixed with the ancient ways, when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir. Just as the Vanir were connected with ‘imagining’, so were the Aesir connected with ‘being’, with being or existing in the material world which external understanding wishes to grasp. When the northern people had entered an age in which individual intelligence was beginning to develop, when the Aesir took the place of the Vanir, the Mystery-custom became corrupted. It migrated to isolated, scattered Mystery-communities in the East. One alone remained. The one in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be renewed, the one in whom the Christ was to dwell, was chosen to unite within himself what had once been the content of the northern Mysteries.

So in contemplating in the Luke Gospel the story of how the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary, we may seek its origin in the true visions which occurred in what was later mirrored in the Nerthus Mystery with its symbols. This had migrated over to the East. Spiritual science now reveals it and only spiritual science can find a meaning for the Anglo-Saxon rune song. For Nerthus and Ing are one and the same. And of Ing it is said: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’ He strode, of course, across the waves of the clouds, just as Nerthus strode across the waves of the clouds. What had been general in the colder regions became singular, a single event. It took place as a single event and as such comes to meet us again in the description in the Luke Gospel.

Now once something is there, once it has become customary and firmly anchored in the soul, then it remains there, it remains firmly in the soul. So when the people of the North received the tidings of Christianity from what had been ancient Rome in the South, these tidings were linked with old Mystery-customs which lived no longer in full consciousness but in the subconscious and were thus only dimly sensed. That is why the feeling for Jesus could be especially strongly developed there. What had lived in the old Nerthus Mystery had sunk down into the subconscious where it was still present, where it was sensed and felt.

In those distant days in the far North, when the earth was still covered in forests in which lived the aurochs and the elk, the families gathered in their snow-covered huts in the lamplight around a newborn child. They spoke of this new life and of how it brought to them the new light which the heavens had announced to them in the days of early spring. This was the ancient Christmas, the consecrated night. When they later received tidings of one who was born in the holiest hour and who was destined for great things it reminded them of another who had been the firstborn after the twelfth hour of the consecrated night. The ancient knowledge was gone, but the ancient feelings lived on when the tidings came of such a one born in distant Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had descended to the earth from the starry heavens.

It is our duty in the present time to understand such things more and more so that we may learn to grasp the meaning of earthly mankind's evolution. Holy Writ is filled with what is unimaginably great, not with the kind of triviality so often discussed in religious tracts. It is filled with holy truths which run through the whole of human evolution and thrill us to the marrow, flooding our hearts with wonder. All this resounds in what the gospels contain. Once spiritual science has revealed the profound background to what lives in the gospels, these gospels will become for mankind something inestimably dear and valuable. One day mankind will know why it is said in the Luke gospel:

‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David): To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.’

For Him, the firstborn among those who were to find one another in the soul, the ancient Mystery-forces had migrated to the distant East from the Danish peninsula.

‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.’

In the same way had Ertha, who rode through the countryside in her chariot, brought tidings of the arrival of human beings on earth in a way fitting for the ancient consciousness of the Vanir, that is, for subconscious, atavistic clairvoyance.

‘And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,’

Saying what the Ertha priest had spoken in the ancient northern Mystery to the woman who was to conceive:

‘The revelation of the divine comes from on high in the time of peace among those who are of good will!’

As Tacitus says: ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’

It is to this greatness that human beings must ascend: They must look deeply into the course of human evolution. For even the Mystery of Golgotha, which gave a deeper meaning to the whole of earth evolution, only becomes fully comprehensible when it is shown how it stands within human evolution as a whole. When materialism has disappeared and people want to know, not only in the abstract but also quite concretely about their divine origin, there will once again be an understanding for the holy Mystery-truths of ancient days. Then will the interval of time be over in which Christ, though He lives on the earth, can only be minimally understood in full consciousness. For the understanding of Christ among the Gnostics faded away; and the understanding of Jesus grew only unconsciously in connection with the ancient worship of Nerthus. In the future mankind will have to bring into consciousness and bind together both these unconscious streams. Then an understanding of Christ will gain more and more prominence on the earth, and this will be the link between ancient Mystery-knowledge and a renewed great flourishing of Gnosis.

Those who take seriously the anthroposophical view of the world, and also the Movement connected with it, will see that the things it has to say to mankind are no childish games but great and serious truths. We must allow our souls to be deeply moved, because these things are meant to move us deeply.

The earth is not only a great living creature. It is also a lofty spiritual being. Just as a great human genius cannot evolve to full stature without suitable development through childhood and youth, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the divine could not have united with earth evolution if, in the days of earth's beginning, other divine beings had not descended in a different, though equally divine way. The revelation of the divine on high incorporated in the worship of Nerthus differed from the way it was later understood; but it existed.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom is solely atavistic, yet it is infinitely higher than the materialistic world view which is today making human beings into animals as regards the level of their knowledge.

In Christianity we are concerned with a fact, not with a theory. The theory has to follow after the fact and it is important for the human consciousness that is to develop during the further course of earth evolution. But Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, exists as a fact, and it was necessary that it should enter at first into the unconscious streams. This was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when Christ united with the earth.

Shepherds, people resembling those among whom the worship of Nerthus lived, are also described in the Luke gospel. I can only sketch all this for you. If only we had more time I could show you how deeply founded are the things I have to tell you today. It is because man came down from spiritual heights that the revelation of the divine came from the heavens. It had to be expressed in this way to those who knew, from ancient wisdom, that the destiny of man is linked with what lives in the stars of the heavens. But what is to live on the earth as a result of the incarnation of Christ into a human being will have to be understood gradually. The tidings are twofold, they are in two parts: ‘The revelation of the divine from on high’ and ‘Peace to earthly souls who are of good will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the festival of the birth of Christ is meaningless!

Not only was Christ born for mankind; mankind also crucified Him! There is a necessity for this, too, but it is no less true that mankind did crucify Christ. And it may be known that the crucifixion on the wooden cross at Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come in which the second part of the Christmas words may be understood: ‘Peace to men on earth who are of good will!’ For the negative, too, may be felt and sensed, namely, that mankind today is far removed from a proper understanding of Christ and the Christmas Mystery.

Surely it must cut us to the quick that we live in an age when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down.⁹ It is almost dishonest in these days, when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down in the way it is, to celebrate Christmas at all. Let us hope, since we are not yet confronted with the absolute worst, that a change of soul may take place so that, in place of the shouting-down of the longing for peace, there may come Christian feelings, a will for peace. If it does not, it may not be those who are striving in Europe today but, instead, others who come over from Asia who will one day take revenge for the shouting-down of the longing for peace and bring tidings of Christianity and of the Mystery of Golgotha to the ruins of European culture and spiritual life. Then the record will be indelible: At Christmas in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the annunciation of peace on earth to human souls who are of good will, in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the tidings of Christmas, mankind succeeded in shouting down the longing for peace!

May it not come to this! May the good spirits who work in the Christmas impulses guard Europe's unfortunate population against this!

• 1. See, among others, Rudolf Steiner Christ and the Spiritual World. The Search for the Holy Grail, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1963, Lecture One.
• 2. At the first Council of Nicaea (325) the Athanasian creed (identity of the Son with the Father) was accepted. Arius denied this identity and stressed the oneness of God the Father. He gained many supporters, especially among the Germanic tribes, and the strife between the two schools of thought dragged on throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, until Arianism lost its influence.
• 3. ‘To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingaevones; those of the interior, Herminones; all the rest Istaevones.’ Tacitus Germania, 2.
• 4. A literal translation of these two sentences reads as follows: ‘Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, who were given the name ‘Wanen’ [English: Vanir], which is connected with the word ‘wahnen’ [to fancy, to imagine], that is, with that which runs its course, not in full, intellectual consciousness but in a “knowing, dream consciousness”.’ Trs.
• 5. Tacitus on the Ertha saga, Germania, 40. Translated by A J Church and W J Brodribb.
• 6. The night of 30 April to 1 May when the witches are said to gather on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1970, and also Die Julzeit und die Christfeststimmung, Dornach 1966.
• 8. The so-called song of the runic names. Twenty-second rune. See Wilhelm Grimm Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes), Göttingen 1821.
• 9. On 12 December 1916, via a speech in the Reichstag by Bethmann-Hollweg, the Central Powers offered a suggestion for peace negotiations which was rejected by the Allies. See Lecture Thirteen.

My dear friends! Today we have something to discuss that is very intimately connected with what can be felt from the whole of today's spirit of the age as the need for religious renewal. First of all, I have to present to you what can lead to the creation of a kind of breviary. This breviary should be what gives the pastor the strength to work, and perhaps I may take this opportunity to point out that in this respect, too, we should not confuse the intellectual with what, in the truest sense, can be the religious impulse that comes from the whole human being. Here it is really a matter of us communicating properly. There is a great deal – and this includes, in particular, because it has just been mentioned in the questions, charity – there is a great deal that must, so to speak, flow naturally from the mind, that must, as a matter of course, emanate from the pastoral care, but the pastoral care must first have acquired the appropriate mind. And that is why, to a certain extent, things that are happening inwardly are even more important today than the intellectual description of some external measures. The latter follow naturally in many respects when the inner life is in order.

Now I do not intend to go so far as to compile a literal breviary right now, but rather to bring about what a breviary can achieve. For the man of today, a breviary can no longer consist merely of reciting prayers, but must be a kind of emotional meditation in the fullest sense. Now I would like to give you the elements that, according to my findings, should make up what the pastor should experience over the course of a year, so that he can prepare himself in the right way and perform the pastoral ministry in the right way.

We begin with the time that lasts from, say, the end of November to around the end of December, until Christmas. So we begin with what can be called the Advent season. This Advent season is felt in the right way by us when we go through it as preparation for the Christmas season itself. But this can only be the case if we truly awaken within us all that is, as it were, alive in the development of the world and of humanity itself within such preparation, and these are essentially the following details for the Advent season. He who wants to live through this Advent season should first direct his meditation to that which, as a certain mystery, is included in what can be called the Word, the Logos. (The following is written on the board:)

1. Word (Logos)

He should feel, in particular, how the concept of the Logos must be expanded so that one feels what it contains in everything that is actually the world, that one feels the working of the Logos in the blowing of the wind, in the moving of the clouds, in the course of the stars, the sun and the moon, in the becoming and growing of everything that surrounds us, but also in all that is becoming in man, without man adding anything to it through his own power of soul development at first. In this process, we do not yet feel the Logos or the Word in its entirety, but the most essential thing about meditation is that one begins with an incomplete beginning, like the plant with the root, and that one allows what one begins with, as it grows within oneself, to become what it can become. The second thing that can be particularly felt during this time is what I would like to call the commandment, (it is written on the board:)

2nd commandment

that is, what arises when a person looks more inwardly. One could say: If one wants to visualize what is meant by this commandment or law, then one can turn, on the one hand, to the Old Testament image of the proclamation of the law to Moses at the burning bush, or, on the other hand, one can try to feel what is still felt today in ritual terms as the right thing to do when completing Jewish worship by saying: O Adonai. The third thing to focus on is, I would say, the natural event (it is written on the blackboard:

3. natural event

with its necessity, which must be felt in such a way that the person who sees both the sprouting and the destructive forces of nature, who sees, let us say, the proliferation of a jungle as the characteristic of growth, who sees earthquakes or volcanic eruptions as the characteristic of destruction, feels the necessary power of nature to become. In essence, this is the feeling that properly brings us to what the Old Testament calls the root of Jesse. The fourth thing we have to delve into is what can now be called the moral force in man, which in our time speaks from some vague depths as conscience, for example. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. Moral Power

This is essentially what is already felt in the sense of the Old Testament as the source in man, through which he is a closed self in relation to the outside world, which can therefore well be called: the key that opens and no one locks, that locks and no one opens. We have meditatively immersed ourselves in those points that can also be felt with regard to the human being himself. If one then turns more outward, one awakens in oneself the light that pours through the world, but at the same time one feels it by taking that which is there for the senses as light and, for the spirit, as the justice of the universe. (It is written on the board:)

5. Light: Justice

In the languages of earlier times, right means something that is connected with “judging”, and this in turn is connected with the ray. One can then feel how that which is felt as luminous justice penetrates into the darkness, into the shadow, as the invigorating element that works into the shadow of death. It is images that we must mainly devote ourselves to, and from this pictorial composition, after we have, so to speak, felt the sun of righteousness, the possibility arises for us to let the sun of righteousness arise from this image, when we have felt this deeply, and also that which is summarized in one the good and the evil, that it turns out for the good through the power that radiates from it – not radiating from evil, but from that which we are to grasp – so that we do not place ourselves alone among those who claim justice through a certain inward arrogance, but also among those who are recognized as sinners. Finally, as we pass through this series of images, we rise to the perception of Christ, (it is written on the board:)

6. Christ

who unites life with death and death with life. And finally, from there, I would like to say, we can be brought into the perspective that leads directly to Christmas, the perspective through which we can see the Christ in the Jesus who is also called Emmanuel in the New Testament, because in Jesus is God. (It is written on the blackboard:)

7. Jesus = Immanuel

If we meditate on these images in the organic context just characterized during the Advent season, then this is what can be lived out, as I would like to show you using this example: by inwardly expressing what we have experienced in words, which might sound something like this:

The word flows through heaven and earth
It spoke authoritatively to Moses on the mountain
It forms world beings, for the revelation to man
It weaves in the human inner being, to the hidden through itself
It shines as the sun from the light into the darkness
It lives in Christ, bright out of the darkness, gentle in the brightness. than from such an inner experience of the cosmic currents and from such an experience of the world, so that every sentence in older languages and also in older poetry can be related to something like that.

When we have gone through this way to the Christmas season, we should then actually use the following four weeks until January 25 to understand the essence of this Christmas season in a fully human way. And it is connected with the understanding of this essence of the Christmas season, a large part of what can also be called the understanding of Christ. I would like to say that it is important to cross the threshold from the Advent season through the consecration evening, through Christmas night to the actual Christmas celebration. What can we feel when we are really in the world as human beings? Well, my dear friends, we can feel that everything I have given you now as a meditation for the Advent season, no matter how vividly it was in us, in a certain sense nevertheless destroys our humanity, as we can experience these things inwardly, I would say, as an inner perception, but we do not understand them. I would like to say that throughout the whole Advent season, one believes to understand it, but precisely by having gone through it, one gets the feeling that understanding must first follow, the word must first become a name that makes sense to us, that makes the word understandable to us. And whereas in the past we felt, I might say, with a certain depression, the word flowing through the world, we now become aware of it as power, as the power of becoming of existence, the name of which we have grasped; and we become further aware of it as the active factor in all activity. (It is written on the blackboard:)

1. Name: The power of existence of being.
2. Active being.

The commandment ceases to be a mere intellectual concept that one is supposed to obey; one becomes aware of a power of being that also prevails in the moral realm, and one becomes aware, as a third thing, of how the naming and the named are one. Here, in the quiet interior, lies the experience of the sense of self. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. Name to name

The natural law ceases to be mute, it begins to speak: name to name. And in this naming of the name, we now feel through Christ as that which leads through illness and death, through darkness and bondage. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. The Guide through Death and Darkness

And what was previously only felt as a kind of glow of justice flowing through the world is revealed to us as something that belongs to our own being in this experience of the Christmas season; the light of justice is transformed into the ancestor Christ. (It is written on the board:)

5. Ancestor Christ

And then we feel how man needs Christ, how he lives unreconciled with the earth without Christ, how the earth can only bring him something that, in a certain sense, takes him away from the spiritual. If we allow these feelings to precede, we can see the reconciliation of earth and heaven emerging from them. (It is written on the blackboard:)

6. Reconciliation of Earth and Heaven

And then one can feel in a very natural way how the earth denies the spirit in a certain way and now something is happening in one whereby one comes to the spirit that the earth cannot give. (It is written on the board:)

7. Spiritualization of the earth

I would like to emphasize, my dear friends, that I try to give the words as I am giving them right now, because I believe that a living force is already at work in the words, and because, when one gives the words in a certain way and the other person immerses himself in the word in full inner freedom, then, if the words are chosen correctly, one can arrive at much, much more than is originally contained in these things, or at least than is contained in them according to the use of language. So I would like to express things in such a way that the word can come to life in you in a certain sense. Once more I would like to give an example of how one can summarize what has been experienced here by constantly looking at Christ Jesus in the Spirit:

In the man on earth He speaks from nature of the mystery of the world
In him He works as the creative power of the world, full of light
In him He speaks the word about His own nature
In his speaking, the gate of death and darkness opens
In Him, a new ancestor has appeared to man
Through Him, reconciliation with the heights of the world is achieved
Through Him, matter reveals spirit, spirit creates matter.

The experience of the Christmas mystery should actually extend into January, until, yes, let us say, January 22, 23, 24, 25. The time that now comes, until about February 23, 25, should be devoted to a meditative sense of what Jesus became in his transformation of humanity.

It is necessary, my dear friends, that we also feel how, through such a deepening in all becoming, being and weaving, how through such a feeling the pastor of souls can automatically come to open the testament and take from it the things that he then also brings to humanity in the reading of the gospel, and how he can come to carry out what he is to bring to humanity for understanding. In this time, which is the time of February, the third season for the Christian, we will meditate in particular on the way Jesus becomes wise. (It is written on the blackboard:)

1. Jesus becoming wise

Everything that we can recognize, for example from the appearance of twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, everything that can otherwise be recognized about the development of Jesus in his youth, belongs in this meditation. Secondly, however, we are to find our way into the meditation of the one who cannot be tempted, who cannot really be tempted in temptation. (It is written on the blackboard:)

2. He who cannot be tempted

Thirdly, we are to confront that which lies in a concept that we are actually to feel completely; that is the concept that the One who becomes wise, the One who in temptation is not to be seduced, is the Son of Man. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. The Son of Man

is therefore the one who is intimately related to all humanity, but who, due to the fact that he entered into earthly existence under the conditions you already know, does not represent that human being who bears the disease of sin, but rather that human being who bears within him the calling to fulfill the nature of the human being in such a way that the disease of sin may fall away. This, however, leads directly to what the fourth aspect has to present: the World Physician. (The following is written on the blackboard:)

4. The World Physician

that is, the one who heals sick humanity. We can apply to ourselves everything in the Gospels that relates to this, and we can bring it to others in the appropriate way. But only through this are we properly prepared for what we are to feel about the Gospel and, in general, through our relationship with Christ Jesus as the special way in which Christ Jesus finds the disciples. (It is written on the blackboard:) 5. The One who finds

There are infinite depths in the Gospel stories when we make this in particular the subject of meditation, the way in which the disciples come to the Christ, how they follow him and so on. Only when we have this feeling do we have a correct sense of the next, of the teacher, (it is written on the blackboard:)

6. The Teacher

by the Teacher in the sense in which I have indicated it to you in the course of these lectures, in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. And only when we have felt this will we be able to experience inwardly what I have said about the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, because the earthly kingdom is actually destined to perish, and so the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven. (It is written on the board:)

7. Establishment of the Heavenly Kingdom

We have immersed ourselves in an understanding of Jesus in this way, and in a sense we have become mature through it. Then we have become mature in a sense to the point of Christian self-knowledge. This would then have to be fulfilled from the end of February to March 21 to 25, or so. And we would come to such human self-knowledge by properly fulfilling the period of Lent, the time of fasting, which of course must essentially take into account the process of transformation within. In this way, the human being would first feel how the earth takes hold of him with its forces, but how he, through this taking hold of the forces of the earth, is, as it were, making his way with the decline of the earth. (It is written on the board:)

1. Decline of the Earth But out of this feeling of the decline of the earth can arise another feeling, which I would characterize in the following way: One senses that in all that presents itself as external nature, there is an element of decline. One feels connected to this element of decline through the nature of one's body, and one is seized by the fear that the moral element within oneself must also perish. Thus, one senses the danger for the moral element in the face of earthly becoming. (It is written on the board:)

2. Danger for the moral sense.

Certain denominations accommodate this sentiment by ordering fasting, that is, not eating as sumptuously as is otherwise the case during the year, but rather abstaining. In this way, although it is attempted in a physical way and such physical things should actually be far removed from our time, there is indeed an increased sense of the human being within himself, and with it a transition from the otherwise merely natural feeling to the finer feeling with regard to the moral. However, fasting must not be arranged in the way it is often arranged in the Roman Catholic faith. Recently, we learned of a decree issued by the bishop to whose diocese Basel also belonged in the 12th and 13th centuries; in this episcopal ordinance, the provost of the Basel cathedral was obliged to slaughter eight pigs every day at Christmas for his canons – I believe there were twelve of them. I think there were more like 26 canons, but that's enough. In any case, the menu that was indicated was more than enough for Christmas, thanks to an episcopal decree. And then it was also indicated how to fast. But I could not find out that through this fasting precisely that could be achieved, which I have now indicated to you as the meaning of the Lenten commandment. But then, when this danger to morality has been felt, one can also have a sense of the distinction between what is actually the eternal heritage of man and how this eternal heritage of man, which is to be restored through Christ, differs from what man has become through mere earthly existence. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. Eternal heritage of humanity and temporal humanity.

And now, and this can also be the case, a strong feeling should arise from this, how man as an earthly human being is in need of healing, how he is in need of the leader, how he is in need of light, how he is in need of a transformation for that kind of mind that he has only from earthly forces, how he is in need of that kind of mind that he has only as an earthly human being. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. Needing healing

5. Needing a guide

6. Needing light

7. Needing a change of mind

We have thus characterized something of what we are to live through as meditation during the March time of the year, February to March, during Lent, and are now approaching what arises as the contemplation of Christ's death as the March-April time that fills the Easter season. The first thing we are to include in our meditation is looking up to heaven. Let us try to have a sense that the Easter season is connected with the fact that, in a sense, the spiritual falls away in the sky, that we are pushed towards a physical relationship. So (it is written on the board):

1. Looking up to the physical heaven. The second thing we are to feel, looking up to the physical heaven, is the grave, in reference to Christ's descent into the grave. (The following is written on the board:)

2. Grave.

The third, which we should then feel deeply, is death as the effect of being in the earthly body. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. Death

We will try to put ourselves in these feelings during Passion Week, in order to find the right way to make the transition during Easter days, to feel the resurrection as the effect of being a spirit. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. Resurrection

But then, when we have grasped the resurrection, when resurrection stands before us, as we have tried to do in our lectures, then the right worship of the one God arises, but then also the right self-containedness, the right “Christ in me.” (It is written on the blackboard:)

5. Worship
6. Christ in me

And only after all this, what the felt connection between looking up at the starry sky, but which determines the times, and looking down at the grave, feeling death in the body, feeling the resurrection as a spirit, permeating ing of our soul with devotion in worship, of the closing in on itself of the power of Christ, all that can be deeply felt can then be summarized in what can be called the Christian confession, which is best achieved through meditation. (It is written on the board:)

7. Confession

And now we come to what the May days, April 24 to May 25, can encompass. Once we have gone through all this, the days of May will give us a sense of the immediate presence of the supersensible, which we can learn to perceive in the way the resurrected Christ Jesus walks with his disciples, insofar as the Gospels give us clues. (The following is written on the board:)

1. The presence of the supersensible

From this presence of the supersensible, from what we can feel from the fact that we feel, just as things surround us in relation to our eyes and ears, so the beings of the supersensible surround us, from this a feeling for the existence of the moral arises. (It is written on the blackboard:)

2. The existence of the moral

And only when we have developed the right feeling for the existence of the moral will we be ready to perceive the external phenomena of the world as appearance; before that, it will always remain more or less a cliché. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. World as appearance

But then, when we perceive the world as appearance, this carries us over to a perception of the truth that is hidden in the world. (It is written on the board:)

4. Hidden Truth.

And now we all have within us the elements that enable us to penetrate more concretely with the Christ, to penetrate with the Risen Christ. (It is written on the blackboard:)

5. Penetrating with the Risen One.

Only in this context can we really have a proper sense of how to be a disciple, not of someone facing death, but of the Risen One, which is what Paul then became. (The following is written on the board:)

6. Disciple of the Risen One

And then you can feel with him in his world, feel in the spiritual world, feel in a different world. (It is written on the board:)

7. Feeling in a different world

And now we come to the time of Pentecost, that is, to the time of the appearance of the Holy Spirit, May-June. If we have gone through all this in advance, if we feel we are in another world, we get an idea of how we can have a new living realization, not the realization that we peel off as words from the things around us. So (it is written on the board):

1. New living knowledge (gospel) We begin to feel the gospel in its liveliness.

and now it turns out that we are learning to feel it promisingly, that a moral world is emerging, because morality will be its continuation after the demise of the purely natural world. So the second thing is the prospect of the existence of morality. (It is written on the board:)

2. Prospect of the existence of morality

This will be a very concrete sensation when we have first gone through everything else, after we have come to the feeling of danger for the moral during Lent. And after we have opened up this prospect of the being of this moral, we learn to recognize, I might say, how the truth in the spirit, holding itself up, floats away from all earthly heaviness. (It is written on the board:)

3. Truth that holds itself in the spirit.

This is something that one must first experience separately in its concreteness in order to have it as a human being. Everything we can experience on earth, everything we can combine through the senses and with the mind, carries within it a certain element that I would like to compare pictorially with the following: Imagine an athlete stepping up to us and showing us a weight that says, let us say, 1000 kg. We marvel at his enormous strength. But then he shows us that there is nothing inside by shaking it, and we stop believing in the reality of the appearance. Why do we stop believing in the reality of the appearance? Because we see that the earthly power of gravity is lacking, and the earthly ceases to have a being for us in the true sense of the word when it lacks the earthly power of gravity. The spiritual has the inner gravity, the inner power of retention. We do not get a correct sense of this inner power of retention of the spirit until we have gone through the things I have spoken of. But then, when we have gone through this, we realize that what appears to us separately in spirit as the truth of the world is also present in material things, so that it is not the material things that are an illusion, but only their appearance as mere matter, that matter is actually spirit. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. Matter as Spirit

When we have sensed this, then, my dear friends, we must experience something like an invasion of the power that we have gained through this entire meditation into our word. That is the moment when, in our inner meditation, what can be expressed by the words: “My tongue is loosed,” arises. (It is written on the board:)

5. The tongue is loosened.

One senses the word of the world in the spoken word. One senses it as something that one experiences, I would say, in the utterance of the word itself; just as one has a taste when swallowing food, so when one speaks the word, when the tongue is loosened in this sense, one senses what the word as a world word allows us to feel, not just to understand. One then feels oneself in the word, one feels oneself raised up out of what our mere body is, one feels oneself weaving with its essence on the waves of the word, one feels the liberation. (It is written on the board:)

6. Feeling of liberation

And then one also feels the union with that which has liberated one, the union with the spirit. (It is written on the blackboard:)

7. Union

We now come to the so-called St. John's time, June-July. We have, in a certain way, meditatively completed what we must, after all, to a high degree work out with ourselves as human beings. We are now ripe to immerse ourselves in what is going on around us, and we are indeed called upon to do so by what has already been prepared in the outer world. My dear friends, we can look at what is happening and has been prepared in the outer world in such a way that our inner eye is not spiritually solar; then we see the plant world, prepared in spring, extending into the ripening of the high sun, but we do not feel the spirit in the making concretely and distinctly enough. Only when we have brought all this with us to the time of June, for the training of our spirit, do we also experience the spirit in the making. (The following is written on the board:)

1. Spirit in Becoming

And when we experience the spirit in becoming, then, in a sense, all being continues for us; we feel, in a sense, when we look beyond the seed, how the seed does not merely conclude with its upper fruit, but carries within it the power, which we feel spiritually, to shoot up further. And we feel how the long light of night at this time carries within it the power to become even brighter spiritually. That the growth of the light of night can remain until the time when the actual summer begins is transformed into a spiritual growth of the universe. We feel that which in pre-Christian times could only be felt by the world, that in the post-Christian era, when we can relate to Christ in the right way, it transforms into the spiritual vision in the becoming of the light in the darkness. That which we have developed for Christ in us is also carried into nature. We also feel the light in nature outside as the spiritual in the darkness. From what we feel in the continuation of the power of growth in the plants, in the continuation of the becoming light, we are given images that are hidden in the world, which we grasp in the imaginative life. We are given the power to express ourselves in images. We learn to follow the Pentecostal call, we learn to preach. We learn to preach by learning to penetrate nature spiritually. We learn to preach by developing a deep feeling for nature, by being able to say to ourselves: the plants do not stop growing there, but the spiritual extends beyond their physical growth. The light also shines where it is on the wane. We understand the words of John: 'I will decrease, but thou shall increase'. Thus we have a sense for the light in the darkness, for the becoming in the being. (The following is written on the board:)

2. Light in the Darkness. Becoming in Being.

We feel nature around us and become aware that what we feel around us, wherever we carry the spirit through our mind's eye, has a relationship to our sleeping, but that we are unconscious when we experience our sleeping, and that by looking out [into nature] we feel the waking sleeping of nature. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. Nature's waking sleep.

And we feel, my dear friends, how that which was the Christ impulse can now actually be carried into the contemplation of the outer world. The time is ripe for this, because the present time must spiritualize a Christ-less natural science, to christen it; otherwise no new formation of religion arises.

The description of this process through the year in the early Church has come to an end; the time had not yet come when it was possible to carry the Christ impulse out into the outer natural world. You see how what was given in a certain abundance for the preceding period passes over into something that now has no relation at all to the development of time. You must begin — if you stop with the old development of the church — to do something like what the Catholic Church does when it has developed the Gospel up to the time of Pentecost and developed it out into the time of St. John: you must adhere to the feasts of the apostles, you must adhere to the feasts of the saints, to the feasts of Mary, you must adhere to the Acts of the Apostles, you must adhere to the letters of Paul. But basically you do not have that innermost relationship to what actually only emerges here and deepens more and more in the following time. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, had the Gentile view, which related to nature, to connect with the Jewish view, which related to the inner man. Therefore, if we feel very deeply during this time: What was the consciousness of John as the forerunner of Christ Jesus, how did he experience the Christ, and how did he, above all, express his own activity in relation to the appearance of the Christ? If we then find the transition [to the question]: How was Paul's life in relation to the living Christ? — and if we draw a comparison in ourselves in this time of John between John and Paul, then we lead over in the right way to the actual task of Paul, which is felt to be so because it could not have been fulfilled in its time.

But, my dear friends, we are not getting anywhere here; we only have three points, whereas we used to get seven points in a very natural way. And we must be content with the inner development, with the meditative development of these three points, for the time around St. John's Day. We must feel what the spirit gives us in a more lively way, how it expands, I might say, into the distance, but thereby also has less content than what arises for the spirit in what has gone before. Therefore, anyone who wanted to continue schematically with what I have given would not be able to arrive at a correct inner handling of what I must actually describe as the meditative content of the month of John for the pastor.

This afternoon I will also write down the time from July to August for you. This is the time when we experience the actual maturing of nature in the Christian sense. This is also the time when we will be particularly moved by what Paul says about his perception of the living Christ, his rapture into a spiritual world. For we will, so to speak, feel that which we previously sensed as the spirit in the process of becoming, as the presence of this spirit in the ripening nature that surrounds us. We will feel, when we can immerse ourselves in the right way in what has come to fruition, how the light has really shone in the darkness, in everything that is out there, where the light lives on in the ripening, and we will be able to feel how that which comes into being, that which lives on in the ripening, can also take root in us. We can only feel this if we can now experience, out of the earlier feeling of the waking-sleeping spirit, the calm of the August nature and the spiritual that is weaving in the calm, living in the splendor of the sunlight, and we will be able to transfer this image to that which we can experience in ourselves through Christ. Then, as a fourth point, a very lively experience of the external world emerges, and a fourth point follows from the other three. In a sense, the external and the internal come together in us. In this way, one can sense external and internal maturity, and one gets the images for inner maturity from the fact that the external fertilizes one.

I would like to continue from there in the afternoon and write down the last few points for the rest of the time.

A report about festivals and celebrations. By the author of “Light on the Path”. Translated from English by members of the Theosophical Society. Authorized translation. Sueviaverlag. Jugenheim an der Bergstraße, 1904.

This is an important booklet for those who want to get to know occult truths in an intimate way. A high wisdom lives in it. However, this wisdom is not expressed. For the booklet cannot be taken as if one could learn something from it as from a writing in our ordinary literature. Those who allow the contents to take effect on them, absorbing them into their thoughts, feelings and will, can allow a unique elixir of life to flow through their soul and thereby rise to an inkling of the great truth that the human spirit lives according to the same laws as the All-Spirit (whereby here, “All-Spirit” is understood only to mean the spirit that rules the heavenly bodies related to our Earth and its evolution). The inner life of this All-Spirit was once as the human spirit is today. And the spirit of man will be in the future what the spirit of the universe is today. In the outer world, however, the deeds of the All-Spirit confront the human spirit. Just as the sun rises and sets, just as it completes its cycle during the year and during the millennia, just as the earth brings its seeds and children to maturity, leads them to death and lets them rise again: all these are the deeds of this All-Spirit. The human being who rises above sensory perception sees the plants ripening, bearing seeds, sinking the seeds into the earth, enduring the sleep of death in the earth and then rising again: and in all this he feels the effects of divine life. And he rises to the realization that this divine life first had to undergo a long apprenticeship until it had matured its spirit to do such deeds. And then it also dawns on man that this apprenticeship of the gods was similar to his own present one. And in the deeds of the gods he then sees the blueprints of his own future. When the snow covers the sleeping life of the earth during the short winter days, when the first sprouts of the trees push towards the re-strengthened sunbeam, then he sees in it the divine masterpieces, and he says to himself: your spirit is of the same kind as the one that can do all this. And you must rise and look up fervently at these masterpieces on the days when they reveal themselves to you. Then these days become festivals for you, and in the course of the year these festivals will join together for you to become an insight into the harmonious work of the gods, from which you have to learn. Christmas, Easter and the other annual festivals thus come to life in his soul. And what the sun brings about in the course of the year will be the hieroglyph for the secret revelation of one's own future.

When man rises to such intuition, he can gradually recognize how his own spirit once split off from the All-Spirit, to be sunk into the material earth ground, there to learn to accomplish things in the future that are similar to those that are around him today. He will bring the darkness in which he is to his own contemplation, if he looks merely at his own present stage of development; and he will let himself be illuminated by the light that radiates from the deeds of the gods. Thus he grows together with the universe, finally feeling himself to be a part of it, just as a little finger must feel itself to be a part of the organism. And so he will see the Christmas season approaching his soul and know that it means the same thing in the life of this soul as once occurred in the soul of the god when it learned to perform the deed that falls on Christmas in the course of the year. Christmas is then not just an outward sign and symbol for him, but a source of strength that truly plants a seed in his soul for the future. And so it will be for the other festivals of the year.

Because this booklet leads to such feelings, it is a truly occult work. It does not just speak about the festivals in the way that a textbook might speak about magnetism, but it is a guide, like a person who, instead of a textbook, hands us a real magnet that we can then work with ourselves. The students of the initiation have learned to celebrate the seasonal festivals as suggested in this writing. And that is why these festivals themselves have given them such occult insights, just as a magnet attracts iron.

The book describes the process of human development from the moment when a person awakens to the ability to look into the karmic chains of their own soul until the moment when the higher self, the Christ, awakens, which has now transformed a child into a companion of divine beings. For it corresponds to the first moment of Christmas and what precedes it, and to the second, Easter. Those who can witness what is happening in the heavens during this time know the most important occult secrets. And those who awaken the right feelings within themselves at the appropriate times, as prescribed by the Büchelchen, prepare themselves to experience such secrets. If you take this booklet, live by it for a year and a second year and so on, in the sense that the instructions for attaining higher knowledge in the secret schools indicate, you will already perceive astral and mental, and the day will come when you will do so with full consciousness.

The moment is beautifully described when the soul begins to rise inwardly to see the karmic chain, how it becomes lonely, abandoned by what it has hitherto called reality. All the sacred awe of this momentous moment in human life lies in the words (page 1): “The disciple who now enters the hall of learning - a place known to the seers - will find it dark and deserted, with wide-open gates and blown by the wind. There is no peace anywhere, not a single spot of light. The walls are black, and the river, which used to flow freely and unbridled before us, is black and foaming like mad. Truly a scene to make you want to flee, and no disciple will want to challenge it a second time. Only the ignorant go forward and suddenly face it. The more wise know of the desert, remain silent and maintain their confidence despite the nightmare that threatens them; for whether they dwell quietly with their own, whether they are with their dearest friends, the sudden awareness of absolute loneliness will come to rest on their hearts despite everything, even in the midst of their companions, so that it stands still with oppression and agony."

Those who truly want to penetrate the occult world must understand such things vividly, for they describe the moment when man learns to renounce all knowledge that comes only from outside and learns to recognize that higher knowledge can never flow from anywhere other than from within. Then he learns to rise above so-called “objective” proofs and finds the source of truth by sacrificing all illusions. In “solitude” he learns to recognize that no one and nothing but he himself can lay this truth on the altar of sacrifice for humanity and the universe. The gatherers of seemingly “objective proofs” for the mind and also the so-called metapsychics – the latest fashion in French psychology has coined this word to prove to the discerning that it is still very far from understanding occultism – all these close the door to the secrets firmly in front of them, for they demand for their proofs precisely what must be overcome by those who want to penetrate into the higher secrets. Anyone who wants to prove the existence of spirits as one proves the presence of hydrogen does not understand himself; and anyone who seeks something mectapsychic as one seeks the presence of an acid is not on the path to the spirit, regardless of whether he is engaged in scholarly sport with the valuable observations of Richet, or of any spiritualist amateur club.

The encounter with the other initiates and the contemplation of the world from this perspective are described in the little book as downright powerful and true to life: “The disciple has become an individuality and is recognized. The message that proclaims this to him is audible only in his own heart and in the hearts of those who, like him, are able to hear the voice of silence. It does not reach the outer ear. The multitude of unseen souls, who in darkness and half-consciousness cherish the desire to become a part of the divine body of love, appear as a veiled multitude in the mighty process in the drama of the world soul. They are the unfree with undeveloped abilities, who blindly place their trust in a god taught to them and in their personal teachers.

And no less grand and true to life is the description of what the awakening of the higher soul means: “Since the day of birth, after the divine part of man has separated itself from the choirs of angels to consider itself equal to its own ephemeral footprints in the sands of time, that part has remained in darkness; now it is heading towards the recovery of eternal life. So it was at the birth of Buddha and of Christ; and so it is at the birth of the divine in every human being in whom this miracle takes place.” Those who understand this in a living way know occult truths of the highest value. Words of such depth are not often found in entire libraries, not even in so-called theosophical ones.

The translators of the booklet, the same ones who also translated the “Flita” discussed in the previous essay into German, will have done many a great favor if these two books should find an understanding audience. It may also be said that the translations are cast in beautiful German. We will make progress in Germany with the theosophical movement and achieve what we are supposed to achieve if there are several people who combine the attitude and correct understanding of what is important as these translators do.

My dear friends,

A large number of anthroposophical friends have appeared at the Class today who have not been here before, so I am obliged to say a few introductory words about the School's arrangements. It is to be remembered in all earnestness that with the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum a new element has entered into the anthroposophical movement. Especially the members of our Free School for Spiritual Science must be aware of this new element. I have often indicated this, but I know that many anthroposophical friends are here for the first time who have never heard it, so I must emphasize it once again.

It is true that before the Christmas Conference it was always emphasized that the anthroposophical movement and the Anthroposophical Society must be held strictly separate.

The anthroposophical movement represented the inflow of spiritual wisdom and life impulses into human civilization today which can and should be obtained for our present time directly from the spiritual world. This anthroposophical movement exists not because people like it to exist but because the spiritual powers which guide and lead the world and affect human history consider it right that spiritual light, which can come through anthroposophy, flow today into human civilization in the appropriate manner.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in order to act as an administrative society for the body of anthroposophical wisdom and life. And it had to be continually emphasized that anthroposophy as such is beyond and above any societal organization and the Anthroposophical Society is the exoteric administrator.

That has changed since the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum. Since the Christmas Conference the opposite is the case. And only because the opposite is the case was I able to declare myself willing, together with the Executive Committee (Vorstand) which was formed during the Christmas Conference and with whom the appropriate work to be done can be carried out, to take over the presidency of the Anthroposophical Society which was founded at Christmas. I can explain what this means in one sentence: Until then, anthroposophy was administered by the Anthroposophical Society; now whatever happens through the Anthroposophical Society must itself be anthroposophy. Since Christmas the Anthroposophical Society must occupy itself with anthroposophy. Every single act must have an esoteric character. The investment of the Vorstand was thus an esoteric measure, a measure which must be thought of as coming directly from the spiritual world. Only when our anthroposophical friends are conscious of this can the Anthroposophical Society thus founded thrive. So, the anthroposophical movement and the Anthroposophical Society have now become identical.

Thus, the Vorstand at Dornach is an initiative-Vorstand, as was emphasized during the Christmas Conference. Of course, there must be an administration. But that is not what it considers to be its principal task, but rather to make anthroposophy flow through the Anthroposophical Society and to do everything possible to achieve this objective.

The position of the Vorstand at Dornach within the Anthroposophical Society is therewith given. And it must be clear that from now on every relationship within the Anthroposophical Society will not be based on some bureaucratic measure or other, but it will be based on the strictly human. Therefore, at the Christmas Conference statutes that contain paragraphs which detail what members must believe or agree to were not presented; rather do the statutes describe what the Vorstand intends. And that is how the Anthroposophical Society is constituted. It is founded upon human relationships.

It is a minor thing, but I must emphasize it: every member is issued a membership card, which is signed by me, so that even if it's an abstract thing, the personal relationship is at least present. It has been suggested that I have a rubber stamp made with my signature. I'm not going to do that - despite it not being exactly comfortable to sign twelve thousand membership cards, little by little. But I will not have the stamp made, first of all because, although very abstract, a relationship is at least established to each and every member when, if only for minutes the eye rests on the name of the person who carries the membership card. Obviously, all the other relationships will be even more human, but by this means a concrete beginning is made within our society.

I must also stress that it must be clear to the members - I stress it because it has already been sinned against - that when the name “General Anthroposophical Society” is used, the agreement of the Vorstand at the Goetheanum is first obtained. In the same sense, when something comes from the Goetheanum and is then used as something esoteric, the use is based upon an understanding with the Vorstand at the Goetheanum. This means that nothing by way of formulations and teaching which appears in the name of the General Anthroposophical Society will be recognized by us here as valid unless an understanding with the Vorstand at the Goetheanum has taken place. In the future, no abstract relationship will be possible, only concrete ones. Anything said to come from the Goetheanum must really come from the Goetheanum. Therefore, the use of the title “General Anthroposophical Society” for lectures to be given somewhere or for the use of formulations and so forth which originate here and which an active member wishes to distribute, should write to the Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, that is, to Mrs. Wegman, in order to obtain the Vorstand's agreement. It is important that in future the Vorstand at the Goetheanum be understood as the center of the anthroposophical movement.

Furthermore, the relation of this School to the Anthroposophical Society must be clearly understood by the membership. One who becomes a member of the Anthroposophical Society feels the inner heartfelt need to learn and live what circulates in the world as anthroposophical knowledge and living impulse. One assumes no responsibilities other than those which come to the heart and soul from anthroposophy itself. Once one has been a general member of the General Anthroposophical society for a certain time - presently the minimum is two years - he can apply for membership in the Free School for Spiritual Science.

In this Free School for Spiritual Science one assumes truly earnest responsibilities for the Society, for anthroposophy, that is, that as a member one wishes to be a true representative of anthroposophy to the world. That is necessary today. The leadership of the Free School for Spiritual Science cannot agree to work together with someone as a member under other conditions.

Do not say, my friends, that this is a limitation of freedom. Freedom demands that everyone involved be free. And just as one can be a member of the School and be free in this relationship, the leadership of the School must also be free to determine with whom it wishes to work and with whom not. Therefore, if the leadership for any reason is of the opinion that a member cannot be a true representative of anthroposophy to the world, it must be possible for the leadership of the School to either not approve that person's application or, in the case where he is already a member, to say that his membership must be revoked. This must be strictly observed in this future, so that in fact a free cooperation exists between the School's leadership and the members.

Step by step we will try to make arrangements so that those who cannot take part in the continuing work of the School in Dornach can partake in some manner. We can only take the fifth step after the fourth, not the seventh step after the first; we must take one step after the other and there has been much to do here since the Christmas Conference. But it will all be arranged to the extent possible. We will have a newsletter through which those who reside elsewhere can participate in the School's activities. We were able to make a beginning with a newsletter that Dr Wegman sent to the physicians who were thus able to participate in the work of the School. Things will develop as much as possible, and I ask that you be patient in this respect.

Something else to be mentioned is that the School must be understood not as having been established by a human impulse, but from the spiritual world. A decision made from the spiritual world has been obtained with the means which are possible. So that this School is to be understood as an institution of the spiritual world for the present time - as has been the case with the Mysteries in all times. Therefore, we may say today: This School must develop into a true Mystery School for our times. Thus, it will be the soul of the anthroposophical movement.

This makes clear how serious membership in this School should be understood to be. It is obvious that all the previous esoteric work achieved here will flow into the School's work. For this School is the esoteric foundation and source of all esoteric activity within the anthroposophical movement. Therefore, if anyone wishes to initiate any kind of esoteric work in the world without a connection to the Vorstand at the Goetheanum, they must either reach an understanding with the Vorstand or they cannot include things which originate in the Goetheanum in their teaching or impulse. Whoever wants to do esoteric work under conditions other than those just mentioned cannot be a member of this School. They must then do the esoteric work outside the confines of this School and unrecognized by it, but must clearly understand that it cannot include anything which originated in this School. Relations with the School must be clearly understood. So the members must understand that [the leadership of] the School must be able to consider that each member is a true representative of anthroposophy in the world, and that every member represents anthroposophy exoterically (sic) as a member of the School should.

Before I was President of the Anthroposophical Society an attempt was made to organize the Goetheanum in the way other universities are organized. But that doesn't work under certain circumstances. Here esoteric studies will take place which are not found in other universities. And there is no intention to compete with other universities in the world, but to begin with questions about any field of life posed by honestly seeking people, which cannot be answered outside the esoteric.

Therefore, in the future, especially for members of the School, nonsense which keeps being repeated must cease, because with the Christmas Conference something real has happened and for the Goetheanum to fulfill its mission all the members of the School must frankly and freely declare: I am a representative of the anthroposophy which comes given from the Goetheanum. Whoever will not do this, who thinks that one should be silent about anthroposophy, prepare people slowly, whoever wants to play politics and thinks that he can advance by denying us and then people will come to us - they generally don't - would be well advised to give up membership in the School right away. I can promise you that in the future membership in the School will be taken very seriously indeed. For those members of the School whose work is really about anthroposophy and not something else, this will be accepted readily and gladly. Those who continually claim that you can't confront people with anthroposophy immediately, that you must somehow talk them into it gradually, may choose to exercise their opinion outside the School.

These are the conditions which must be adhered to, and I had to mention them today because so many anthroposophical friends are present who had not yet participated in the School. And this is the reason why you have had to wait so long for the lesson to begin, and listen to this introduction. So, we can consider the lesson today to be a kind of preparation. I will hold a second lesson, date to be announced, in which no new friends may participate. So, I ask those who wish to attend in the future to have patience, because if every time a lesson is held here new people come, we would never get anywhere. Of course, one can still become a member, but only members who have attended today will be admitted to the next lesson. It will be a continuation of today's lesson.

I wish to begin today's lesson - without you taking notes, only listening at first - by speaking the mantric formula which points to what has resounded throughout the ages, first from the Mysteries, but previously for the Mysteries from the script written in the stars, in the whole cosmos, and which resounds in the human soul, in the human heart, as the great challenge to humanity to strive for a true knowledge of self. This challenge; “O man, know thyself!” rings forth from the whole cosmos.

We look up at the stars, which reveal an especially clear writing in the zodiac, which through their composition in certain forms reveal the grand cosmic script. For one who understands the script the cosmic words will sound forth: “O man, know thyself!”

When we look up at what the planets reveal by their movements, first the sun and moon, but also the planets which belong to the sun and moon, then just as the movements of the stars reveal the powerful, forceful cosmic word, so do these planetary movements reveal the heart and feeling content.

And through what we experience from the elements which surround us on the earth and in which we partake through our skin, through our senses, through everything in us, that enters into us and acts in our bodies - earth, water, fire, air - through them the will element pours into these words.

We can therefore let this cosmic word, which rings out to humanity, act on our souls through the mantric words:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Is it you yourself who,
Feeling space, experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear friends, my dear sisters and brothers, there exists no knowledge which is not closely tied to the spiritual world. Everything we call knowledge which is neither investigated in the spiritual world nor imparted by those who are able to investigate in the spiritual world, is not real knowledge. We must be clear about the fact that when we look around in the world, in the kingdoms of nature, see the colors and the radiance manifested, see what lives above in the shining stars, in the warming sun, what springs up from the depths of the earth - it is all sublime, grand, beautiful, full of wisdom. And we would be very mistaken to ignore this beauty, sublimity, this wisdom. If one wishes to become an esotericist, if he strives for real knowledge, then he must have a sense for the world around him - an open, free sense. For during the time between birth and death, during his earthly existence, he is obliged to absorb his strength from the forces of the earth, and to return the results of his work to the forces of the earth.

But although it is true that man must really participate in all the colors on colors, sound on sound, warmth on warmth, star on star, cloud on cloud, creatures of the kingdoms of nature which surround him, it is also true that if when he looks out at all the grand, powerful, sublime, wise, beautiful things his senses convey, he still does not discover what he himself is. Rather is it just then, when he has a correct sense of the sublimity, beauty and grandeur of his surroundings in his life on earth, that he will realize: In this light-filled kingdom of earth the inmost source of my being is not present. It is elsewhere. Full recognition of this causes us to seek the state of consciousness which moves us on to what we call the threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, which lies immediately before an abyss, we must approach and remember that in all that surrounds us in earthly existence the primal source of humanity is not found.

Then we must know: at this threshold stands a spiritual figure called the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian takes care - beneficially to man - that one does not cross the threshold unprepared, without having experienced deeply in the soul those feelings I have spoken about. But then, when he really is prepared with inner earnestness for spiritual knowledge - whether by means of clairvoyant consciousness or through healthy human understanding of what he has been told, for both ways are valid, only then is it possible for the Guardian of the Threshold to reach out with a helping hand and allow him to look over the abyss. There, beyond the threshold where the human being's inmost being originated, utter darkness lies at first.

My dear friends, my dear sisters and brothers, we seek light in order to see in the light the origin of our own being. At first darkness reigns. This light which we seek must radiate out from the darkness. And it only radiates out from the darkness when we become aware of how the three fundamental impulses of our soul-life, thinking, feeling and willing, here is this earth-life are held together by our physical bodies. Thinking, feeling and willing are conjoined in physical existence.

If I schematically draw how they are conjoined, it looks like this. Feeling (green) extends into thinking (yellow); willing (red) extends into feeling. So, in earthly existence the Three are conjoined.

One must learn to feel that the Three separate from each other. And if more and more he uses the meditations suggested to him here by the School as the content of his soul life, he will note the following [drawing again]: thinking (yellow) is freed, detaching itself from feeling, feeling [green] is on its own as is willing [red]. For one learns to perceive without the physical body.

The physical body had held thinking, feeling and willing together, had pressed them into each other. [Around the first drawing an oval is drawn.] Here [in the second drawing on the right] the physical body is not present.

Through the meditations which he receives here at the School, one gradually comes to feel himself outside his body; and he comes to regard the world as self, and what self was, as world. We stand here on the earth in our earthly existence: we feel like human beings; we say, as we become inwardly aware: this is my heart, these are my lungs, this is my liver, this is my stomach. What we call our organs, what we call the physical human organization, we consider to be our own. And we point up: that is the sun, that is the moon, those are the stars, the clouds, that is a tree, a stream. We identify these things as being outside us. We are within our organs. We are outside of those things we indicated as: that is the sun, that is the moon, those are the stars, and so on.

When we have prepared our souls enough so that they can perceive without the body, that is, outside the body in the spiritual universe, then the reverse consciousness comes about. Now we speak of the sun as we speak of our heart here in earthly existence: that is my heart. We speak of the moon: that is the creator of my form. We speak of the clouds more of less as we speak on earth of our hair. We call our own organism what people on the earth see as components of the universe. And we point out: look there, a human heart, human lungs, a human liver - that is objective, that is world. Just as when we are in our physical bodies we look out from here to the sun and moon and to the world, when from the universe we look at the sun and the moon and clouds and rivers and mountains and they are within us. And when we look at man he is our outer world. The difficulty is only in the spatial relationships. And the difficulty will be overcome.

As soon as we leave our physical bodies with our thinking, we perceive this thinking as one with all that is manifested in the stars. Here on earth we call our brain our own, as the instrument of our thinking. But now we begin to feel the stars, especially the stars of the zodiac, as our brain when we are out in the universe and look down at man external to us.

And we perceive the circling planets as our own feeling. Our feeling follows then the course of the sun, of the moon, and of the other planets. Between what we experience as thinking in the fixed stars and feeling, is the sun in ourselves [the sun sign is inserted between the yellow and green of the second drawing]; and the moon lies between feeling and willing - which we also feel within us. [The moon sign is inserted between green and red.] And by simply meditating on this figure, it has the force to bring us closer and closer to spiritual vision. It must be realized that what I am saying here can really be experienced: leaving the physical body, expanding throughout the cosmos, feeling the elements of the cosmos - sun and moon, stars and so on - as one's own organs, observation of humanity as our exterior world.

What must be perfectly clear however, is that our thinking, our feeling and our willing which on earth is a unity held together by the physical body, now becomes threefold. And we learn to feel this threefold nature above all when we observe thinking.

Dear friends, dear sisters and brothers, this thinking which man uses on earth between birth and death is a corpse. It does not live. Whatever he may think with his brain about the beautiful, sublime, grand earth in his surroundings: these thoughts do not live. They lived in pre-earthly existence. They lived, these thoughts, when we had not yet descended to the physical world, but still lived above in the soul-spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. There the thoughts which we have on earth were alive, but our physical body is the grave in which the moribund thought-world is buried when we descend to the earth. And here we carry the corpses of thought within us. And we think about our sense-perceptible surroundings on earth not with living thoughts but with the corpses of thought. But before we descended to this physical world a living thinking existed within us.

My dear friends, we only need to immerse ourselves in these truths again and again with inner strength and we come to the conscious conclusion that it really is so. One comes to know the human being in this way. One comes to know him and sees him so: This is the human head. [The outline of a head is sketched.] This human head is the bearer and support for earthly corpse-thinking. From it spring forth - but dead - the thoughts which spread over what is perceived by the eyes, by the ears, by the sense of warmth, by the other senses. We observe the thinking that corresponds to life on earth.

But gradually we learn to see through this thinking. Within the spiritual cell of the human head is the lingering sound of the true, living thinking in which we lived before descending to the physical world. When one looks at man, one sees at first his dead thinking [sketch: red part of the head]. But behind this dead thinking in the head's spiritual cell is the living thinking [yellow part of the head]. And this living thinking has brought with it the force necessary to form our brain. The brain is not thinking's creator, but the product of pre-earthly living thinking.

So when we look at the human being with the correct awareness, dead earthly thinking is manifested on the surface of the head; if we look within to the spiritual cell behind, we see the living thinking, which is like a will, such as the will we are otherwise aware of in the human motor system, which is really sleeping in us. For we don't know how thought descends to our muscles and so on - when it intends to will this or that. Then we observe what lives in us as will: we see it as thinking in the spiritual cell behind the sense oriented thinking. But then this will, which we become aware of as thinking, is creative for our thinking organ. For this thinking is no longer human thinking, it is cosmic thinking.

If we can understand the human being so that we look through the earthly thinking to the thinking which made the brain the basis for thinking on earth, then sensory thinking flows out into the cosmic void, and eternal thinking arises as will.

We become conscious of all this when we let the following mantric words act in us:

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkening spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let flow through your soul's force
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And the will, it arises
As cosmic-thought-creating.

This imagination must gradually stand before you, my dear friends, this imagination of dead thinking directed toward the sensory world streaming out from the head. Behind it lurks - at first in darkness - the true thinking which glows through sensory thinking and which builds the brain as man descends from the spiritual to the physical world. It is, however, like will. And one sees then how from out of man the will arises [white lines from below to above], spreading in the head, to become cosmic thinking because what lives in the will as thinking is already cosmic thinking.

We should therefore try to better understand and bring closer the mantric thoughts which we can imbue in the soul in the following way:

[The first verse is written on the blackboard:]

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkening spirit-cell

- that is, one must look behind thinking - [“behind” is underlined]

Willing arises from the body's depths;

- one must become strong in the soul to let normal sensory thinking flow away -

Let flow through your soul's force
Dead thinking into the cosmic void
And the will, it arises
As cosmic-thought-creating.

These seven lines contain the secret of human thinking's connection to the universe.

We must not pretend to understand these things with the intellect, but must let them live in feeling as meditation. And these words have force. They are constructed harmoniously. “Thinking”, “willing”, “cosmic void”, “will” and “cosmic thought creating” [these words are underlined] are arranged here in inner organization of thoughts so they can work on the imaginative consciousness.

Just as we can look at the human head and it becomes a means for us to look into cosmic-thought-creating, we can also look at the human heart as the physical imaginative representative of the human soul. As thinking is the abstract representative of the human spirit, we can look upon the human heart as the representative of feeling. And we can look into feeling, as it applies to human earthly existence, but now no longer behind, but into it. [In the drawing a yellow oval.] For just as we perceive cosmic-thought-creating in the spiritual cell behind thinking, we can also perceive feeling, whose representative the heart is, streaming through something which from the cosmos goes in and out of man: we perceive cosmic life, cosmic life which becomes human soul-life.

As here [in the first verse] must be: “behind thinking's sensory light”, now it must be: “in feeling's” in the second mantra, which must be harmonically interwoven with the first.

See in feeling's psychic weaving
How in the twilight of dreams
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through the tranquil heart
Human feelings drift away:
Cosmic spirit life becomes
Man's true force of being.

[This second strophe is written on the blackboard:]

See in feeling's psychic weaving
How in the twilight of dreams

Feeling is only a wakeful dreaming. Feelings are not as conscious as thinking is. They are as conscious as the pictures in dreams. Thus, feeling is a waking dream. Therefore:

See in feeling's psychic weaving
How in the twilight of dreams
Life

Here [in the first verse] “willing” arises from the body's depths; whereas here “Life” streams in from cosmic distance.

streams in from cosmic distance;

[In the drawing 4 horizontal arrows are added.]

As here [in the first verse] thinking is to flow into the cosmic void through strength of soul, now we let the dreams of feeling gust away, but in their place, we perceive in the psychic weaving of feeling what streams in as cosmic life. When feelings' dreams completely dissolve in sleep, when individual human feeling stops, then cosmic life weaves into man.

Life streams in from cosmic distance

[Writing continues:]

Let in sleep through the tranquil heart

Here [in the first verse] we need strength of soul; Here [in the second verse] we need complete tranquility, for the dreams of feeling dissolve in sleep, and the divine cosmic life streams into the human soul.

Let in sleep through the tranquil heart

[Writing continues, and the words “drift away”, “cosmic spirit life” and “Man's true force of being” are underlined.]

Human feelings drift away:
Cosmic spirit life becomes
Man's true force of being.

In these seven lines the whole secret of human feeling is contained, if it can become independent when the unity [of thinking, feeling, willing] becomes threefold.

In this way we can also observe the human limbs, in which the will is revealed [Drawing: white arrow pointing downwards]; here we cannot say: “See behind”, “See into”. Here we must say “See above”, for thinking streams down to the will from the head, although man with normal consciousness cannot see it. But the thoughts stream from the head into the limbs in order for the will to be able to act in the limbs.

When we observe the will acting in the limbs, when we see in every arm movement, in every leg movement how the will streams in, then we also realize how in this will there is a secret thinking, a thinking which directly grasps earthly existence. Actually, it is our being in earlier earthly lives, which grasps earthly existence through the limbs in order that in grasping it we can live our present life on earth. Thinking descends into the limbs. When we see how thinking descends, we are seeing thinking in the will [drawing: red descending from the head through the arm].

Then, because we are seeing with the soul, we see how thinking lives in the arms, in the hands, in the legs, in the feet, in the toes, a process otherwise hidden from us, then we must see how this thinking is light. Thinking as light streams through arms and hands, through legs and toes. And the will, which otherwise is sleeping in the limbs, transforms itself and thinking appears as a magical being of will that transplants the human being from earlier lives - after becoming spirit - into the present-earth life:

See over the will's work in the body,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from the head's forces;
Let human will transform itself
Through the soul's vision of light;
And thinking, it appears
as the magical essence of will.

It conjures, that is, it acts magically on the invisible thinking in the will of the limbs. He understands the human being who knows that the thought which is not seen in the will - because we are sleeping in the will - acts magically in the limbs as will. And only by seeing as magical the thoughts which pass through the arms and hands, through legs and toes is true magic understood.

[The third strophe is written on the blackboard with the words “thinking”, “transform” and “magical being of will” underlined.]

See over the will's work in the body,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from the head's forces;
Let human will transform itself
Through the soul's vision of light;
And thinking, it appears
as the magical essence of will.

Therein is contained the secret of human will, which creates magically from out of the universe into man.

Let us then, my dear friends, my dear sisters and brothers, consider this a foundation for building later on at a time to be announced, a foundation for again and again in meditation letting the mantric words flow through the soul.

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkening spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let flow through your soul's force
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And the will, it arises
As cosmic-thought-creating.

See in feeling's psychic weaving
How in the twilight of dreams
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through the tranquil heart
Human feelings drift away:
Cosmic spirit life becomes
Man's true force of being.

See over the will's work in the body,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from the head's forces;
Let human will transform itself
Through the soul's vision of light;
And thinking, it appears
as magical being of will.

The Christian consciousness of to-day is still aware—or can, at least, still be aware—of two poles, representing as it were the outermost extremes of world-outlook. The two poles to which I refer are the Christmas secret and the Easter secret. To begin with—even if you only compare them outwardly—it will strike you at once that the Christmas secret is really the secret of birth; it represents the birth of Christ Jesus, and therewithal attaches itself to the secret of birth in general, the Easter secret is connected with the secret of death, inasmuch as it is a festival associated with the death of Christ Jesus. Now birth and death are the two boundaries of human life, as it runs its course within the physical body. Thus, in truth, we may say: over against what stands before man as the visible part of his being, birth and death veil from his sight the invisible part; they are the two gateways to the invisible world.

In the festivals of Christmas and Easter, two gateways to the invisible world are thus made the basis of the Christian year; and inasmuch as this is so, the Christian world-conception is indeed connected with the Mysteries of all the World. Wherever we may look—among all peoples and in the most varied regions of the Earth, we find Mysteries everywhere associated either with the secret of birth or with the secret of death, Not that it lies so patently at hand in every case; the inner connections are not always visible at once. Thus, certain Mysteries (I am only referring now to post-Atlantean time) were connected with the secret of birth in a more indirect way. I refer to those Mysteries which place into the very centre of their life what the profane world calls the Sacred Fire; ‘Sacred Fire’ is very different from what the profane world can understand. It is essentially Man himself—the super-sensible Man who underlies the human being of the sense-world. What is it that the profane world knows as the Sacred Fire (or, as we might also call it, the Sacred Warmth)? What is it in reality, when they revere this Fire? It is a symbol of the super-sensible Man. It is that which descends through birth from spiritual heights to grow and evolve in it physical body. It is the invisible or super-sensible Man—perceptible, however, to an old atavistic clairvoyance!

This, then, is the type of the Mysteries which takes its start from the super-sensible Man who underlies the man of the sense-world—the super-sensible Man who passes through birth to clothe himself with a sensely garment. This is the type of Mystery which afterwards passed over into the secret of Christmas; it is essentially the Mystery of birth.

Less hidden, we may truly say, is the other kind of Mystery,—that which belongs to the secret of death. While the former is associated with Fire, this kind of Mystery is associated with the Light. Here too, however, as in the case of Fire, something quite different is meant by ‘the Light.’ ‘The Light’ refers to that which speaks to man at night-time when the star-lit sky sends him its language of Light. All astrological Mysteries in ancient time were in reality Mysteries of Light,—in the times, I mean, before the arrival of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only, here again we must remember that the ancient Astrology was not pursued with the abstract calculations of to-day, but with an atavistic clairvoyant power. Man did not merely observe the mineral-physical world of stars above him; in those most ancient times, he had an organ with which to behold the secret of the constellations. It was, especially, a customary art in certain Mysteries of olden time, to observe the Moon establishing its various positions through the constellations of the Zodiac. They knew that when the Moon was shining from the region of the Pleiades, or from Taurus, it signified something quite different than if it were shining from some other region of the sky. Likewise the other planets in their several constellations were brought home to the consciousness of men. It was, however, a very different consciousness from what has remained to us in this materialistic epoch. They knew, moreover, that the Mystery of human death is connected with what is thus spoken to man by the starry constellations. Throughout the ever-changing association of the fixed stars with the several planets, they saw the expression, as it were, of a language which he who sojourns in the body hears from the Earth, while at the same time the souls of the dead perceive it from the other side. They were clearly conscious of the fact that when a man gives himself up with devotion to the language of the stars, he lives in that element which receives the human being when he passes through the Gate of Death.

They looked on birth as on a Question, in those ancient times; and the old kind of Mysticism—that is, the experience in consciousness of the invisible or super-sensible Man—was intended as an answer to this question. What the stars were speaking through their constellations,—they did not regard it as a mere outer fact, to be summed-up as we are wont to do. No! in the times of the old Mysteries—the Mysteries of the Stars, the Mysteries of Light—they regarded the starry constellations as a Question, and human death as the real answer thereto. (Even as birth was associated with the super-sensible Man, so was death associated with the constellations. Hence we may truly call the ‘Mysteries of Fire’ the Mysteries of Birth, the Christmas Mysteries; and the ‘Mysteries of Light’ the Star-Mysteries—the East Mysteries, the Mysteries of Death. And we may add: those Mysteries which afterwards merged into the real secret of Christmas, are the ones which really underlie all that humanity possessed by way of Mystery secrets, before Golgotha, in ancient India and Egypt. Chaldea and Western Asia was more the soil for Easter Mysteries—that is to say, for a Science of the Stars.

In Western Asia, especially among the so-called Iranian peoples and notably in the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch, the Science of the Stars was well developed. Only we must conceive that in the earliest times man had an exact super-sensible vision of the entity which clothes itself at birth with the physical body, just as he had on the other hand a direct vision and perception of the language of the stars. As I have often said, when ancient charts depict all manner of Beings in the Heavens, such Beings are no mere figment of human fancy. They are the image of what the old atavistic clairvoyance actually saw in the starry sky; for the old atavistic consciousness did really see the human being in connection with the entire Universe. This consciousness was thoroughly aware of the truth that the cosmos is a self-contained organism—in which organism we, as Man, do live and move and have our being.

This consciousness, needless to say, has been lost. It must be regained by mankind in course of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; and that, in all essentials, by the two streams aforesaid—the streams of Star-wisdom and of Mysticism—finding one another once more. In ancient times they could appear distinct—two separate poles, as it were. In our time it must be possible to unite the Christmas and the Easter Mystery in one; to see them as the two sides of one and the same Being.

When we transplant ourselves into ancient times of human knowledge, we find a clear awareness of the fact that the Zodiac is not only to be found up yonder in the Heavens, but that man too carries within him the same law and principle as is represented for example by the Zodiac,—that is to say, by the farthest circumference of the Universe of the fixed stars.

You know that in olden times not only certain places in the Heavens were thus named, as Aries and Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, etc., but the human being too was membered thus: head = Aries; neck = Taurus; the two sides of man in their lateral symmetry = Gemini; the chest and ribs = Cancer; the heart as Leo, and so on, Man bears microcosmically within him the several regions which are also the fundamental places of the Heavens. This connection of microcosm and macrocosm was deemed most essential in those ancient times. Man, as it were, bore within him the Heavens of the fixed stars, by virtue of the Zodiac which represents it. It was said, of old time: When a man uses his larynx in speech, there sounds forth from him the same cosmic stream which flows down to us from the cosmos when the Moon is shining from the Pleiades. They felt the kinship of the Light and of that which the Light carries down when the Moon is shining from the region of the Pleiades,—they felt the kinship of this macrocosmic stream with that which issues from man when he makes use of his larynx. So too with the Sun. So too, they felt Man penetrated with the same law and principle that works in the planetary system, yet with this difference:—They knew that the system of the fixed stars corresponds to fixed places in Man, namely, the Ram to the head, the neck to the Bull, and so on. Fixed portions of the human being were thus associated with the heaven of the fixed stars. Those organs on the other hand which represent, as it were, the mobile element in man, sending the saps and fluids throughout man's nature, were connected by them, and rightly, with the planetary system. Man is himself, as it were, a heaven of the fixed stars, and he carries a planetary system within him. Thus in the oldest Mysteries they conceived an intimate relationship as between Man and the whole cosmos.

To perceive the full scope and range of this matter, must, however, also bear the following in mind. In man we have the several constellations like fixed places—Aries the head, Taurus the neck, and so on. Thereby, man stands in a certain relation—a quite individual relation—to the starry heavens. Assume for a moment that a man is born to-day in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces. Pisces will be quite especially determined by his inner system of fixed stars. Now Pisces is associated with the feet,—that is to say, with what man experiences through his feet, inasmuch as he is born in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces, a man is born with that part of his being which corresponds to this particular constellation to the Sun. If he were born at another season of the year, his constellation would be less in accordance with the cosmic constellation. Nowadays, this attunement or non-attunement of the human being is determined according to certain hard-and-fast schemes. In the ancient Mysteries they felt in a very living way the peculiar unison, the sounding-together of the human constellation after birth with the heavenly constellation.

Now you will bear in mind that a very special constellation existed in the age of Aries, precisely in the Mystery of Golgotha. For at that very time the whole of mankind, with that portion of the human being which corresponds to the head, was in harmony with the constellation of Aries in the Spring. Here was another reason why those who knew the Mysteries felt something quite peculiar in this correspondence of the human constellation of the head with the constellation of the Cosmos. Man is related, through the head, not with the Earth but with the Cosmos. Through the head, therefore, he is especially adapted to receive the forces of the Cosmos. With his head—that is to say, with his Aries—he reaches out into the Cosmos. What constellation will therefore be the most favourable one, of all that can exist in the Cycle of 25,920 years in which we are now living? Precisely that, in which the constellation of the Ram is with the rising Sun in Spring. In short, I wish to indicate this fact. They studied Man in his whole being, in his attunement with the macrocosm. They studied this especially because they were well aware how much depended, even for earthly events, on this attunement of Man with the macrocosm.

They perceived the manifold secrets of these constellations of the stars; and they always knew that with every secret of a starry constellation a human secret is connected. More and more, they tried to express how each secret of the stars is connected with an inner secret of Man. It is remarkable how far they got in this direction with their ancient science. We see it in the Pyramids. Even if crudely studied, the structure of the Pyramids proves to contain all manner of secrets. Take the length of the four basic sides, forming the plan of the Pyramid; compare it with the height. It corresponds exactly to the proportion of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. It is a true correspondence to a large number of decimal places. But it not only applies to things like this. Certain sub-divisions in the Pyramids correspond to the Zodiacal sub-divisions of the macrocosm. The weight of the Pyramids—it has only been calculated approximately—is a certain fraction of the weight of the whole Earth. Certain measurements of the Pyramids, multiplied by a power of 18, give you the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In short, such are the measurements of the Pyramids that they can only be the result of a marvellous and intimate knowledge of the relationships of the stars and the Heavens.

These Pyramids were not really the work of the Egyptians, Whenever conquerors came into Egypt from Iranian countries, from Western Asia, they created Pyramidal structures, The Egyptians learned to build Pyramids from these peoples, peoples who possessed Star-Mysteries; their own Mysteries were not Star-Mysteries, but rather a kind of Christmas Mysteries.

The study of the Pyramids had led to this result, even during the 19th century. Men like Carus declared that the pure study of the Mysteries was enough to show us that there was a Science in ancient times which has since been lost, and which is calculated to make the civilisation of to-day blush for shame. These are Carus' own words, not mine. The humanity of to-day are not very prone to believe that there existed in primeval human times a science—acquired by somewhat different means, it is true—but a true science none the less, able to shed its light into deep secrets of the Cosmos.

But the most important thing is not the mere fact that the Wise Men of those Mysteries were acquainted with such distant cosmic measures or secreted them into the structure of the Pyramids. The most remarkable is quite another thing. It was by no means an abstract knowledge which they had, of man's relation to the Universe of stars. It was a very concrete knowledge—a knowledge whereby Man could feel himself within the whole Cosmos. He knew that with his head, which he turns freely to the Cosmos, he is directly related to the Heaven of the fixed stars. All that appeared to the human being as the secret of the head—the Wise Men of the Mysteries perceived it as the secrets of the heaven of the fixed stars. And it is perfectly true the human head is formed by the heaven of the fixed stars. It is but a materialistic prejudice of to-day to suppose that everything is inherited from the ancestors,—that everything comes from the germ. The germ itself—in so far as it is the germ of the head—is informed and filled with forces, within the human mother, by the heaven of the fixed stars. According to his head, Man is connected with the fixed stars. His head is an image of the whole heaven of the fixed stars. You may read of it from another point of view in my booklet, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, where I have also touched upon this matter. Likewise on the other side, the rest of the human organism corresponds to all that is connected with the secret of the Sun. Even in this direction, Man is really of a twofold nature; and this was well known to those Wise Men of the ancient Mysteries who were the keepers of the Star-Mysteries, or Easter Mysteries. Man is a twofold nature: his head is assigned to the heaven of the fixed stars; and the rest of his body, with the centre in the heart, to the Sun.

Now these ancient astronomers (or you may call them astrologers, if you will) knew something else as well. When we observe the stars in their relation to the Sun, we see the Sun gradually remaining behind as against the movement of the fixed stars. Thereby the vernal point keeps on appearing at a different place; the Sun is always being left behind a little. The stars seem to go a little quicker in their annual movement than the Sun. And the strange thing is (though for the old astronomers it was not strange at all—it was a deep and significant Mystery for them) that after 72 years the fixed stars in their movement have sped on exactly a day ahead of the Sun—one day in 72 years.

What does this signify, transferred to Man; For the old astronomers it was fraught with meaning, though for the clever people of to-day, no doubt, it may seem nonsense. It meant that among all other things we also have in us this twofold, fixed-star and solar nature. With our head we go quicker than with the rest of our body. And when we have lived for 72 years (these things, of course, arc only to be taken approximately), our head has gone ‘ahead’ of the rest of our body by a whole day of stars. That is why the average—as I have often explained from other points of view—human life lasts for 72 years. It can be much longer, of course, or shorter as the case may be; but on the average, the span of human life is 72 years. All this is connected with the duality between the course of life in the head, and in the rest of the human body. It corresponds exactly to the duality of the movements of the heaven of the fixed stars and of the Sun.

So does Man stand as a microcosm in the macrocosm. In those olden times, Man was indeed able to feel himself within the macrocosm, just as our little finger now feels itself to be part and parcel of the organism as a whole. Man was really able to feel himself a member of the whole.

And they considered this the most important thing: to perceive how human life is connected with the secret of the stars. Therefore especially the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, was associated with the Star-Mystery.

The Christian World-conception now had the task of connecting the two together. This must essentially be contained in the concrete development of Christian World-conceptions. The Mystery of birth, the Christmas Mystery, the Mystery of super-sensible Man on the side of birth, must be connected with the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, the Mystery of the super-sensible Man on the side of death.

That which is generally known as Science nowadays, concerns itself with birth; that which is generally known as Religion, concerns itself with death. The Religion of to-day lacks any inclination to turn to the super-sensible Man. It sounds a strange thing to say; but the mere fact that Religion still talks of the super-sensible Man does not imply that it has any strong inclination to concern itself with super-sensible Man in any real way. For we can only concern ourselves with the super-sensible Man if we take our start from what was felt most strongly in the ancient Mysteries of Christmas—that is to say, if, taking our start from birth, we find our way through birth into human pre-existence. Therefore the Mysteries of birth laid the greatest stress on the pre-existence—the existence before birth—of super-sensible Man. The other Mysteries—those that then culminated in the Easter Mysteries—laid especial stress on the post-existence, on the existence of Man beyond death. It is to this latter side that the Religions have inclined, at the same time rejecting the Science that is connected therewith, namely the wisdom of the stars. Meanwhile the Science of to-day, which concerns itself chiefly with problems of descent—with all that belongs to birth—has rejected what leads to the super-sensible Man and to the conscious experience of him, which is true Mysticism.

Thus it has come about that Science on the one hand, by rejecting the super-sensible Man, has become materialistic; while on the other hand Religion, by declining to study the super-sensible Man, has become unscientific. In our time the two are standing side by side, without any bridge between them. Those who seem to represent Religion—though in reality, broadly speaking, they only want to “guard their pounds and talents”—those who call themselves official representatives of the religious faiths, are most annoyed when you speak of the pre-existence of the soul, that is, of super-sensible Man in his reality.

Needless to say, I have been speaking of all this only in the briefest aphorisms. I only wished to emphasise how we must try once more to widen out man's vision, beyond what is immediately present in the physical world. Inasmuch as we have pointed to the two directions in the Mysteries, our outlook has indeed been widened in the two directions in which the sense world must he transcended. For on the one hand we must seek again for the true inner Man, who can only be found within us by the path described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. That is the one side; and the other is, to seek in a new form for what the stars can say to us. But we shall only find it in its new form if we are able once again to bring into direct relation to the Macrocosm what is there in Man himself. Such is the inner composition a book like Occult Science. Here the attempt is made once more to build the bridge between Man and the Macrocosm. What can be found in man himself, the evolution of man, is connected with that in the macrocosm to which man's evolution belongs. Definite stages in the evolution of man are connected with definite processes in the macrocosm. Thus, in our anthroposophical Spiritual Science we have begun again to look in both directions—to look for the super-sensible man and for the secrets of the Macrocosm. This also means the building of it bridge, once more, between Religion and Science.

Religion has become void of science. Any one who will, can see that it is so. And, that the science of to-day has become void of Religion, is still more obvious. Quite unconnectedly, the two stand side by side in the so-called civilisation of our time. In this way alone was it possible for such strange errors to arise as I described in these lectures,—errors of which the sharp-witted intellectual theories of Dupuis are a particulate example. Dupuis, as I said, considered the ancient Mysteries mere error and deceit. He believed that in those ancient Mysteries certain tales were invented merely in order to delude the people, while in reality they had nothing else in view than the mere movements of the stars. Dupuis made the simple mistake of believing that the Ancients could see nothing else in the star-lit sky than a modern astronomer can see; whereas in reality, what the modern astronomer sees in the star-lit sky is precisely equivalent to what the modern anatomist sees in the human body. Just as the corpse is not the man, so too, the content of modern Astronomy is not the real heaven of the stars. Natural-scientific Astronomy is only in its initial stages; it has experienced no more, as yet, than a mere mathematical, mechanical and summary description of what goes on in the great Universe outside us. Study what is afforded by the Astronomy of to-day; you will find mathematical and mechanical relationships; it is the mere expression of an immense celestial machinery. Meanwhile, all that takes place on Earth (with the exception of the coarsest physical processes), the scientist only seeks to investigate on the Earth itself. Wherever a plant arises, wherever a human being or an animal is born, it is all supposed to be due to “inheritance.” For it goes without saying, you can in no way apply to man what the modern astronomer finds in the stars. But in real fact there is a mutual interplay between the starry Heavens and the Earth. No seed or germ can arise on the Earth—neither the germ of a plant, nor of an animal or man—unless it be prepared and laid down by the whole macrocosm.

What does the scientist of to-day say? Here is the hen, and in the hen, the egg. It goes without saying: from the egg a new hen is derived, and from the hen an egg again, and thence again a hen. Therefore the scientist follows it up from hen to hen. Whereas the truth is: Here are the starry heavens, here is the hen. The whole of the heavens send their forces, from all the constellations, into the hen; and the germ inside the hen is an expression of the entire heaven of the stars.

It is strange to look into the course of evolution in this respect. A science existed, once upon a time, which might well make the people of to-day blush for shame. It has been lost and ruined. We must be conscious that we are living to this day in the age of a lost science. The first beginnings of a science have been planted again in a new form, and they must be developed. What is admired so much, in the progress of science during the last four centuries, can only justly be admired if looked upon as a beginning. It is only when the bridge is built from this beginning to the real Mysteries of Christmas and Easter—only when this bridge is built, at least for human feeling—that something real will have been achieved.

We should make this thought living in our soul, for this thought alone is prone to unite the man of to-day, in his soul, with the Universe. Every seed is united with the macrocosm; the seeds of the Spirit likewise. Man unites himself with the macrocosm when he tries to receive into his soul a macrocosmic science. To begin with at least in the idea, in the intuition thereof, this consciousness of the macrocosmic connections of Man and the Earth needs to be carried into all branches of life. Our time is far remote from such a consciousness. In this respect, our time is indeed in a certain sense in the reverse position, as compared with a certain epoch of the past. For we may ask: How could a primeval wisdom of mankind—so great and so far-reaching that this present time could blush for shame to contemplate it,—how could such a science have been lost? We need not wonder very much that it was lost. We must remember that in the evolution of humanity the positive is most certainly connected with the negative aspect. We have often spoken of the progress humanity has undergone by the spread of Christianity; let us not, however, forget that the spread of Christianity—the positive aspect—is also connected with the negative aspect of the same, namely the laying-waste of an ancient culture. Let us not forget that tens of thousands of works of ancient culture were destroyed while Christianity was being spread abroad. Thousands and thousands of symbols in which the Ancient Wisdom had been handed down, were destroyed. People to-day have little conception of the ruthless work of destruction which culminated in the third and fourth centuries of our era. Julian the Apostate still tried to some extent to stem this work of destruction; but the time was against him. He did not succeed. Humanity to-day ought to be well aware how many things were destroyed and lost and ruined in those centuries.

Precisely from such things, we can learn that evolution, so-called, is by no means simple. Suppose for a moment that Christianity had not gone on its way through the world as an appalling destroyer. Mankind would have had to remain in their old state of un-freedom. For the attainment of freedom is after all, only possible by that Impulse which is also the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha.

On the other hand, the negative side must not be allowed to get the upper hand. For there exists a certain spirit which has preserved far more the negative aspect of Christianity. It appears in this form to-day: it wants to destroy—this time, in the soul-life—all that arises towards the re-conquest of the Ancient Wisdom. This ought not to be allowed to happen. To-day, again and again—wherever they have the opportunity—the so-called official representatives of Christianity bring forward this idea: “At the time of Christ,” they say, “in the apostolic age, there were Revelations. To-day no such thing is permissible. Today it is sin or swindle or deceit; it is anti-Christian.” To see clearly in these matters is also one of the tasks of today, for every human being who strives for the truth. The striving for clarity is one of the essential tasks for to-day. Alas! in other matters too, clarity has grown befogged by all manner of feelings which people associate with mere empty phrases. I do believe the healthy feeling of the truth can only be sought and found again along the paths of the Spirit.

Words are terribly misused to-day. Think of all the words that are sounding through the world to-day, and taken seriously as though there were anything contained in the empty words. In this domain, Spiritual Science is no less important as an educator than by its immediate contents. If it claims to be true Spiritual Science, it can never feed men with mere words. Why not? For the very simple reason that you can talk of anything nowadays if you remain at the mere words, if you remain at the mere words, you can talk much about Natural Science. Fritz Mauthner proves, in his dictionary that Natural Science, whenever it claims to become a “Science,”—whenever it goes beyond the mere notification of facts,—becomes a science of mere words. And in the science of History there is nothing else than words, for—as I told you—everything else is passed-through by man in a dreaming condition. And so it is in other spheres. In Politics,—go to work uprightly and honestly, and you will probably find still less behind the words than in the other spheres of life. If you hold to the mere words, you can talk a lot nowadays about Nature and History and Politics and Economics. But you can not talk of the Spirit if you hold fast to the mere words for the Spirit, to-day, is nowhere contained in the words. I mean this in all earnestness. Yet the converse is also true. Namely, in compensation for this, the Spiritual Science of to-day is a real education, for men to grow beyond the prevailing attachment to words.

It is the paramount task of those who believe in Anthroposophy to go beyond the words to the real things; and—as the “thing” of Spiritual Science is the Spirit itself—this means to go beyond the words to the Spirit. This will be fruitful; this will endow us with new purposes and aims in all domains of life One fruit, above all, it will bear. It will liberate—all those who are willing to be liberated—from the belief in authority; from that credulity and superstition which is so widespread in the humanity of to-day—so widespread that they even fail to notice its existence. Alas! many a bitter experience will still be necessary for poor mankind of to-day to find its way, more or less, on to the path to which I here refer.

The poor humanity of to-day!—it prides itself on the very thing which it most lacks, namely, on freedom from faith in authority, freedom from idol-worship. In the eyes of him who knows the Spirit, many an idol of the past is worth more than the idols of the present. As to the idols of the present... The conscious man, no doubt, has fallen out of the habit of prayer; but the unconscious man prays to the idols of the present all the more fervently. For in the eyes of him who sees through the evolution of the world, the Woodrow Wilsons and the rest are far more perilous idols of superstition than any idols of the past. The humanity of to-day is far more attached to its idols and superstitions than ever primeval humanity were attached to theirs. Even the clearest signs will scarcely avail the humanity of to-day. Precisely in these things, they are extraordinarily difficult to bring on to the oaths of truth.

The earnestness of the moment does indeed require it again and again.—Even when we bring forward truths that reach out into such far and wide perspectives, we must conclude with such remarks as I have made just now. It is essential to Spiritual Science to serve real life; and that which claims to be serving life nowadays is serving it least of all.

I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before.

To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology.

Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days.

Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature.

Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness.

The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man.

The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.”

Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.

But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other.

Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream.

And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance.

Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit.

But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.

My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.

And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;

but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales.

Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.”

Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment.

But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.

The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times.

Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry.

Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego.

And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly.

You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men.

Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time.

Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning.

But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course.

Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away.

Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well.

Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness.

And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.”

You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons.

Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual.

We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form.

If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline.

Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.

Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically.

This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it.

Many friends have come here to-day for the first time since the Christmas Foundation Meeting and I must therefore speak of it, even if only briefly, by way of introduction. Through this Christmas Foundation the Anthroposophical Society was to be given a new impulse, the impulse that is essential if it is to be a worthy channel for the life which, through Anthroposophy, must find embodiment in human civilisation. Since the Christmas Foundation an esoteric impulse has indeed come into the Anthroposophical Society. Hitherto this society was as it were the administrative centre for Anthroposophy. From its beginning onwards, Anthroposophy was the channel for the spiritual life that has been accessible to mankind since the last third of the 19th century. Our conception of the Anthroposophical Movement, however, must be that what takes its course on earth is only the outer manifestation of something that is accomplished in the spiritual world for the furtherance of the evolution of humanity. And those who wish to be worthily connected with the Anthroposophical Movement must also realise that the spiritual impulses are also at work in the sphere of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

What does it really amount to when a man has a general, theoretical belief in a spiritual world? To believe in theory in a spiritual world means to receive it into one's thoughts. But although in their own original nature thoughts represent the most spiritual element in modern man, the thoughts themselves are such that in their development as inner spirit during the last four to five centuries, they are adapted only to receive truths relating to material existence. And so people to-day have a spiritual life in thoughts, but as members of contemporary civilisation they fill it with a material content only. Theoretical knowledge of Anthroposophy also remains a material content until there is added to it the inner, conscious power of conviction that the spiritual is concrete reality; that wherever matter exists for the outer eyes of men, not only does spirit permeate this matter, but everything material finally vanishes before man's true perception, when this is able to penetrate through the material to the spiritual.

But such perception must then extend also to everything that is our own close concern. Our membership of the Anthroposophical Society is such a concern; it is a fact in the outer world. And we must be able to recognise the spiritual reality corresponding to it, the spiritual movement which in the modern age unfolded in the spiritual world and will go forward in earthly life if men do but keep faith with it. Otherwise it will go forward apart from earthly life; its link with earthly life will be maintained if men find in their hearts the strength to keep faith with it.

It is not enough to acknowledge theoretically that spiritual reality hovers behind mineral, plant, animal and man himself; what must penetrate as deep conviction into the heart of every professed Anthroposophist is that behind the Anthroposophical Society too—which in its outward aspect belongs to the world of maya, of illusion—there hovers the spiritual archetype of the Anthroposophical Movement. This conviction must take real effect in the work and activity of the Anthroposophical Society. Such a conception will in the future contribute in many ways to the provision of the right soil for that spiritual Foundation Stone which was laid for the Anthroposophical Society at the time of the Christmas Meeting.

And this brings me to speak of what I shall have to say to you in the coming days, for which this introductory lecture is intended to provide guiding lines. I want to show how at this serious point in its existence the Anthroposophical Movement is actually returning to its own germinal impulse. When at the beginning of the century the Anthroposophical Society came into being out of the framework of the Theosophical Society, something very characteristic was foreshadowed. While the Anthroposophical Society—then the German Section of the Theosophical Society—was in process of formation, I gave lectures in Berlin on Anthroposophy. Therewith, at the very outset, my work was given the hallmark of the impulse which later became an integral part of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Apart from this, I can remind you to-day of something else.—The first few lectures I was to give at that time to a very small circle were to have the title, “Practical Exercises for the Understanding of Karma.” I became aware of intense opposition to this proposal. And perhaps Herr Guenther Wagner, now the oldest member of the Anthroposophical Society, who to our great joy is here to-day and whom I want to welcome most cordially as an Elder of the society, will remember how strong was the opposition at that time to much that from the beginning onwards I was to incorporate in the Anthroposophical Movement.

Those lectures were not given. In face of the other currents emanating from the Theosophical Movement it was not possible to proceed with the cultivation of the esotericism which speaks unreservedly of the reality of what was always there in the form of theory.

Since the Christmas Foundation, the concrete working of karma in historical happenings and in individual human beings has been spoken of without reserve in this hall [The temporary lecture-hall in the “Schreinerei” (workshop) at the Goetheanum.] and in the various places I have been able to visit. And a number of Anthroposophists have already heard how the different earthly lives of significant personalities have run their course, how the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself and of the individuals connected with it has taken shape. Since the Christmas Foundation these things have been spoken of in a fully esoteric sense; but since the Christmas Foundation, also, our printed Lecture-Courses have been accessible to everyone interested in them. We have thus become an esoteric and at the same time a completely open society.

Thus we return in a certain sense to the starting-point. What must now be reality was then intention. As many friends are here for the first time since the Christmas Foundation, I shall be speaking to you in the coming lectures on questions of karma, giving a kind of introduction to-day by speaking of things which are also indicated, briefly, in the current News Sheet for members of the society.

As is clear from our anthroposophical literature, the development of human consciousness is bound up with the attainment of those data of knowledge which point to facts and beings of the spiritual world and with penetration into these facts. We shall hear how this spiritual world, the penetration into which has become possible through the development of human consciousness, can then be intelligible to the healthy, unprejudiced human intellect. It must always be remembered that although actual penetration into the spiritual world requires the development of other states of consciousness, the understanding of what the spiritual investigator brings to light requires only the healthy human intellect, the healthy human reason that endeavours to put prejudice aside.

In saying this, one immediately meets stubborn obstacles in the modern life of thought. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, a well-meaning article appeared on the subject of the public lecture I had given before a large audience. This article was to the following effect: Steiner maintains that the healthy human intellect can understand what is investigated in the spiritual world. But the whole trend of modern times has taught us that the healthy human intellect can know nothing of the super-sensible world, and that if it does, it is certainly not healthy!

It must be admitted that in a certain sense this is the general opinion of cultured people at the present time. What it means, translated into bald language, is this: If a man is not mad, he understands nothing of the super-sensible world; if he does, then he is certainly mad! That is the same way of speaking about the subject, only put rather more plainly.

We must try to comprehend, therefore, how far the healthy human intellect can gain insight into the results of spiritual investigation achieved through the development of states of consciousness other than those we are familiar with in ordinary life. For centuries now we have been arming our senses with laboratory apparatus, with telescopes, microscopes and the like. The spiritual investigator arms his outer senses with what he himself develops in his own soul. Investigation of nature has gone outwards, has made use of outer instruments. Spiritual investigation goes inwards, makes use of the inner instruments evolved by the soul in steadfast activity of the inner life.

By way of introduction to-day I want to help you to understand the evolution of other states of consciousness, first of all simply by comparing those that are normal in present-day man with those that were once present in earlier, primitive—not historic but prehistoric—conditions of human evolution.

Man lives to-day in three states of consciousness, only one of which, really, he recognises as a source of knowledge. They are:

Ordinary waking consciousness;

Dream consciousness;

Dreamless sleep consciousness.

In ordinary waking consciousness we confront the outer world in such a way that we accept as reality what can be grasped through the senses, and allow it to work upon us; we grasp this outer, material world with the intellect that is bound to the brain, or at any rate to the human organism, and we form ideas, concepts, emotions and feelings, too, about what has been taken in through the senses. Then in this waking consciousness we grasp the reality of our own inner life—within certain limits. And through all kinds of reflection, through the development of ideas, we come to acknowledge the existence of a super-sensible element above material things. I need not further describe this state of consciousness; it is known to everyone as the state he recognises as pertaining to his life of knowledge and of will here on earth.

For the man of the present time, dream consciousness is indistinct and dim. In dream consciousness he sees things of the outer world in symbolic transformations which he does not always recognise as such. A man lying in bed in the morning, still in the process of waking, does not look out at the rising sun with fully opened eyes; to his still veiled gaze the sunlight reveals itself by shining in through the window. He is still separated as by a thin veil from what at other times he grasps in sharply outlined sense-experiences and perceptions. Inwardly, his soul is filled with the picture of a great fire; the heat of the fire in his dream symbolises the shining in of the rising sun upon eyes not yet fully opened.

Or again, someone may dream that he is passing through lines of white stones placed along each side of a roadway. He comes to one of the stones and finds that it has been demolished by some force of nature or by the hand of man. He wakes up; the toothache he feels makes him aware of the decayed state of a tooth. The two rows of teeth have been symbolised in his dream-picture; the decayed tooth, in the image of the demolished stone.

Or we become aware of being, apparently, in an overheated room where we feel discomfort. We wake up: the heart is thumping vigorously and the pulse beating rapidly. The feverish movement of the heart and pulse is symbolised in the overheated room. Inner and outer conditions are symbolised in dream; reminiscences of the life of day, transformed and elaborated in manifold ways into whole dream-dramas, absorb the sleeper's attention. Nor does he by any means always know to what extent things are elaborated in the miraculous arena of his life of soul. And concerning this dream-life, which may play over into waking life when consciousness is dimmed in any way, he often labours under slight illusions.

A scientist is passing a bookshop in a street. He sees a book about the lower animal species—a book which in view of his profession has always greatly interested him. But now, although the title indicates a content of vital importance to a scientist, he feels not the faintest interest: and then, suddenly, as he is merely staring at what otherwise he would have seen with keen excitement, he hears a barrel-organ in the distance playing a melody which at first entirely escapes his memory ... and he becomes all attention.—Just think of it: the man is looking at the title of a scientific treatise; he pays no attention to it but is gripped by the playing of a distant barrel-organ which in other circumstances he would not have listened to for a moment. What is the explanation? Forty years ago, while still quite young, he had danced for the first time in his life, with his first partner, to the same tune; he is reminded of this by the tune which he has not heard for forty years, played on the barrel-organ! Because he has remained very matter-of-fact, the scientist remembers the occasion pretty accurately.

The mystic often comes to the stage of inwardly transforming a happening of this kind to such an extent that it becomes something entirely different. One who with deep and sincere conscientiousness embarks upon the task of penetrating into the spiritual life must also keep strictly in mind all the deception and illusion that may arise in the life of the soul. In deepening his life of soul a man can very easily believe that an inner path has been discovered to some spiritual reality, whereas in fact it is no more than the transformed reminiscence of a barrel-organ melody! This dream-life is full of wonder and splendour, but can be rightly understood only by one who is able to bring spiritual insight to bear upon the appearances of human life.

Of the life of deep, dreamless sleep, man has in his ordinary consciousness nothing more than the remembrance that time continues to flow between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking. Everything else he has to experience again with the help of his waking consciousness. A dim, general feeling of having been present between the moments of falling asleep and waking is all that remains from dreamless sleep.

Thus we have to-day these three states of consciousness: waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. If we go back into very early ages of human evolution—not, as I said, in historic times but prehistoric times accessible only to those means of spiritual investigation of which we shall be speaking here in the coming days—then we also find three states of consciousness, but essentially different in character. What we experience to-day in our waking hours was not experienced by the men of those primeval times; instead of material objects and beings with clear shapes and sharp edges, they saw all the physical boundaries blurred.

In those times a man who might have looked at you all sitting here would not have seen the sharp outlines demarcating you as human beings to-day; he would not, like a man to-day, have seen these contours bound by so many lines, but for his ordinary waking consciousness the forms would have been blurred; they would have lacked definition. Everything would have been seen with less precision, would have been pervaded by an aura, by a spiritual radiance, a glimmering, glistening iridescence extending far beyond the circumference that is perceived to-day. The onlooker would have seen how the auras of all of you sitting here are interwoven. He would have gazed into these glimmering, sparkling, iridescent auras of the soul-life of those in front of him. It was still possible in those days to gaze into the life of soul because the human being was bathed in an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit.

To use an analogy: if in the evening of a bright, dry day we are walking through the streets, we see the lights of the street-lamps in definite outlines. But if the evening is misty, we see these same lights haloed by all sorts of colours—colours which modern physics interprets quite wrongly, regarding them as subjective phenomena, whereas in truth they give us an experience of the inmost nature of these lights, connected with the fact that we are moving through the watery element of the fog. The men of ancient times moved through the element of soul-and-spirit; when they looked at other men they saw their auras—which were not subjective phenomena but a real and objective part of the human being. Such was one state of consciousness in these men of old.

Then they had a state of consciousness which linked on to this, just as with us the sleep that is invaded by dreams links on to the waking state; again it was not the same as our present dream condition, but everything that was material around it disappeared, vanished away. For us, sense-impressions become symbols in the state of dream consciousness: sunshine becomes fiery heat, the rows of teeth become two lines of stones, dream-memories become earthly or also spiritual dramas. The sense-world is always there; the world of memories remains. It was different for the consciousness of one who lived in primeval times of human evolution—and we shall realise by and by that this applies to all of us, for those sitting here were present then in earlier earthly lives. In those times, when the sun's light by day grew weaker, man did not see symbols of physical things, but the physical things vanished before his eyes. A tree standing before him vanished; it was transformed into the spiritual and the spirit-being belonging to the tree took its place.—The legends of tree-spirits were not the inventions of folk-fantasy; the interpretation of these legends, however, is an invention of the fantasy of scholars who are groping in a morass of fallacy.—And it was these spirits—the tree-spirit, the mountain-spirit, the spirit of the rocks—who in turn directed the eyes of the human soul into that world where man is between death and a new birth, where he is among spiritual realities just as here on earth he is among physical realities, where he is among spiritual beings as on earth he is among physical beings.—This was the second state of consciousness. We shall presently see how our ordinary dream consciousness can also be transformed into this other consciousness in a man of modern time who is a seeker for spiritual knowledge.

And there was a third state of consciousness. Naturally, the men of ancient times also slept; but when they awoke they had not merely a dim remembrance of having lived through time, or a dim feeling of continuous life, but a clear remembrance of what they had experienced in sleep. And it was precisely out of this sleep that there came the impressions of past earthly lives with their connections of destiny, together with the knowledge, the vision, of karma.

Modern man has waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. Early humanity had also three states or conditions of consciousness: the state of consciousness in which he perceived reality pervaded by spirit; the state in which he had insight into the spiritual world; and the state in which he had the vision of karma. In primeval humanity, consciousness was essentially in a condition of evening twilight.

This evening twilight consciousness has passed away, has died out in the course of the evolution of mankind. A morning dawn consciousness must arise—into which modern spiritual investigation has already found its way. And by strengthening his own soul-forces man must learn to look at every tree or rock, every spring or mountain, or at the stars, in such a way that the spiritual fact or spiritual being behind every physical thing is revealed to him.

It can become an exact science, a source of exact knowledge (although people scoff at it to-day as if it were craziness or sheer delusion) so that when a genuine knower looks at a tree, the tree, although it represents a physical reality, becomes a void, as it were leaving the space free before his gaze, and the spirit-being of the tree comes to meet him. Just as the sun's light is reflected to our physical eyes from all outer, physical objects, so will humanity come to perceive that the spiritual essence of the sun, pervading the world with its life, is also a living reality in all physical beings. As the physical light is reflected back to our physical eyes, so from every earthly being there can be reflected back as a reality to our eyes of soul, the divine-spiritual, all-pervading essence of the sun. And as man now says: “The rose is red” ... the underlying truth being that the rose is giving back to him the gift he himself receives from the physical-etheric sun-nature ... he will then be able to say that the rose gives back to him what it receives from the soul-and-spiritual essence of the sun which streams through the world with its quickening life.

Man will again find his way into a spiritual atmosphere, will know that his own being is rooted in this spiritual atmosphere. He will come to realise that within the dream consciousness, which to begin with can yield only chaotic symbolisations of the outer life of the senses, there lie the revelations of a world of spirit through which we pass between death and a new birth; furthermore, that in the consciousness of deep sleep there weaves and lives in us as an actual and real nexus of forces that which, after waking, leads us into connection with the working out of our destiny, of our karma. What we live through in our waking hours as destiny, notwithstanding all freedom, is spun during our life of sleep, when with the soul and spirit, which have left the physical and etheric, we lead a life together with divine Spirits; with those divine Spirits, too, who carry over the fruits of earlier lives into this present life. And one who through the development of the corresponding forces of soul succeeds in penetrating with vision into the life of dreamless sleep, discovers therein the connections of karma. Moreover it is only in this way that the historical life of humanity acquires meaning, for it is woven out of what men carry over from earlier epochs, through the life between death and rebirth, into new life, into new epochs. When we look at some personality of the present or some other age, we understand him rightly only when we include his past earthly lives.

During the coming days, then, we shall be speaking of that spiritual investigation which, while concerning itself first with personalities in history but then also with everyday life, leads from the present life, or a life in some other age to earlier earthly lives.

Rudolf Steiner: It seems to me that these questions you have written down are largely rooted in matters that have already been discussed.

Regarding the change of cult colors [1st question]: The point, as I told you, is that the cycle is that the time before Christmas is essentially blue, that at Christmas you have the light color; then the light color remains until Lent, when it turns black. Then we have mainly red during the Easter season, and then we move on to light colors for the Pentecost season. That is how it was presented the last time. So for what I call the festive season, we have the light color during the summer; if there are no special occasions, the color remains white. At Pentecost it is white with yellow edges. That remains essentially so until we have to move on to the blue color.

Emil Bock: The color we are using now is already a light one.

Rudolf Steiner: What I have suggested to you now is what I would advise you to use at all times for the regular trade fair because this violet that you have now is the color that you can actually use all year round on every occasion, whereas you could not do that with any other color.

Emil Bock asks about the spiritual essence of colors. Why these colors cannot be used.

Rudolf Steiner: If we take the color red, which would occur at the resurrection on Easter Sunday, we have in the red color that which characterizes the activity from the spiritual world, and in contrast to the red color, in the blue color we see the gradual decline of the physical into the spiritual world. These are the two color contrasts; therefore, the Advent is blue, the time immediately after Easter until Ascension Day is red, as the contrast. Then we have the other colors in such a way that they always have some other aspect. We have the universal color white, or light, at Christmas, which the Catholic Church has taken as the color of innocent children, but this is wrong, since white represents light as such, that is, the reappearance of the sun, the solstice. Then we have the black color, the color that moves toward the time of the Passion, which represents the darkening that culminates in death. Then in summer we don't actually have white, but light colors. If you don't go back to the old mystery tradition, then of course we don't actually have green. If we went back to what you call “cultic optics” – one would have to call it the cultic Gloria – then you would have a light green for summer, around Midsummer. But that is no longer used. But it could be reintroduced, a light yellow-green. But then you actually have all the colors. The thing is that everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, everything else.

Now you are also asking about the other vestments here [2nd section of questions]. You have other vestments for the priest: the vestment for the afternoon service on Sundays. Have I not yet explained this? It is like this: a cope of this cut (see drawing on page 202) has the color of the chasuble that is worn down here. For you, since you will still be wearing the original garment for some time, which can always be worn on any occasion, it should be the color of the braids.

The stole is worn under the mantle. It is better if you do not wear the alb at baptisms and when hearing confessions, but instead wear a shortened alb, so that you have an alb up to the knee. This is the priestly garment for these acts such as baptism, hearing confessions, anointing. Funerals should actually be performed in this mantle. The alb and stole are worn under this mantle. Now, what else I noticed: the alb has the belt around here and this belt is also the color of the chasuble, and this then makes it possible for you to cross the stole where it should be worn at the front. But that would be all the garments you need.

Table 4

The sleeves are not important, but it is difficult to get a robe for every single thing now. Therefore, I am putting together here the things that I consider practically possible and that can serve quite well. The sleeves are really not important. Of course, you could also baptize in a kind of surplice that is sleeveless. All of this can be arranged at some point. But for now, having Alba and a surplice, which of course can have sleeves, the chasuble and a mantle like that for the Sunday afternoon service, which essentially consists of the reading of a short passage from the Gospel and a short sermon, during which the mantle is taken off. Then it is put on again and a psalm is read. This will be the Sunday afternoon or evening service. Everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, that is, the covering of the chalice and the cloth covering the altar; the altar server also wears a chasuble. Now you have a chasuble that I imagined you could use to celebrate every Mass in at first. You cannot think about going through the whole process for quite a long time. A chasuble already costs a small capital in Germany today. So I think you would do best if you used this color, which could be a little lighter – it turned out a little dark – and read every mass in it.

Emil Bock: It is a safe guide for us to hear that violet should take the place of blue at Christmas and reddish yellow at Easter.

Rudolf Steiner: I said that at Christmas a bright white is decisive; perhaps a very light violet. I said that at Christmas the point of view has always changed. Essentially, one has to hold that white should characterize the rising of the sun; that is a different point of view. The point of allowing light violet to enter is this: at Christmas you read the prime mass; you read it in light violet. I only said reddish yellow because I wanted to distinguish it from violet red. There are these two reds: vermilion, which I use for the very bright, shining red, in contrast to the more blue-based carmine red.

The color of the trim? It is best to choose the trim that represents the complementary color, as you have it now. And the length of the robe: to just above the knee. The surplice goes to the knees. Under this robe you wear the alb. You only wear the surplice when you are officiating. Tunic, surplice, stole. Then you wear the beret. The beret is actually the outward sign of priestly dignity. You do not wear the beret as a vestment, but as an external badge. The beret is actually an official badge, not a priestly one. You do not need to wear it during the service. In the Old Testament you had to wear it because you had to be covered. But you wear it when you walk around the church to the altar and take it off when you come to the altar. It is actually what, like Athena's helmet, outwardly demonstrates your dignity. — During the sermon? Yes, you wear it during the sermon. You also preach with it. You preach with the beret. If we had come to the point where some of you were preaching, then you would have needed it. You wear the beret at funerals and at baptisms, but you take it off during the ceremony. You go to the ceremony with your beret on and you leave the ceremony with your beret on.

[Regarding the third section of questions:] I will talk about oil tomorrow; I have talked about wine and bread, and about salt. I have also already spoken about Mercury and so on. – Ashes? Well, the thing is that the actual ashes are on their way to being crushed into an atomistic form. If you produce ashes when burning any substance (the drawing has not survived), then these ashes are on the path of matter to prepare itself to become receptive to spirit again. That is, the ashes, driven far enough in their incineration process, become capable of receiving an image of the universe and forming a kind of cell. [Gap in the stenographer's notes.] It is the case that the ashes are what serves the purpose of the regeneration of the cosmos.

[Regarding the question: What substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words?] – I have already said that. Actually everything should be consecrated. But we need nothing more than to allow the consecration to be a completely free act, as I have done, in a similar way to the chasubles. So in this way everything should be consecrated.

Interjection: water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: No, not that, but everything that is used as an auxiliary object in cults. Emil Bock: What about water, salt and ashes in the baptismal ritual?

Rudolf Steiner: That is for baptism. It is necessary that you include in baptism the whole transformation that has taken place in the evolution of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; that is what matters in this matter.

Emil Bock: That first the Christ is indicated by the water, and only then the cosmic foundation by the salt?

Rudolf Steiner: Through water, we are led to the Father-God. It is the same process that has taken place through a truly profound fact, in that the female moon and the male sun have passed in the newer times into the female sun and the male moon. Thus you have a transition, a metamorphosis, that is in it.

Emil Bock: While one must think of the Father God in the case of salt, here it is the water. Water – generative power; salt – sustaining power; ash – renewing power. You related the water to the Father, the salt to the Christ, the ash to the Spirit.

Rudolf Steiner: There is a slight difficulty here because we cannot properly express what is there in time. If I describe: physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, spirit self, life spirit, spiritual human being, I also put them in that order; it looks as if I am putting them in succession.

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But that is not true. I would have to combine two currents here (it is drawn on the board) if I want to draw it correctly. I would have to do it like this: physical body, etheric body, astral body; sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; and now I would no longer have to draw the spirit self in one plane, but in a different direction, turning it around here and drawing it three times in a different direction. I would have to do it like this:

Plate 4

This is also the case in the formula [of the baptismal ritual]. If you take the same sequence: water – Father, salt – Christ, ashes – Spirit; you will not get the real fact that you want. You have to [think] you live in the community of Christ through the birthing power of water, through the sustaining power of salt, through the renewing power of ashes. Now you turn the whole idea around, you come from a completely different side: in the Father's World Substance, in the Christ's stream of words, in the Spirit's radiance of light. - It is not possible for you to relate these things directly to one another, they are out of alignment with one another.

[Regarding the last question of the third section:] Holy water and incense at the grave? – incense is only there to take over the connection to the spiritual world. Incense is burnt. You follow the path of the soul from the physical body until the soul reaches the spiritual world. You follow it by means of incense. You go from what is still below to what is above. And in holy water we have regeneration again.

[Regarding the fourth question:] Use of a monstrance. Do you really need these devices? These were originally devices that remained fixed, that simply belonged to the architecture of the altar and represented the sun with the moon, and which were then transformed into a container that was used at solemn masses to initiate and conclude the mass and that was carried by Catholics in processions.

Emil Bock: I believe that we do not have that need, but we recalled that you said that we should strive for this symbolum first.

Rudolf Steiner: I said for the sermon that you should have this symbol as a guiding symbol: sun and moon, because by this you have the will to connect the physical cosmos with the spiritual cosmos at one point. It can also be used as a fixed symbol in your worship, when you perform the worship, either architecturally or painted: the monstrance as the connection of the sun with the moon. You have the same symbol, for example, among the “seals and pillars”, and you will also find it again in the Apocalypse: the woman who is on the moon, the sun in front of the constellation of the Virgin, which points to midsummer, when it approaches the Christmas season. Here you also have the sun, with the moon below it. This is the same as the monstrance. This is what I meant, you have to work towards this symbol. You will find opportunities to use this symbol everywhere, in speech and in representation. But I think that this is one of the points where, in the use of this symbol... [Gap in the stenographer's notes]. The Catholic Church today does not admit this whole context and uses the monstrance like an idol that is worshipped, which has its center where the consecrated host is carried. I don't think you have a need for it. Otherwise, what I said about not making it too Catholic will come about. But the symbolum is something to which you should pay special attention. [The next question in the fourth section:] Is it possible to use wooden chalices? — Of course you can use wooden chalices.

Emil Bock: Where should the confession take place?

Rudolf Steiner: It can take place anywhere. It is very difficult to perform this half cultic act without a stole, and you cannot wear the stole without at least a surplice as something else. You can speak to the people at first, that is a counsel, but then, in order to maintain the priestly dignity, put on the surplice and stole before you summarize the matter in the sentences in which it should culminate. That is how it should be, but for the time being you can simplify it. You can do it by giving the advice without the stole and then putting on the stole by letting it culminate in a cultic act. This makes a very solemn impression.

[The next questions:] Why the touching of the left cheek at the parish communion? — This is a special form of laying on of hands. And: Why the signs on the forehead, chin and chest of the infant? — This is the acceptance into the three powers of the Trinity. Perhaps it should be mentioned that you have to get the congregation used to making the three crosses on the forehead, chin and chest at the same time as you make the sign [sign of the cross]. You make the sign on the person to be baptized first at the baptism.

Emil Bock: Why these three parts of the body?

Rudolf Steiner: These three parts of the body express – of course, here too we are dealing with a shift – that when we make the triangle on the forehead, we are dealing with the human head system, with the past, if we make the square on the chin, it has to do with the future, because this actually represents the metabolic system, and under this we have to do with the chest system, with the present. However, in reality these things shift, they are not arranged in this way. But there is a trinity everywhere. You can even find this in pictures in the Catholic Church. You often find the Father depicted at the top, with the dove below and the crucifix above, which does not mean that this is a systematic order. As soon as you approach the spiritual, you are not always able to maintain a systematic order in terms of space or time. I think I have already made it clear to you that in the spiritual realm, numbers do not correspond to our numbers at all. You have strange experiences, for example, that two times two is not four in the spiritual world.

Next question: Is it possible to burn incense using bowls instead of the usual censer? — You can, of course, burn incense with whatever you can handle. This form of censer is the most convenient to use. Once you have mastered the technique, it is extremely easy; you can direct it so easily. You can use it to burn incense with anything that you can use to burn incense with, without burning yourself; because you don't get burned with the incense burner, it is very comfortable. Once you have some practice, it is excellent. I have never found a prescription for the shape of the incense burner anywhere. The prescription consists of burning incense, not of the incense burner. The only prescription is that you burn incense.

A participant: Can you put the incense bowl on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: You must burn incense yourself, it must be your deed. But the shape of the censer, there is no rule about that.

[Regarding the question:] The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the act of consecration. — This is how it is: if you start from the right side of the altar based on the Gospel reading [i.e. from the left as seen by the faithful], then you proclaim – in the understanding that the proclamation is about the cross – to where the eye looks; active on the right, passive on the left. The remaining things depend on whether one speaks more to the heart, then one speaks to the left, or to the mind, then one speaks to the right. The change is on the right side of the altar, that is, to the left of the faithful [as seen from their perspective].

Emil Bock: Is the consecration addressed to the mind?

Rudolf Steiner: The consecration is directed to the mind. The missal lies on the right side. The consecration itself takes place in the middle. The book lies where the gospel book lies. But to understand it, the highest clarity is needed. The action is already directed to the mind. You also have to look at it in such a way that you have to distinguish whether a believer comes into consideration more in an action than in the reading of the Gospel, or the priest, who always looks to the other side. What is right and left for the believer is not for the priest. The light comes from the east. So it is a matter of either the original concept, that the altar itself is placed to the east, or the newer concept, that the church choir is in the east. The correct thing is to orient the altar to the east, that the altar is the east of the church and that the believer looks to the east. From the very earliest days of Christianity, the altar was always erected over the grave of some founder of a community or some martyr, so that in fact there never was an altar in the Christian church that was not intended as a gravestone. One celebrates mass over the grave of a revered person. The altar also has the form of a gravestone, and is thus intended as a memorial.

Emil Bock: For us, there is no objection to having a movable table?

Rudolf Steiner: You will have a movable altar as long as you do not have the main mass in a specially built building for it. You have many altars in large churches, and they are directed in all possible directions. Whether you place one altar in the room or many, it makes no difference.

[Regarding the fifth question:] What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? — It is good to read the Gospels in such a way that you distribute them throughout the [church] year. Leave the letters, the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse for those parts of the year that are not exhausted by the Gospels. You cannot transfer anything from the Gospel to the time of July or August. Nothing from the Gospels fits there.

A participant: So the Epistle is read instead of the Gospel?

[Another question is asked, but the stenographer only noted:] because of the name?

Rudolf Steiner: The gospel is the whole of the New Testament. I have also used [the expression] in this way. Until the end of the Apocalypse, I call it the “gospel”. The gospels go until Pentecost. It is not true that if they continue, they do not mean anything that falls on the day. I would consider a uniform order of pericopes to be incorrect. The Catholic Church has done this because it wanted to have hierarchical authority. They will not need that at all. The letters of Paul and the Apocalypse are used outside of the church year. Then you will find some clues in the festivals that I have recorded in my calendar. I have included festivals that are to be regarded as Christian festivals, not as Roman Catholic ones. There you will notice some clues. Otherwise one would first have to study the matter carefully. The Catholic Church has simply distributed everything. You should not stick to it, but you should start there with the freedom of teaching.

[Regarding your questions:] Is it the duty of parishioners to communicate? — I would not consider it right to introduce a duty, but I would consider it right for you to work in such a way that no one fails to communicate. - Is it possible to exclude parishioners from communion? What would be the point of that?

Emil Bock: We just wanted to think these things through. Some of us have considered that someone has been accepted into the community who would not have been accepted as a member at another point in time. If this person now wants to come to communion, can they always be admitted?

Rudolf Steiner: It is to be assumed that in those cases that are not, I would say, self-evident cases, you always have the opportunity to have some kind of consultation with these people. That will happen automatically, and then you will have to prepare him in the right way. If you have a murderer who is to be executed the next day, you will not refuse him Communion for that reason. That is about the most radical case. It cannot be right for you to refuse Communion. It will be very difficult for you to have any jurisdiction over the community at all – the church never had that, the political community always lent itself to it – you will never have it. The church has never burned a heretic; it has only said that he is a heretic and worthy of death. The church itself never burned heretics.

A participant asks about church discipline. If a parishioner continues to live an immoral life but wishes to take part in Holy Communion, do one have the right to exclude them?

Rudolf Steiner: In my opinion, the only way to do that would be to oblige him, if he wants to take communion, to accept counseling from you, not in community with the other believers. In this way, you would exercise disciplinary power that is more aimed at ensuring that he does not lose contact with the community, that he is only allowed to sit in a certain place, for example, away from the others when the mass is read. If he puts up with it, it will have the desired effect. The others who don't put up with it leave the church. That is a different kind of punishment. For those who don't put up with it, refusing to take communion is also effective.

[Next question:] Is it advisable to make the ritual texts available to the parishioners? The Credo? - The Credo must of course be made available to all parishioners, they should only hear the rest.

A participant: Can the text be read in community meetings?

Rudolf Steiner: There is no need to exclude that, but it should be made clear that the text is for listening and not for reading. I gave the friends who wanted it prayers for young children. With these prayers, I gave the instruction that the children should not learn or read them by heart; they are spoken in front of the children. They should take them in by listening, not by learning, because: however much is learned in this way, it is ineffective. It must be a process that only works through listening. The cult text should also be heard and seen in this way. You can, of course, explain it, but you have to understand that the cult text should be heard, so that the cult text has no meaning if it is not heard. If someone reads it, it is not a cult text at all; he must hear it from someone else. If he reads it, it would only be a cult text if he heard it at the same time from the transcendental world; then it would become a cult text for him. But if someone living on the physical plane reads the text, it is not a cult text.

A participant: What if a member of the community asks for the text?

Rudolf Steiner: This can only have a meaning if you consider it good for the development of his soul. Then it is not used as a cultic text, but as a meditation.

My dear friends! Today an even greater number of friends of Anthroposophy have made their appearance here, who have never before attended, and so I am obliged, with a few introductory words, to speak about the principles of the school. It certainly must be considered with utter gravity, that with the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum a breath of fresh air has come into the Anthroposophical Movement. And the entrance of this fresh air must penetrate thoroughly into awareness, especially so for the members of our School of Spiritual Science. Yes, I have pointed it out time and again, but I know that there are many friends of Anthroposophy here today, who have not yet been informed of the matter, and so I must lay it out once again.

It is certainly so, and it has had to be declared again and again since the Christmas Conference, that the Anthroposophical Movement must be strictly distinguished from the Anthroposophical Society.

The Anthroposophical Movement represents the infusion into human civilization of spiritual intervention and spiritual life-impulses, that can and should come into being in our time directly out of the spiritual world. The Anthroposophical Movement is there, not because human beings desire that it be there, but rather because it appears appropriate to the spiritual powers controlling and guiding the world, working to ensure the proper course of human history, it appears appropriate to these spiritual powers, to allow spiritual light, light that can come appropriately through Anthroposophy, to flow today into human civilization.

To that end the Anthroposophical Society was established as a governing body, to govern anthroposophical wisdom and institutions. And it had to be emphasized, time and again, that Anthroposophy is something above and beyond the Society, and that the Anthroposophical Society is merely the exoteric governance.

This has changed since the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum. Since the Christmas Conference it is quite the opposite. And only because the case is quite different, am I ready to clarify, with the Executive Council¹ established at the Christmas Conference, am I able to carry out the work that is appropriate, the work moreover that needs to be taken up, and only so am I able to clarify, together with the Executive Council, the assumed functions of leadership of what was established at Christmas as the Anthroposophical Society. What has happened through all this, I can address in just one sentence. This sentence is, that since Anthroposophy will now govern throughout in the Anthroposophical Society, all that occurs now within the Anthroposophical Society must be Anthroposophy itself. Since Christmas, Anthroposophy must be what is done in the Anthroposophical Society. Every individual deed must henceforth have the immediacy of an esoteric character. The appointment of the Dornach Executive Council on Christmas Day was an actual esoteric implementation, an implementation that must be considered as having come directly out of the spiritual world. Only when this is kept in mind by our anthroposophical friends can the Anthroposophical Society, which was actually founded in this manner, only then can the Anthroposophical Society flourish.

And so the Executive Council in Dornach, as underscored since the Christmas Conference, is an initiative executive council. Understandably, governance must take place. But governance is not the first matter of business to be attended to, but rather the business of allowing, of doing everything to allow Anthroposophy to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. To accomplish this is the aim.

The installation of the Dornach Executive Council took place in just such a way within the Anthroposophical Society. And it must be quite clear that from now on relationships within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be built on just any sort of bureaucratization, but rather must be built throughout on humanization. The statutes containing various paragraphs were produced in this way at the Christmas Conference. One must be aware, when one is a member, and must give affirmation to this, or else as described in detail in the statutes, the Executive Council at the Goetheanum must do what it has to do. And the Anthroposophical Society is constituted this way today. It is grounded on human relationships.

It is a small matter, but I must again and again emphasize it, that a membership card has been handed out to each member, signed by myself, so that at least, since at first it is a somewhat abstract matter, it is nevertheless handled with some personal rapport. It would have been quite possible to have had a stamp used with my signature on it. I don't do this, even though it does not lead to equanimity, by and by appending my signature to twelve thousand member-cards, I don't do it, because in reality the most abstract personal relationships would be established, in not having paused for just once, for just a moment, for each individual member, to focus on the name borne on the member's card. And self-understandably, by doing this, all future relationships will be somewhat more humanistic, and will put a mark on the commencement of concrete effective work within our society.

In this regard it must also become clear, I must emphasize this also, it must lie within the awareness of the membership, I emphasize this as otherwise many transgressions will occur, it must lie within the awareness of the membership that when the name General Anthroposophical Society is used, that the affirmation of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum has been obtained first. Even so, if something or other of an esoteric nature is distributed from the Goetheanum in Dornach and broadcast, this should only happen on the basis of an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. Therefore, so that nothing will be claimed as going out in the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, that for those of us here, nothing given here as formulation and instructions will be claimed as having been authorized by the Goetheanum, that is, unless an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in place. No abstract relationships will be possible in the future, only concrete relationships. Whatever goes out from the Goetheanum, must have the stamp of approval of the Goetheanum, made in concrete. This is why we need the title "General Anthroposophical Society", for someone may put out something about lectures that may have been held, or about formulations of various sorts given here, someone, as an active member of the Anthroposophical Society, might share a document prepared with the letterhead of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, or from Frau Wegman, and this must give the impression that the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in agreement. It is really important for the Executive Council at the Goetheanum to be regarded as being at the center of the Anthroposophical Movement in the future.

Now and always, the relationship of this School to the Anthroposophical Society must be held in the consciousness of the membership. Someone may be a member of the Anthroposophical Society, if he has the inner heartfelt drive to get to know, to learn to live with, what goes through the world as anthroposophical ideas of wisdom and impulses of life. One undertakes no other commitment as such, other than taking up with heart and mind what has been bestowed by Anthroposophy itself. Out of this general membership, one can, when the time is right, for now a minimum of two years has been stipulated, one can after a time of having lived within the flow of the membership of the General Anthroposophical Society, one can then seek membership in the School of Spiritual Science.

In coming into this School of Spiritual Science, a person undertakes a really serious commitment to the Society, to anthroposophical endeavors, specifically, in becoming a member, he commits to being in truth a representative of anthroposophical endeavors before the world. This is essential in this day and age. Under any other conditions, the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science cannot readily commit itself to working together with someone as a member.

Do not think that this constitutes a limitation on your freedom, my dear friends. Freedom itself requires that all who here concern themselves with this remain free. And as members of the school can and should be free in this endeavor, so also must the leadership of the school be free, that is, in being able to establish with whom they can and will work, and with whom not. Therefore, when the leadership of the school, for one reason or another, is led to conclude that a member cannot be a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, then it must be possible, for instance, if admission is sought, to disapprove the admission, or if admission has already occurred, the person under discussion having already become a member, to say that the membership must be forfeited. This must be adhered to in the future unconditionally in the strictest sense, for through this in actual fact a free working relationship of the leadership of the school with the membership will be ushered in.

As has already been stated in the Members’ Supplement to the Goetheanum News, we are endeavoring step by step to make it possible for those unable to participate at the Goetheanum to take part in some way in the continuing work of the school. In great measure all that was possible would have already been presented, but there has been much to do here since the Christmas Conference, and we can only take the fifth step after the fourth, and not the seventh step after the first. We may look through various newsletters, and in what is released to peripheral members partake of what goes on here in the school. We have already started, and those in the school involved in medical affairs may participate by partaking of the newsletter Frau Dr. Wegman is sending out concerning the work of the school. Gradually other possibilities will emerge and I beg you to be patient in this respect.

The most comprehensive thing yet to be mentioned would be this, that the school in particular must not become attached to a mode of operation stemming from human impulses, but rather to a mode of operation from the side of the spiritual world. A resolution of the spiritual world is to be taken up with whatever means are possible. This School ought to be an institution of the spiritual world for the present day, as has been the case at all times in the mysteries. It must be pronounced today that this school itself must develop, so as to become what it actually can be in our time, a real mystery school. Thereby you will come to be the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Along with this, moreover, it has already been pointed out in what manner the membership of the school is to be attached in earnest to the school. It is self-evident that whatever esoteric work has been going on will be taken into the work of the school. For this School is the fundamental esoteric bedrock and wellspring of all esoteric work within the Anthroposophical Movement. And to this end, various personalities of whatever background, in founding something esoteric in the world, must have the agreement of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. These personalities must either come into full agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, or else they cannot in the least allow what emerges from the Goetheanum to flow into their impulses or into their teachings. Whoever seeks to strive esoterically under conditions other than these just mentioned, simply cannot be a member of this School. In this case such a person must be outside of the school, striving esoterically but by this School unrecognized, and he must himself be clear, that such undertakings can incorporate nothing of what wells up within and emanates from this school. Association with the school must be as thoroughly and concretely joined as possible. In this way each member of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, each and every member, must make clear to himself, that the school must be able to be regarded in such a manner, that a member is actually a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, that every single member's exoteric involvement with Anthroposophy is just so, that it is dealt with as a member of the school.

The attempt has certainly been made at the Goetheanum, in the event of my no longer being in a leadership position, no longer being the President of the Anthroposophical Society, for the school to develop in a fashion similar to other schools. Solely by means of interpersonal relationships that will not be possible. Here one finds real esoteric substance, which just cannot be found in any other school. And of course, no attempt will be made to rush into some sort of concordance with schools of the world, but rather what should begin at once, is to bring up questions, whenever an honorably searching person of today, from some area of life or another, comes upon this substance, questions that just cannot be answered outside of the esoteric.

It must be so in the future, especially for members. It is simply the way it is, for with the Christmas Conference something actually occurred, and this occurrence must be taken seriously. It has occurred, and in the future, because initiatives ought to be disseminated from this site, from the Goetheanum, in fulfilling its mission, it must be taken most seriously, it must be maintained unconditionally as a standard in fulfilling its mission, it must be crystal clear, and in the future in all the falderal attended to by members of the School it must be hearkened to, and again and again attention must be drawn back to it, in order to have a firm yet free acquaintanceship with it, which is by name, that I am present as a representative of Anthroposophy that flows forth from the Goetheanum. Whoever does not do this with a will, whoever cannot take this up again and again in an unconstrained free and easy manner, mulling over Anthroposophy quietly until after quite some time being prepared, striving in some manner or another along the lines of this policy, whoever believes that he will progress by first disavowing us in order then to be led back to us, usually does not really return to us, and should rather just give up his school membership at once. Membership in the School in the future, I can assure you, will be taken most seriously. I believe that for the various members of the school who henceforth really take up Anthroposophy with a will, taking it up not just for any reason, but taking Anthroposophy up in their work, taking up Anthroposophy in their work in the manner of holding it dear in their hearts, that it will lead again and again to the following phrase coming to mind, that one should approach people with Anthroposophy not just as immediately present and obvious. It must be communicated, by mouth or in some other fashion, in such a way that people can choose merely to remain within their own point of view outside of the school.

All this is what I must once more set out before you. And it had to be mentioned here today, because there are many, many friends of Anthroposophy who until now have not taken part in the work of this School. And specifically, because so many friends are here today who are new to the Class, we have had to wait awhile to start the lesson, we also, before the lesson has even begun, have had to attend to this preamble, which is, in a certain sense, an introduction to today's lesson. I will be holding a second lesson, the date of which is still to be determined, but no other friends will be able to attend this second lesson, other than those who are here today. Also, I will ask any others, who may be coming later, to be patient. Essentially, we cannot accomplish anything, when each time, whenever a lesson is held here, if ever and again new members arrive. With today's lesson we must be considered ourselves fulfilled with those actually in possession of memberships at this time. Certainly, one can become a member, although at the next lesson only those can take part, who are also already in such a position today. Yes, only those will be in this day's continuation.

Well, I would like here and now to begin the declamation, but at first please take note of this, that initially you are merely witnessing the mantric formulation as a reference to what initially emerged throughout time in the mysteries, and then by way of the outgoing mysteries from there hence unto the stars, as the imprinted script unto the entire cosmos, and into human souls, resounding in human hearts, resounding as the great clarion call to human beings, to strive after a real insight, a real knowing of one's self. The clarion call is this, "O Man, know yourself!" It resounds out of the entire cosmos.

As we gaze out to the resting stars, to those stars that in especially significant script stand in the zodiac, to those resting stars which through their gathering together in certain forms bring to expression the great cosmic script, then for one who understands this writing, there will initially be inscribed the contents of the Word of Worlds "O Man, know yourself!"

As one gazes out upon those, that as wandering stars journey along their ways, initially the sun and the moon, although also the other wandering stars, among which are the sun and the moon, then may be revealed, wrapped into the journeying paths of these wandering stars, as also in the forms of the resting stars, the content of the world-strengthening, soul-daunting Word of Worlds, and just so in the movement of the heart’s-, the heart’s world-content, the contents of one’s innermost nature.

And we take part through what we experience in the elements around about us out in the circumference of the earth, as well as experiencing them through our skin, through our senses, through having them nearby us, moving in us, and acting in our own bodies as Earth, Water, Fire, Air, through all that will the impulse of willing be embossed in the following words.

In this way we may allow the Word of Worlds to be intoned to human beings, to work on our souls by means of these mantric words:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, nothing is known but what flows forth from the spiritual world. Whatever passes as knowing by mankind, but is neither fathomed from what emerges from the spiritual world, nor is shared by those who are able to quest within the spiritual world, is not real knowing. The human being must be clear about this, when he gazes around about the world, gazing in the realms of nature at the things that present themselves in color upon color, at the things that are revealed radiant and resplendent, at the things living overhead in the beaming stars, at the things presenting themselves in the warmth of the sun, and at the things that sprout forth out of the earth. In all of these things there is sublimity, grandeur, beauty, and the fullness of wisdom. And a person would be greatly in error, if he were to blithely pass by this beauty, sublimity, enormity, and fullness of wisdom. The person must, when an esoteric wishes to press on with him into real knowing, he must also have a sense of whatever is around about himself in the world, an open, free sense. For during the time between birth and death, during his earthly existence, he is obliged to draw his forces out of the forces of the earth, to carry out his work within the forces of the earth.

But so true it is, that the person certainly must take part in all that is around him in color after color, tone after tone, warmth after warmth, star after star, cloud after cloud, creature after creature in the external realm, so true it is, that the person looks there around about at all of the abundance, grandeur, sublimity, fullness of wisdom, and beauty imparted to him through the senses, and can nowhere find anything, of what he himself is. Directly then, as he has a real sense of the sublimity, beauty, and grandeur in his surroundings in life on earth, then he will immediately take notice, that nowhere to be found in this light, bright realm of earth is the innermost source of his own existence. It is elsewhere. And having a full, inward appreciation of this, this brings the person to the point of seeking an opening into the state of awareness in which he can grapple with what we call the threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, that lies immediately before an abyss, this must be approached, and when there it must be remembered, that in all that surrounds a person on the earth in earthly existence between birth and death, the fountainhead of what it is to be a human being is not to be found.

Then one must know that on this threshold stands a spirit-form that is called the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold is concerned in a way for the welfare of the person, that the person does not come unprepared, without having thoroughly lived with and taken deep into his soul the things that I have already spoken about, that the man does not approach this threshold unprepared.

However then, when the person in all seriousness is really prepared for spiritual knowing, and it may be that he acquires it in clairvoyant consciousness, or it may be that he acquires it through healthy common sense, for in keeping informed both are possible. Whichever is the case, whether knowing about or seeing the Guardian of the Threshold, just then is it possible, that the Guardian of the Threshold may really reach out with a guiding hand and allow the person to look out over the abyss. There, where the person seeks his inner being’s true condition, his actual origin, lying there initially, however, on that side of the threshold, is uttermost darkness.

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we seek light, in order to see the origins of our own human essence in the light. Darkness however spreads out at first. The light that we seek must stream out of the darkness. And it streams out of the darkness only when we become aware of how the three fundamental impulses of our individual soul-life, namely thinking, feeling, and willing, are held together here in life on earth through our physical body. In physical earth existence thinking, feeling, and willing are bound together.

If I were to draw it bundled together schematically, I would draw it first with thinking [yellow], then with feeling [green] extending over into thinking, and then with willing [red] extending over into feeling. In this way the three are bound together in earthly existence.

The person must learn at heart that the three may separate from one another. And he will learn this when he steadfastly, more and more, takes the meditations recommended by this School as the forceful content of his life of soul. He will notice that it starts to happen. [It was once again drawn on the board.] Thinking [yellow] will become free, cast loose from its union with feeling, as will his feeling [green], as will his willing [red]. For the person learns to perceive without his physical body.

The physical body had been holding thinking, feeling, and willing together, drawn together into one another. [Around the first drawing an oval was drawn.] Here [by the second drawing of thinking, feeling, and willing] the physical body is not at hand.

Gradually, through the meditations that he receives here from the school, the person begins to feel himself outside of his body, and he comes into that state of being in which whatever the world is, for him will be the self, and whatever self was, for him will be the world. As we stand here on the earth in our earthly existence, we feel ourselves as human beings, we say, in that we become inwardly aware, that this is my heart, these are my lungs, this is my liver, this is my mouth. The various things that we call our organs, called by us our human organization, we label as our own. And we identify around about, there is the sun, there is the moon, there are the stars, the clouds, a tree, a stream. We denote these various things as being external to us, as we are bound up in our organs. We are quite distinct from those things that we identify externally as the sun, the moon, the stars, and so forth.

When we have prepared our soul sufficiently, so that we are able to perceive without the body, that is, distinct from the body, in the spirit-all, then a directly opposite awareness commences. We speak then of the sun as we speak here in earth existence of our heart, namely, that is my heart. We speak of the moon as that which forms my character. We speak of the clouds in a manner similar to speaking of our hair on earth. We call our organism all of what was a part of the whole surrounding world for the earthly man. And we identify outwardly, look there, a human heart, a human lung, a human liver, they are objective, they are the world. And as we here as men and women look out toward the sun and moon, as we gaze about in a physical body, so do we gaze about from the perspective of the world-all, in which the sun and moon and stars and clouds and streams and mountains are in us, and we look out at the person, who is our external world. The difficulty is only in the relationship of space. And this difficulty will be overcome.

And we may be sure, that as soon as we step out with our thinking out of our physical body, this thinking is at one with all that reveals itself in the resting stars. As we call our brain here, that it serves as the workhorse of our thinking, so do we begin to appreciate the resting stars, namely the resting stars of the zodiac, as our brain, when we are out there in the world and then gaze down upon the man external to us.

And those things that revolve as wandering stars, we perceive as just what our force of feeling is. Our power of feeling moves then in the coursing of the sun, the moon, in the coursing of the other wandering stars. Yes, between what we experience as thinking in the resting stars, and feeling, is the sun within ourselves [Between yellow and green on the second drawing, the sign of the sun was placed.] And between feeling and willing lies the moon, which we feel as being within ourselves. [Between green and red the sign of the moon was placed.] And quite simply, in meditating on these figures, lying within these figures is the force, ever more and more, for us to approach a spiritual perspective. One may come to this only when the substance of what I speak, of what I articulate here with these words, can actually be inwardly experienced, namely going out and beyond the physical body, extending oneself out over the cosmos, feeling the members of the cosmos, sun and moon, stars, and so forth, as one's own organs, and looking back at the person as being in the external world.

Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, the thinking that people practice here on the earth between birth and death is just a corpse. It is not living. What a person otherwise likes to dwell on endlessly in his head about beauty, sublimity, and grandeur about the physical world in his vicinity, these thoughts do not live. But in pre-earthly existence they were living. They were living, these thoughts, before we descended into the physical world, while we were still living as beings of soul and spirit in the soul-spiritual world. Thoughts such as we have here upon the earth were full of life there, and our physical body is the grave in which the dead world of thoughts is buried, when we descend down upon the earth. And here we carry the thought-corpses within us. And with the thought-corpses, not with fully living thoughts, we think about what is in our sensory surroundings here upon the earth. But before our descent down into this physical world, there was active in us fully alive thinking.

My dear friends, one only needs, ever again and forever, with all of one's inner power and force, to thoroughly absorb this truth within. One comes to the point of developing in one's awareness a certainty that it is so. One learns to know the person as such. One learns to know him, so that one can gaze upon him, and say, there is the human head. [An outline of a head was drawn.] This human head is the base and the bearer for earthly corpse-thinking. They sprout forth, [It was drawn as an elongated form down to the right.] these thoughts, but dead, overlaid upon what has been taken in through the eyes, taken in through the ears, through the sense of warmth, taken in through other senses. This is how we regard thinking, in reference to the earth.

But gradually we learn to penetrate through this thinking. Behind it in the spirit-cell of the human head, there still reverberates true, living thinking, the thinking in which we lived before we descended into the physical world. As one gazes at a person, then most certainly one gazes initially at his dead thinking [Drawn as a red part of the head.]. But behind this dead thinking, in the head's spirit-cell, is living thinking. [Drawn as a yellow part of the head.] And this living thinking has brought along the primal force to construct our brain. The brain is not the producer of thinking, but rather the product of pre-birth living thinking.

And so, if one were to gaze with the proper awareness behind what the person reveals in the superficiality of his head's earthly dead thinking, looking into what is behind the spirit-cell, then one might gaze upon the living thinking which certainly is there. This is similar to an act of will coming to one's attention, willing as such in the human musculoskeletal system, for it is certainly there in us, but sleeping. We simply don’t know how a thought goes down, when it has the intention, the will, to make this or that happen in our muscles and elsewhere. Looking at what lives in us as willing, we behold willing in the spirit-cell as the thinking that lies behind sensually aligned thinking. However, the willing we behold there, which we are becoming aware of as thinking, is the creative force for our thinking-organ. There this thinking is no longer just human-thinking, there this thinking is world-thinking.

Understanding a person in this way, somehow being able to look behind earthly thinking, to the thinking which first made the foundation for earthly thinking in the brain, this allows sensual thinking to be cast off into the worldly void, and what emerges as an act of will is eternal thinking.

All of this brings us into the state of mind, within which we can allow the mantric words to work in us.

Look² behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened³ spirit cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

The imagination must gradually stand before you, my dear friends, the imagination that from the top of your head are streaming out the dead thoughts that are aligned with the sensory world. Behind this lies true thinking, at first merely as darkness, shining behind and through the sensory thinking, the true thinking that actually configured the brain, into which a person descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is however a sort of willing. And one sees, then, how willing ascends from a person [A few white lines were drawn from below upward.], spreading out then in the head, and then becoming world-thoughts, because what lives in willing as thinking, is even now world-thinking.

Toward this end one seeks ever more fully to understand, ever more inwardly to grasp, and ever more and more to bring to an inner anchorage the mantric thoughts which one places within the soul, with these words, in the following way. [The first stanza was written on the board.]

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit cell

Please note that one must gaze behind the thinking. [Behind was underscored.]

Willing ascends from bodily depths;

Now one must be strong in soul, to allow the customary sensory thoughts to be cast off.

Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

In these seven lines is contained most certainly the secret of human-thinking in its connection with the world-all.

One must not make a pretense of this, in just grappling with these things with the intellect. One must allow these things to live as meditations in the heart's depth. And these words have strength. They are constructed harmonically. Thinking, willing, worldly-void, willing, and world-thought creating [These words were underlined on the board.] are joined together here in an inner organization of thought, so that they can work effectively upon imaginative awareness.

Even as we can look behind the human head, the human head becoming a mediator in gazing into world-thought creating, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation, the physical representation, the imaginative representation of the human soul. Even as thinking is the abstract representation of the human spirit, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation of feeling. Even so we can gaze into feeling as it is related to the ways of earth in human earthly existence between birth and death. We can gaze into feeling, although here not behind feeling, but rather within feeling [drawing, a yellow oval]. Then, just as we may discern world-thought-creating behind spirit-cell-thinking, so we may grasp in feeling, the representation of the heart, we may truthfully grasp in feeling, streaming through feeling, something that goes in and out of a person from the entire cosmos. World-living is what we truly grasp, world-living that in men and women becomes human-soul-living.

As it must stand there [in the first verse], "behind thinking's sensory light," so must it now be called, "into feeling's" in the second mantra, which must become harmonically interwoven together with the first.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Feeling is merely a waking dream. Feelings are not so well known to a person as are thoughts. They become known to him as the builder of dreams. In such manner are feelings dreams while awake. And just so are they called.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Living

Here [in the first verse] "willing" streams out of body's depths, although here streaming out of world distance into soul-weaving is "living." [The word living was underlined, and the mantric line was continued.]

streams from world afar;

[In the drawing four horizontal arrows were made.]

Now similarly, as here [in the first verse], thinking should be cast out through strength of soul into the world-void, we now allow feeling’s dreams to waft away, in order, however, to discern in feeling's fabric of soul, what streams in as world living. When feeling's dreams fully fade away in sleep, when the individual human feeling ceases, then moving within a person is world-living.

Living streams from world afar;

[The writing was continued.]

Through calm of heart in sleep

Here [in the first verse] we need strength of soul; here [in the second verse] we need complete inner peace in sleep to allow feeling's dreams to fade away, and for heavenly world-living to stream into the human soul.

Through calm of heart in sleep

[The writing was continued, and the words "waft away", "world living", and human-being's-power" were underlined.]

Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

In these seven lines is the whole secret of human feeling, how out of the unity into the trinity, it can itself contain self-understanding.

Even so we can gaze out upon the human limbs, in which willing manifests. There, when we gaze out upon these human limbs, in which willing manifests, [On the drawing, a white arrow was drawn up in elongated form.], there we cannot say "look behind" or "look into", there we must say, "look over," for thinking streams down from the head in willing. In customary awareness a person is not able to observe it, but streaming from the head into the limbs are thoughts, in order that willing can work in the limbs.

Then, however, when we observe willing working in the limbs, when we see in every arm movement, when we see in every leg movement, how the stream of willing streams, then we will also be aware, how in this willing a secret thinking lives, a thinking that grasps earthly existence immediately. Yes, it has been laid in the foundation of our being from earlier lives on earth, that just there, through the limbs, earthly existence is grasped, apprehended, so that through this apprehension we have present existence. Thinking sinks down into the limbs. And when we see it in the willful movement of the limbs, how it sinks down of its own accord, this thinking, then we may catch a glimpse of thinking in willing. [On the drawing, red was drawn downwards in elongated form.]

As we gaze out with the soul, it otherwise would be concealed from us, how thinking lives in arms, in hands, in legs, in feet, and in toes, and then we must see that this thinking is actually light. It streams, thinking as light streams through arms and hands, through legs and toes. And by itself it transforms willing, which otherwise lives in the limbs as sleeping willing. It transforms willing, and thinking appears as willing’s magical essence, which is transferred into a person from an earlier life on earth, carried by the spirit, into the present life on earth.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

It is a sort of conjuring, it is effective, magical, this unseen thinking in the limb's willing. A person begins to understand when he knows that thoughts, because we sleep in the will, that thoughts, even when not apparent in willing, are magically effective in the limbs as willing. And he begins to understand true magic, a magic that at first appears as thoughts, that lives through arms and hands, through legs and toes. [The third stanza was written on the board, during which the words "thinking", "transformed", "thinking", and "willing’s-magical-essence" were underlined.]

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

And in this is the secret of human willing, how such willing, formed out of the world-all, works magically, is contained in human beings.

And so, my dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we will observe this as a foundation, for the time still to be announced, when I will build further upon this foundation. We will observe this as a foundation, using it in meditation, as we allow the mantric words ever and ever again to be drawn through the soul.

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit-cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

• 1. der Vorstand
• 2. One may say Sieh in German, but in English one does not say “See over there,” or “see into your heart,” but rather “look over there,” or “look into your heart.”
• 3. Finstren is one of two variants of the uninflected comparative form of the adjective “dark” (finster). As this adjective is also sometimes inflected in German, meaning the ending of the word changes to express a grammatical function or attribute, it is confusing to translate, but a new ominous word such as darkling should not be invented. Dark or darkened seem to capture the meaning.