The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The subject about which I shall have to speak today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and which was already referred to some time ago,¹ is the special way in which, in the first half of the twentieth century, a kind of renewed manifestation of the Christ-Event is to take place. This will need a certain amount of preparation, and today, to begin with, I shall try to characterize again from a certain point of view the spiritual complexion of the civilized world and, from this point of view, draw attention to the challenges that are placed before us with regard to the evolution of humanity—the education of humanity as a whole in the near future-by the facts of this human evolution itself.

We know that a new age in the development of civilized humanity began around the beginning of the fifteenth century. People today no longer form an exact idea of what the constitution of soul was like in the people who lived before this great turning-point of modern history. People do not consider this. But one could easily imagine how different the soul-constitution in Europe must have been which, over large areas, inclined people to undertake the Crusades to Asia, to the Orient; especially when one bears in mind how impossible an event like this, resting as it did on an idealistic spiritual background, has become since the beginning of the fifteenth century. People do not consider the completely different nature of humanity's interests before this historical turning-point, nor the interests which, since that time, have become particularly important. But if, from the many characteristics which can be attributed to this more recent time, one wishes to single out the most significant one, then this must be the increasing ascendancy, the increasing intensity of the human power of intellect.

But in the depths of the human soul there is always another force, whether as a sense of longing or as a more or less clear facet of consciousness. It is the longing for knowledge. Now, when one looks back into former times, even into the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of European development, it is possible to speak of a definite longing for knowledge in as much as the human being at that time had faculties in his soul which enabled him to achieve a relationship to nature—a relationship to what was revealed in nature as spirit—and thereby also to achieve a relationship to the spirit world itself. Certainly, longing for knowledge has been spoken about a good deal since then; but it is impossible, when one looks completely without prejudice at the development of humanity, to compare the longing for knowledge which holds sway today with the intensity of the longing for knowledge that held sway before the middle of the fifteenth century. Striving for knowledge was an intense affair of the human soul; for knowledge that had an inner glow, an inner warmth, for the human being, and which was also significant for the human being when it came to what moved him to perform his work in the world, and so on. Everything that lived there as a longing for knowledge has become less and less comparable with what has been emerging since the middle of the fifteenth century. And even when we consider the great philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, we are presented with ingenious elaborations of the human system of ideas; but only, if I can put it so, artistic elaborations of it. In neither Fichte, nor Schelling, nor Hegel—particularly not in Hegel—do we find a proper idea of what had previously existed as a longing for knowledge.

Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the striving for knowledge, even though pursued in isolation as was still the custom, enters more and more into the service of outer life. It enters into the service of technological science and thus also takes on the configuration of this technology. What then is the cause of this? It comes from the fact that it is just in this time that we find the particular development and elaboration of the intellect. This, of course, did not happen all at once. The intellect was gradually prepared for. The last traces of the old clairvoyance had long since become extremely dim. But one can nevertheless say that, to a certain degree, the last effects of the old clairvoyance—though not the old clairvoyance itself—were still present even in the fifteenth century. All human beings, or at least those who strove for knowledge, had some idea of the faculties rising up out of the human soul that are higher than the faculties concerned with daily life. Although in olden times these faculties arose from the soul in a dreamlike way, they were nevertheless faculties different from those of everyday life and it was by means of these other [higher] faculties that people tried to probe to the depths of the world-being—and did, in fact, penetrate to its spirituality. Thus was knowledge attained. People experienced it as knowing when, from the phenomena of nature, from the being of nature, they sensed, they perceived, how spiritual elemental beings worked in the individual phenomena of nature; how the divine spiritual being as a whole worked through the totality of nature. People felt themselves to be in the realm of knowledge when gods spoke through the phenomena of nature; when gods spoke through the appearance and movements of the stars. This is what people understood as knowledge.

The moment humanity renounced perception of the spiritual in the manifestations of nature, the concept of knowledge itself also fell more or less into a deterioration. And it is this decline of real intensity in the pursuit of knowledge that marks the latest period of human evolution.

What then is needed here? It is that which exists at present only in the small circle of anthroposophically-striving human beings but which must become more and more general. Nature's manifestations spoke to ancient human beings in such a way that they revealed the spirit to them. The spiritual spoke out of every spring, every cloud, every plant. In the way people came to know the manifestations and beings of nature they also came to know the spiritual. This is no longer the case. But the condition of intellectualism is only a transitional condition. For what is the deepest characteristic of this intellect? It is that it is impossible to grasp and know anything at all with the pure intellect. The intellect is not just there for knowing. This is the greatest error to which the human being can give himself: the belief that the intellect is there for gaining knowledge. People will attain to true knowledge again only when they concern themselves with what lies at the basis of spiritual-scientific research; which, at the least, can be given by Imagination. People will only know truly again when they say: In ancient times divine-spiritual beings spoke from the manifestations of nature. For the intellect they are silent. For higher, super-sensible knowledge it will not be the phenomena of nature that will speak directly—for nature, as such, works silently. But beings will speak to the human being—beings who will appeal, to him in Imaginations, will inspire him, with whom he will become united intuitively and whom he will then be able to relate again to the phenomena of nature. Thus one can say: In ancient times the spiritual appeared to the human being through nature. In our transitional condition we have the intellect. Nature remains spiritless. The human being will lift himself up to a condition where he can again truly know; where, indeed, nature will no longer speak to him of divine-spiritual beings but where he will o take hold of the divine-spiritual in supersensible knowledge and will, in turn, be able to relate this to nature.

It was a particular characteristic of oriental spiritual life, of oriental knowledge—which, as we know, lived on as a heritage in occidental civilization—that the orientals, at the time of the blossoming of the knowledge of their culture, perceived a spiritual element in all the manifestations of nature; that the divine-spiritual spoke through nature, whether through the lower elemental beings in individual things and phenomena or in the whole of nature, as the all-encompassing divine-spiritual. Later on there developed in the central regions of the earth that which came under the dialectical-legal spirit. It is out of this that intellectuality was born. Spiritual culture was retained as a heritage from the ancient Orient. And when people still had this last longing to experience something from the Orient—people did experience something of this in the Crusades and brought it back to Europe—and after they had stilled this longing through the Crusades, the Orient became effectively closed off. On the one hand, by what was established by Peter the Great who destroyed the remains of the oriental constitution of soul on the European side and, on the other hand, by the blockade set up by the Turks who, just at the beginning of this age which we call the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, established their rule in Europe. European thought and culture was, as it were, closed off from access to the Orient. But it had to develop further and could only do so under the influence of the dialectical-legal life, under the influence of the economic life arising from the West, and in the decadent continuation of the spiritual life which had been received from the Orient, to which the doors were now closed as I described. The condition was thereby prepared in which we are now living, where it is up to us, out of ourselves, to open the doors again to the spiritual world; to come to a perception of it through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

This is all connected with the fact that, in those ancient times in which the oriental rose to the attainment of wisdom, what was of particular importance were the abilities, the forces, brought by the human being into physical existence through birth. In the time of oriental wisdom, everything—despite the civilization which took its course there and was shone through with wisdom—everything, fundamentally, depended on the blood. But, at the same time, what was in the blood was also spiritually recognized. It was determined by the Mysteries as to who, through his line of blood, was called by destiny to the leadership of the people. There could be no questioning this: whoever was called to the leadership of the people by the Mysteries was brought to this position because his bloodline, his descent, was. the outer sign that this was how it should be. There could be no question of any kind of legal proof as to whether anyone was rightly in this position or not because, against the verdict of the gods, according to which people were allotted their place, there could be no contradiction. Jurisprudence was unknown in the mission here in the world of the senses was given by Orient. One knew theocracy, the 'rule of cosmic order', One's mission here in the world of the senses was given by the spiritual world above. The feeling that said that someone was in the in the right place because the gods had directed his bloodline in such a way that he could be brought to this place was replaced with another in a dialectical-legal dress, on the basis of which one that he could dispute on legal grounds whether someone was entitled to his position, or to do this or that, and so on.

The nature of the soul-constitution, prepared already in Greece but then particularly also in Rome, by which Central Europeans were beginning to use concepts, dialectics, to decide what justice was, was quite unknown and alien to the Orient. I have described this from different aspects. In the Orient it was a matter of fathoming the will of the gods. And there were no dialectics for deciding what the gods willed.

But we are again at a turning-point. It is becoming necessary now for humanity to also take a closer look at this dialectical-legal element. For the economic element, which from the West has conquered the world with the aid of technology, is already completely entangled in the state of affairs that has arisen through the dialectical-legal aspect. The economy was a minor element in the ancient theocratic cultures which were permeated by the divine-spiritual. People did there in the economic life what arose as a matter of course according to the place and rank into which the gods had placed them through the proclamations of the Mysteries. And then the economic life, which began again only primitively, became caught up, as it were, in the threads of the dialectical-legal life. For, at the beginning of the so-called Middle Ages, the Romans above all had no money. Economics based on money was gradually lost and the dialectical-legal culture spread in Europe as a kind of economy based on nature-produce. The early part of the Middle Ages was, basically, short of money; and this brought about all those forms of military service which were necessary because there was no money to pay the troops. The Romans paid their troops with money. In the Middle Ages feudalism developed, and with it a particular type of professional soldiery. All this came about because, tied to the soil under the influence of an economy based on the exchange of nature-produce, a man could no longer take part himself in distant campaigns of war. Thus this dialectical-legal element grew up in a kind of agricultural economy based on barter, and it was only when technology from the West permeated this economic life that the new age arose. The life of this new civilization, which has become so fragile, has arisen in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch entirely as a result of technology. I have already described this in different ways. I have described how, according to the official census, world population at the end of the nineteenth century was 1,400 million but that as much work was being accomplished as though there were 2,000 million. This is because such a phenomenally large amount of work is done by machines. The machine technology with its stupendous transformation of the economic life and the social life has arrived.

What has not yet arrived—because everything is still engulfed in the intellectual life—is precisely what must now carry this machine-technological economy into modern civilization. One experiences the strangest things today with regard to the prospects facing humanity. There are already many people today, particularly among those who pride themselves on being practical, who, for example, go into governmental positions with their practical experience where it then usually evaporates. The little practical experience people have usually evaporates as soon as they take it into a government department. Such `governing practicians', such 'practical men in government'—one has to put it in inverted commas—get the strangest ideas these days. Someone said to me recently: 'yes, the new age has brought us machines, and with them urban life; we must take life back to the land.' As though one could just remove the machine-age from the world! The machine would simply follow us into the country, I said to him. Everything, I said, could be forgotten; spiritual culture could be forgotten, but machines would remain. They would simply be taken out to the land. What has arisen in the cities will transplant itself into the country.

In fact, people become reactionaries in a grand style—when they no longer feel inclined—and this is the characteristic of people generally today: that they have no will—to form ideas concerning true progress. They would prefer to bring back the old conditions of the countryside. They imagine that this can be done. They believe that one can shut out what the centuries have brought. That is nonsense! But people today love this nonsense so tremendously because they are too complacent to grasp the new and prefer to get along with the old. The machine age has arrived. Machines themselves show how much human labour they save. It is simply that 500 million people would have to do the work machines do if their work on the earth were to be done by people.

And all this work by machines began, primarily, in Western civilization. It arose in the West and spread to the Orient very late where it did not establish itself at all in the same way as it did in occidental civilization. But that is a time of transition. And now try and grasp a thought which, however strange it may seem to you, must be taken seriously.

Let us suppose the human being in ancient times had before him a cloud, or perhaps a river, or all kinds of vegetation and so on. He did not see in these the dead nature seen by the human being of today—he saw spiritual elemental beings, up to the divine-spiritual beings of the higher Hierarchies. He saw all this, as it were, through nature. But nature no longer speaks of these divine-spiritual beings. We have to grasp them as spiritual reality beyond nature and then relate them again back to nature. The period of transition came. Man created machines as an addition to nature. These he regards for the time being quite abstractly. He works with them in an entirely abstract way. He has his mathematics, geometry, mechanics. With these he constructs his machines and regards them altogether in the abstract. But he will very soon make a certain discovery. Strange though it may still seem to the human being of the present that such a discovery will be made, people will nevertheless discover that (in this mechanistic element which they have incorporated into the economic life) those spirits are again working which in earlier times were perceived by the human being in nature. In his technical machines of the economic sphere the human being will perceive that, although he constructed and made them, they nevertheless gradually take on a life of their own—a life certainly which he can still deny because they manifest themselves to begin with only in the economic sphere. But he will notice more and more in what he himself creates that it gains a life of its own and that, despite the fact that he brought it forth from the intellect, the intellect itself can no longer comprehend it. Perhaps people today can barely form a clear idea of this, but it will be so nevertheless. People will discover, in fact, how the objects of their industry (Wirtschaft) become the bearers of demons.

Let us look at it from another side. Out of the naked intellect, out of the most desolate intellect, there has arisen the Lenin-Trotsky system that is trying to build an economic life in Russia. Despite Lunacharsky,² these people are not interested in the spiritual life. For them the spiritual life must be an ideology arising from the economic life. It can hardly be said that there is a very strong dialectical-legal element in the Trotsky-Leninist system—everything is to be geared towards the economic. The desire is, in a certain sense, to embody the intellect in the economic life. If one could do this for a time—this initial experiment will not work, but let us suppose that it were possible—the economic life would grow over peoples' heads. It would bring forth everywhere destructive, demonic forces out of itself. It would not work because the intellect would not be able to cope with all the economic demands that would surge up! Just as the human being in ancient times beheld nature and the manifestations of nature and saw in them demonic beings; so, too, must the human being of present times learn to see demonic beings in what he himself produces in the economic life. For the time being these demons, which human beings have not diverted into machines, are still in human beings themselves and manifest as the destructive beings (die zerstarenden) in social revolutions. These destructive social revolutions are nothing other than the result of not recognizing the demonic element in our economic life. Elemental spirits (elementarische Geistigkeit) must be looked for in the economic life just as in ancient times elemental beings (elementarische Geistigkeit) were sought in nature. And the purely intellectual life is only an intermediary stage which has no significance at all for nature or for what man produces, but only for human beings themselves.

Human beings have developed the intellect so that they can become free. They have to develop a faculty that has absolutely nothing to do with nature or with machines but only with the human being himself. When the human being develops faculties that stand in a relationship to nature, he is not free. If he tries to flee into the economic life he is also not free because the machines only overwhelm him. But when he develops faculties that have nothing to do with either knowledge or practical life, like pure intelligence, he can appropriate freedom to himself in the course of cultural development. It is precisely through a faculty like the intellect, which does not stand in a relationship to the world, that freedom can arise. But in order that the human being does not tear away from nature, in order that he can again work into nature, Imagination must be added to this intellect; everything must be added to it which supersensible research is seeking to find.

There is something else involved here. I related how, for the ancient oriental, the relationships of the blood line were of very particular importance, for the wise men of the Mysteries were guided by these as though by signs from the gods when they placed the human being into his appropriate [social] position. And all these things reach over then like after-effects, like ghosts, into later times. Then came the dialectical-legal element. The official stamp became the most important thing. The diploma, examination results or, rather, what was on the piece of paper that was the examination certificate—this became the important thing. Whereas in ancient theocratic times blood was the decisive factor, it was now the piece of paper. Those times drew near for which many things are characteristic. A lawyer once said to me during a discussion I had with him: The fact that you were born, that you exist, is not what matters!' This did not interest him. It was the birth certificate or the christening certificate that had to exist; that was the important thing. The paper substitute! So the dialectical-legal arose. This, at the same time, is also the expression for the unreal (das Scheinhafte) in relation to the world, for the unreal element of the intellect. But precisely in the human being himself there could develop, as the counterpart of this maya element (Scheinhafte) in the world, what gave the human being freedom.

But now there develops, out of what is signified in paper—which in earlier times was signified in the blood—out of what is signified in the letter-patent of nobility or similar documents, something that is already showing itself today and which will—continue if things go on as now. And they will continue! Descent by blood will no longer be of importance. The letter-patent of nobility and similar papers will have no more importance. At most, only what a man manages to salvage of what he possesses from the past will count. To ask 'why' was not possible when the gods still determined an individual's place in the world. In the dialectical-legal age it was possible to dispute this 'why'. Now all discussion ceases, for only the factual is left, the actuality of what an individual has salvaged. The moment people lose faith in the paper-regime there will be no more discussions. The things an individual has saved for himself will simply be taken away. There is no other way to bring humanity forward, now that nature no longer reveals the spiritual, than to turn to the spiritual itself and, on the other hand, to find in the economic element what people in earlier times found in nature.

This, however, can only be found through association. What a human being alone can no longer find can be found by an association which will again develop a kind of group-soul, taking in hand what the individual at present cannot decide alone. In the Middle Ages, in the age of the intellect, it was the individual that ruled in economics. In the future it will be the association. And people must stand together in an association. And then, when it is recognized that a spiritual element has to be kept in check in the economic life, something will be able to arise which can replace the blood-line and the patent. For, the economic life would grow above the human being's head if he did not show himself equal to it, if he did not bring a spiritual insight with him to guide it. No one would associate with someone who did not bring qualities that made him effective in the economic life and which qualified him really to control the spirits which assert themselves in the economic life. An entirely new spirit will arise. And why will this be so?

In the ancient times, in which people judged according to the blood, what had taken place before birth or before conception was of importance for human beings, for this is what they brought into the physical world through the blood. And when existence before birth had been forgotten a recognition of the life before birth still lived on in the recognition of the blood-line. And then came the dialectical-legal element. The human being was only recognized in relation to what he was as a physical being. Now the other element comes in—an economic life that is growing demonic. And the human being must also now be recognized again in his inmost soul-and-spirit being. And just as one will see the demonic element in economic life, so one will also have to begin to see that which the human being bears through repeated lives on earth. One will have to be aware of what a human being brings when he enters this life. This will have to be taken care of in the spiritual limb of the social organism.

When one judges according to the blood, one really does not need a pedagogy; one only needs a knowledge of the symbols through which the gods express where it is a human being is to be placed. As long as one judges in a purely dialectical-legal way one only needs an abstract pedagogy which speaks of the human child in a generalized way. But when a human being is to be placed in an associative life in such a way that he is fit and capable one has to take account of the following. One must realize that the first seven years in which the human being develops the physical body, are not significant for what he will be able to do later in the social life -—he must only be made fit and capable in a general way valid for all human beings. In the years between seven and fourteen, in which the etheric body is developed, the human being must first of all be recognized. What has to be recognized is what then emerges as the astral body at the age of fourteen or fifteen and which comes into consideration when the real soul-and-spiritual core of the human being is to bring him to the place he is meant to be. Here the educational factor becomes a specifically social one. It is a matter here of gaining a true understanding of the child one is educating so that one can see that a certain quality in the child is good for this, and another quality is good for that. But this does not show itself clearly until after the child leaves primary school and it will belong to an artistic pedagogy and didactics to be able to discern that one child is suited for this and another is suited for that. It is according to this that those decisions will be made that are the challenge in Towards Social Renewal for the circulation of capital; that is to say the means of production. A completely new spiritual concept must arise which, on the one hand, is capable of perceiving the economic life in its inner spiritual vitality and, on the other, can perceive what role must be played by cultural life; how cultural life must give economic life its configuration. This can only happen if the cultural life is independent, when nothing is forced upon it by the economic life. It is when one inwardly grasps the whole course of humanity's evolution that one recognizes how this evolution requires the threefolding of the social organism.

Thus, because we have been closed off from the Orient in more recent times by the Petrinism of Peter the Great on the one hand and Turkey on the other, we therefore need an independent spiritual life; a spiritual life that really recognizes the spiritual world in a new form and not in the way in which, in ancient times, nature spoke to man. One will then be able to relate this spiritual life back to nature. But once one has found it, one will also be able to develop this spiritual life in such a way in the human being that it becomes the content of his skills; that he will be able through this spiritual life to satisfy, in associative cooperation, an economic life that becomes more and more dynamic. Such thoughts as these really must exist in an anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For this reason such a spiritual science can only be born from a knowledge of the course of human evolution.

The first thing is to steer towards a real knowledge of the spirit. Talk of the spirit in general terms—in empty, abstract words in the way that is accepted practice today among official philosophers and in other circles and which has become generally popular—is of no use for the future. The spiritual world is not the same as the physical world. Thus it is not possible to gain a perception of the spiritual world by abstracting from the physical but only by direct spiritual investigation. These perceptions naturally then appear as something completely different from what the human being can know when he knows only the physical world. People who, out of complacency, wish only to know of the physical world call it fantastic to talk about Old Moon, Old Sun and Old Saturn. They find that, when one speaks about these former embodiments of the earth, it strikes no chord in them. Things are described there of which they do not have the foggiest notion. The fact is of course that they have no notion of them because they do not want to know about the spiritual world. Things are related to them about the spiritual world and they say: But it doesn't concur with anything we already know. But that is the whole point: worlds are found that do not concur with what one knows already. This is the way, is it not, that, for example, Arthur Drews, the philosophy professor, judges spiritual science. It does not concur with what he has already imagined. Indeed, when the railway from Berlin to Potsdam was to be built, the post master of Berlin³ said: And now I'm supposed to send trains to Potsdam! I already send four post coaches a week and no one travels in them. If people really want to throw their money out of the window why don't they do it directly! Of course, the railways looked different from the post-coaches of the 1830s of the honest post-master of Berlin. But, of course, the descriptions of the spiritual world also look different from what nests in heads like Arthur Drews'. He, however, is only characteristic of many others. He is even one of the better ones, strange as it may seem. Not because he is good, but because the others are worse.

It was first of all necessary to show how, on a strict scientific basis, one can truly penetrate into the spiritual worlds. This is what, in the first place, our lecture course this autumn has been striving towards. And even if this is only at its beginnings, it has at least been shown how, in certain areas of the sciences, knowledge can be raised to a knowledge of the spiritual as such and how this spiritual element can in turn permeate what is gained by sense-knowledge.

But what can thus be gained in the field of knowledge and what will be achieved in contrast to the accepted knowledge in the schools—for it is in this area that fine beginnings are apparent—would remain incomplete. One could in fact already show how psychology, and, indeed, even mathematics, point towards spiritual realms. But it would only be something incomplete and therefore unable to aid our declining civilization if a truly elemental and intensive will does not arise from the area of practical economic life. It is necessary that old usages, old habits, be truly dropped and that everyday life be permeated with spirituality. It must come about as a flower of the Anthroposophical Movement that, with the help of the mood of soul that can arise out of spiritual science, a perceptive understanding of practical life is brought to bear—especially of the practical economic life—and that it may be shown how the downfall can be averted if a consciousness of creating something alive is carried into this economic life.

Every day one should keep an ever-watchful eye on the so blatantly visible signs of our declining economic life. This old economic life cannot be galvanized. For just as today no one should be proud of what he gains from ordinary science—for that would definitely lead humanity into the future prophesied by Oswald Spengler—so, too, no one should be proud of what he can gain from the old economic life by way of abilities that correspond to this old form. Today no one can be proud of being a physicist, a mathematician, a biologist in the usual sense. But also no one can be proud of being a merchant, an industrialist in the old sense. But this 'old sense' is the only thing we have today. Nowhere today do we see anything arising like a true association. What is really needed, as a kind of second event of this Goetheanum, is to have something on the lines of this lecture-course, which could provide something tangible out of the realm of practical life itself, and which could stand side by side with the sciences. We will not get any further with what is contained in just one stream but only when this other side of human striving also has its place.

This today is still the characteristic feature of our present human evolution: on the one side the traditional bearers of the old spiritual life who calumniate and slander one when, working out of the modern scientific approach, one tries to achieve a spiritualization. They already do this today quite consciously because they have no interest in the progress of human development and because, for the time being, they only think to hold back this evolution of humanity. Sometimes they do so in a truly grotesque manner, like that strange academic⁴ who recently spoke in Zurich about Anthroposophy and went to such extremes that even his colleagues were shocked; so that, as it seems, this attack against Anthroposophy has actually acted as mild propaganda for it. These representatives of a redundant spiritual life persist, however, and will do so far more, for they will dose ranks with formidable slanders. Here one sees what one is up against, arising in the form of slanders and so on, in regard to untruth.

On the other side one can notice another strong resistance; which, however, occurs in the unconscious. And this is a painful experience. In this area one can definitely speak of an inner opposition, sometimes quite unintentional, against what must lie in the direction of spiritual-scientific endeavour. It will be a matter of having to learn, particularly in this area, to identify with the aims that spiritual science can set here. For to judge, in the subjective way that has been usual up to now, what must be willed from spiritual science, would be to do the same as the priests and others in other areas do when they declare spiritual science a heresy. This is what makes difficulties for our Anthroposophical Movement—the fact that precisely in this area a kind of inner opposition is clearly noticeable. One can say that it is particularly in this area that what sheds light in such a strange way on certain accusations which come from many sides, shows itself most clearly. They say: 'In this Anthroposophical Society everyone only repeats what one man has said. But in reality they do not repeat at all; everyone just says what he thinks so that the one man can approve it.' We have experienced this many times, have we not? A person talks frequently about what he may want, saying that I said so, even though from me he actually heard the exact opposite. Now this is the real rule of blind faith in authority. A strange faith in authority! This has been evident in many cases. But it would be particularly damaging if this strange kind of opposition—there has actually always been more opposition than faith in authority and, therefore, an indictment of faith in authority is really unjust—it would be far more fatal if what I refer to here as inner opposition were, particularly in the sphere of practical life, to take on wider dimensions. For then the opponents of anthroposophical striving would, as long as they could, of course say: `Aha, a sectarian, fantastic movement which cannot be practical.' Of course it cannot be practical if people do not engage themselves in it; just as, after all, no matter how good one is at sewing, one cannot sew without a needle.

With this I only wished to draw attention to something that needs watching. It is by no means intended as a criticism or as a reference to the past but is something necessary for the future. Nevertheless, I would of course not have referred to it if I did not see all sorts of smoke-clouds rising. But I am really only pointing out what has, as it were, to be a challenge to really cooperate on all sides and not to shelter behind reactionary practices and, behind the bulwark of these reactionary practices, destroy Anthroposophy even though one is perhaps trying to help it. So I am not referring to something that has already happened but to something that is necessary for the future. It is necessary to think about these things.

With these comments I shall have to let it rest for today. Tomorrow and the following day we shall have to link up this prelude which, as you will see, is in fact an introduction to a study of the Christ-experience in the twentieth century.

• 1 . See Das Ereignis der Christus-Erscheinung in der atherischen Welt (The Event of the Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric World), sixteen lectures given in different cities in 1910, (GA 118).
• 2 . Anatol Vasilevich Lunacharsky (1875–1933), Russian writer and politician. From 1917 he was the Commisar for the education of the masses.
• 3 . Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler (1770–1846).
• 4 . It has not been possible to establish who this was.

Yesterday I told you the story of Gerhard the Good—which most of you probably know—so that today we can illustrate various points in our endeavour to increase our understanding of the matters we are discussing. But before I interpret parts of this story for you, in so far as this is necessary, we must also recall a number of other things we have touched on at various times during these lectures. From what has been said over the past few weeks you will have seen that the painful events of today are connected with impulses living in the more recent karma of mankind, namely, the karma of the whole fifth post-Atlantean period. For those who want to go more deeply into these matters it is necessary to link external events with what is happening more inwardly, which can only be understood against the background of human evolution as seen by spiritual science.

To begin with, take at face value certain facts which I have pointed out a number of times. I have frequently said that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, an endeavour was made to draw the attention of modern mankind to the fact that there exist in the universe not only those forces and powers recognized by natural science but also others of a spiritual kind. The endeavour was to show that just as we take in with our eyes—or, indeed, with all our senses—what is visible around us, so are there also spiritual impulses around us, which people who know about such things can bring to bear on social life—impulses which cannot be seen with the eye but are known to a more spiritual science.

We know what path this more spiritual science took, so I need not go over it again. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, then, it was the concern of a certain centre to draw people's attention to the existence, as it were, of a spiritual environment. This had been forgotten during the age of materialism. You also know that such things have to be tackled with caution because a certain degree of maturity is necessary in people who take in such knowledge. Of course, not all those can be mature who come across, or are affected by, this knowledge in accordance with the laws of our time, which underlie public life. But part of what must be done at such a time can be the requirement to test whether the knowledge may yet be revealed publicly.

Now in the middle of the nineteenth century two paths were possible. One, even then, would have been what we could describe by mentioning our anthroposophical spiritual science, namely, to make comprehensible to human thinking what spiritual knowledge reveals about our spiritual environment. It is a fact that this could have been attempted at that time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but this path was not chosen. The reason was, in part, that those who possessed this esoteric knowledge were prejudiced, because of traditions that have come down from ancient times, against making such things public. They felt that certain knowledge guarded by the secret brotherhoods—for it was still guarded at that time—should be kept within the circle of these brotherhoods. We have since seen that, so long as matters are conducted in the proper way, it is perfectly acceptable today to reveal certain things. Of course it is unavoidable that some malicious opponents should appear, and always will appear, in circles in which such knowledge is made known—people who are adherents for a time because it suits their passions and their egoism, but who then become opponents under all sorts of guises and make trouble. Also when spiritual knowledge is made known in a community, this can easily lead to arguments, quarrelling and disputes, of which, however, not too much notice can be taken, since otherwise no spiritual knowledge would ever be made known. But, apart from these things, no harm is done if the matter is handled in the right way.

But at that time this was not believed. So ancient prejudice won the day and it was agreed to take another path. But, as I have often said, this failed. It was decided to use the path of mediumistic revelation to make people recognize the spiritual world in the same way as they recognize the physical world. Suitable individuals were trained to be mediums. What they then revealed through their lowered consciousness was supposed to make people recognize the existence of certain spiritual impulses in their environment. This was a materialistic way of revealing the spiritual world to people. It corresponded to some extent to the conditions of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in so far as this is materialistic in character.

This way of handling things began, as you know, in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it soon became obvious that the whole thing was a mistake. It had been expected that the mediums would reveal the existence of certain elemental and nature spirits in the environment. Instead, they all started to refer to revelations from the kingdom of the dead. So the goal which had been set was not reached. I have often explained that the living can only reach the dead with an attitude which does not depend on lowering the consciousness. You all know these things. At that time this was also known and that is why, when the mediums began to speak of revelations of the dead, it was realized that the whole thing was a mistake. This had not been expected. It had been hoped that the mediums would reveal how the nature spirits work, how one human being affects another, what forces are at play in the social organism, and so on. It had been hoped that people would start to recognize what forces might be used by those who understand such things, so that people would no longer be dependent solely on one another in the way they are when only their sense perceptions come into play, but would be able to work through the total human personality. This was one thing that went wrong.

The other was that, in keeping with man's materialistic inclinations, it soon became obvious what would have begun to happen if the mediumistic movement had spread in the way it threatened to do. Use would have been made of the mediums to accomplish aims which ought only to be accomplished under the influence of natural, sense-bound reasoning. For some individuals it would have been highly desirable to employ a medium who could impart the means of discovering the knowledge which such people covet. I have told you how many letters I get from people who write: I have a lottery ticket; or, I want to buy a lottery ticket; I need the money for an entirely selfless purpose; could you not tell me which number will be drawn? Obviously, if mediums had been fully trained in the techniques of mediumship, the resulting mischief with this kind of thing would have been infinite, quite apart from everything else. People would have started to go to mediums to find a suitable bride or bridegroom, and so on.

Thus it came about that, in the very quarter that had launched the movement in order to test whether people were ready to take in spiritual knowledge, efforts were now made to suppress the whole affair. What had been feared in bygone times, when the abilities of the fourth post-Atlantean period still worked in people, had indeed now come to pass. In those days witches were burnt, simply because those people called witches were really no more than mediums, and because their connections with the spiritual world—though of a materialistic nature—might cause knowledge to be revealed which would have been very awkward for certain people. Thus, for instance it might have been very awkward for certain brotherhoods if, before being burnt at the stake, a witch had revealed what lay behind them. For it is true that when consciousness is lowered there can be a kind of telephone connection with the spiritual world, and that by this route all sorts of secrets can come out. Those who burnt the witches did so for a very good reason: It could have been very awkward for them if the witches had revealed anything to the world, whether in a good or a bad sense, but especially in a bad sense.

So the attempt to test the cultural maturity of mankind by means of mediums had gone awry. This was realized even by those who, led astray by the old rules of silence and by the materialistic tendencies of the nineteenth century, had set this attempt in train. You know, of course, that the activities of mediums have not been entirely curtailed, and that they still exist, even today. But the art of training mediums to a level at which their revelations could become significant has, so to speak, been withdrawn. By this withdrawal the capabilities of mediums have been made more or less harmless. In recent decades, as you know, the pronouncements of mediums have come to amount to not much more than sentimental twaddle. The only surprising thing is that people set so much store by them. But the door to the spiritual world had been opened to some degree and, moreover, this had been done in a manner which was untimely and a mistake.

In this period came the birth and work of Blavatsky. You might think that the birth of a person is insignificant, but this would be a judgement based on maya. Now the important thing is that this whole undertaking had to be discussed among the brotherhoods, so that much was said and brought into the open within the brotherhoods. But the nineteenth century was no longer like earlier centuries in which many methods had existed for keeping secret those things which had to be kept secret. Thus it happened that, at a certain moment, a member of one of the secret brotherhoods, who intended to make use in a one-sided way of what he learnt within these brotherhoods, approached Blavatsky. Apart from her other capacities Blavatsky was an extremely gifted medium, and this person induced her to act as a connecting link for machinations which were no longer as honest as the earlier ones. The first, as we have seen, were honest but mistaken. Up to this point the attempt to test people's receptivity had been perfectly honest, though mistaken. Now, however, came the treachery of a member of an American secret brotherhood. His purpose was to make one-sided use of what he knew, with the help of someone with psychic gifts, such as Blavatsky. Let us first look at what actually took place. When Blavatsky heard what the member of the brotherhood had to say, she, of course, reacted inwardly to his words because she was psychic. She understood a great deal more about the matter than the one who was giving her the information. The ancient knowledge formulated in the traditional way lit up in her soul a significant understanding which she could hardly have achieved solely with her own resources. Inner experiences were stimulated in her soul by the ancient formulations which stemmed from the days of atavistic clairvoyance and which were preserved in the secret brotherhoods, often without much understanding for their meaning on the part of the members. These inner experiences led in her to the birth of a large body of knowledge. She knew, of course, that this knowledge must be significant for the present evolution of mankind, and also that by taking the appropriate path this knowledge could be utilized in a particular way.

But Blavatsky, being the person she was, could not be expected to make use of such lofty spiritual knowledge solely for the good of mankind as a whole. She hit upon the idea of pursuing certain aims which were within her understanding, having come to this point in the manner I have described. So now she demanded to be admitted to a certain occult brotherhood in Paris. Through this brotherhood she would start to work. Ordinarily she would have been accepted in the normal way, apart from the fact that it was not normal to admit a woman; but this rule would have been waived in this case because it was known that she was an important individuality. However, it would not have served her purpose to be admitted merely as an ordinary member, and so she laid down certain conditions. If these conditions had been accepted, many subsequent events would have been very different but, at the same time, this secret brotherhood would have pronounced its own death sentence—that is, it would have condemned itself to total ineffectiveness. So it refused to admit Blavatsky. She then turned to America, where she was indeed admitted to a secret brotherhood. In consequence, she of course acquired extremely significant insights into the intentions of such secret brotherhoods; not those which strive for the good of mankind as a whole, disregarding any conflicting wishes, but those whose purposes are one-sided and serve certain groups only. But it was not in Blavatsky's nature to work in the way these brotherhoods wished. So it came about that, under the influence of what was termed an attack on the Constitution of North America, she was excluded from this brotherhood.

So now she was excluded. But of course she was not a person who would be likely to take this lying down. Instead, she began to threaten the American brotherhood with the consequences of excluding her in this way, now that she knew so much. The American brotherhood now found itself sitting under the sword of Damocles, for if, as a result of having been a member, Blavatsky had told the world what she knew, this would have spelt its death sentence. The consequence was that American and European occultists joined forces in order to inflict on Blavatsky a condition known as occult imprisonment. Through certain machinations a sphere of Imaginations is called forth in a soul which brings about a dimming of what that soul previously knew, thus making it virtually ineffective. It is a procedure which honest occultists never apply, and even dishonest ones only very rarely, but it was applied on that occasion in order to save the life—that is the effectiveness, of that secret brotherhood.

For years Blavatsky existed in this occult imprisonment, until certain Indian occultists started to take an interest in her because they wanted to work against that American brotherhood. As you see, we keep coming up against occult streams which want to work one-sidedly. Thus Blavatsky entered this Indian current, with which you are familiar. The Indian brotherhood was very interested indeed in proceeding against the American brotherhood, not because they saw that they were not serving mankind as a whole, but because they in turn had their own one-sided patriotically Indian viewpoint. By means of various machinations the Indian and the American occultists reached a kind of agreement. The Americans promised not to interfere in what the Indians wanted to do with Blavatsky, and the Indians engaged to remain silent on what had gone before.

You can see just how complicated these things really are when you add to all this the fact, which I have also told you about, that a hidden individual, a mahatma behind a mask, had been instituted in place of Blavatsky's original teacher and guide. This figure stood in the service of a European power and had the task of utilizing whatever Blavatsky could do in the service of this particular European power. One way of discovering what all this is really about might be to ask what would have happened if one or other of these projects had been realized.

Time is too short to tell you everything today, but let us pick out a few aspects. We can always come back to these things again soon.

Supposing Blavatsky had succeeded in gaining admission to the occult lodge in Paris. If this had happened, she would not have come under the influence of that individual who was honoured as a mahatma in the Theosophical Society—although he was no such thing—and the life of the occult lodge in Paris would have been extinguished. A great deal behind which this same Paris lodge may be seen to stand would not have happened, or perhaps it would have happened in the service of a different, one-sided influence. Many things would have taken a different course. For there was also the intention of exterminating this Paris lodge with the help of the psychic personality of Blavatsky. If it had been exterminated, there would have been nothing behind all those people who have contributed to history, more or less like marionettes. People like Silvagni, Durante, Sergi, Cecconi, Lombroso and all his relations, and many others would have had no occult backers behind them. Many a door, many a kind of sliding door, would have remained locked.

You will understand that this is meant symbolically. In certain countries editorial offices—I mean this as a picture!—have a respectable door and a sliding door. Through the respectable door you enter the office and through the sliding door you enter some secret brotherhood or other working, as I have variously indicated over the last few days, to achieve results of the kind about which we have spoken. So the intention was to abolish something from the world which would have done away with, at least, one stream which we have seen working in our present time. Signor d'Annunzio would not have given the speech we quoted.

Perhaps another would have been given instead, pushing things in a different direction. But you see that the moment things are not fully under control, the moment people are pushed about through a dimming of their consciousness, and when occultism is being used, not for the general good of mankind—and above all, in our time, not with true knowledge—but for the purpose of achieving one-sided aims, then matters can come to look very grave indeed.

Anyway, the members of this lodge were, from the standpoint of the lodge, astute enough not to enter into a discussion of these things. Later on, certain matters were hushed up, obscured, by the fact that Blavatsky was prevented by her occult imprisonment from publicizing the impulses of that American lodge and giving them her own slant, which she would doubtless otherwise have done. Once all these things had run their course, the only one to benefit from Blavatsky was the Indian brotherhood. There is considerable significance for the present time in the fact that a certain sum of occult knowledge has entered the world one-sidedly, with an Indian colouring. This knowledge has entered the world; it now exists. But the world has remained more or less unconscious of it because of the paralysis I have described.

Those who reckon with such things always count on long stretches of time. They prepare things and leave them to develop. These are not individuals, but brotherhoods in which the successor takes over from the predecessor and carries on in a similar direction with what has been started.

On the basis of the two examples I have given you, of occult lodges, you can see that much depended on the actual impulses not being made public. I do not wish to be misunderstood and I therefore stated expressly that the first attempt I described to you was founded on a certain degree of honesty. But it is extremely difficult for people to be entirely objective as regards mankind as a whole. There is little inclination for this nowadays. People are so easily led astray by the group instinct that they are not objective as regards mankind as a whole but pay homage to one group or another, enjoying the feeling of ‘belonging.’ But this is something that is no longer really relevant to the point we have reached in human evolution. The requirement of the present moment is that we should, at least to some degree, feel ourselves to be individuals and extricate ourselves, at least inwardly, from group things, so that we belong to mankind as human individuals. Even though, at present, we are shown so grotesquely how impossible this is for some people, it is nevertheless a requirement of our time.

For example, let me refer to what I said here a few days ago. A nation as a whole is an individuality of a kind which cannot be compared with human individualities, who live here on the physical plane and then go through their development between death and a new birth. Nations are individualities of quite a different kind. As you can see from everything we find in our anthroposophical spiritual science, a folk spirit, a folk soul, is something different from the soul of an individual human being. It is nonsense to speak in a materialistic sense, as is done today, of the soul of a nation while at the back of one's mind thinking of something resembling the soul of an individual—even though one, of course, does not admit this to oneself. Thus you hear people speak of ‘the French soul’; this has been repeatedly said in recent years. It is nonsense, plain nonsense, because it is an analogy taken from the individual human soul and applied to the folk soul. You can only speak of the folk soul if you take into account the complex totality described in the lecture cycle on the different folk spirits. But to speak in any other sense about the folk soul is utter nonsense, even though many, including journalists, do so—and they may be forgiven, for they do not know what they are talking about. It is mere verbosity to speak—as has been done—for instance of the ‘Celtic soul and the Latin spirit’. Maybe such a thing is just about acceptable as an analogy, but there is no reality in. We must be clear about the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. So often have we said that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished in such a way that what has been united with earth evolution ever since is there for all mankind, but that if an individual speaks of a mystical Christ within him, this is no more than idle talk. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective reality, as you know from much that has been said here. It took place for mankind as a whole, which means for every individual human being. Christ died for all human beings, as a human being for human beings, not for any other kind of being. It is possible to speak about a Christian, about one whose attitude of mind is Christian, but it is complete nonsense to talk of a Christian nation. There is no reality in this. Christ did not die for nations, nations are not the individualities for whom He died. An individual who is close to the Being of the Mystery of Golgotha can be a Christian, but it is not possible to speak of a Christian nation. The true soul of a nation, its folk soul, belongs to planes on which the Mystery of Golgotha did not take place. So any dealings and actions between nations can never be interpreted or commented upon in a Christian sense.

I am pointing out these things simply because it is necessary that you in particular, my dear friends, should understand just how important it is today to arrive at clear-cut concepts. This can only be done by applying spiritual science, and yet mankind as a whole strives to fish in muddy waters with concepts that are utterly nonsensical and obscure. So the important thing is, above all, to arrive at clear-cut concepts, to see everything in relation to clear-cut concepts, and also to understand that in our time certain occult, spiritual impulses have been working, chiefly through human beings. This is fitting for the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Now if Blavatsky had been able to speak out at that time, certain secrets would have been revealed, secrets I have mentioned as belonging to certain secret brotherhoods and connected with the striving of a widespread network of groups. I said to you earlier that definite laws underlie the rise and evolution of peoples, of nations. These laws are usually unknown in the external, physical world. This is right and proper, for in the first place they ought to be recognized solely by those who desire to receive them with clean hands. What now underlies the terrible trials mankind is undergoing at present and will undergo in the future is the interference in a one-sided way, by certain modern brotherhoods, with the spiritual forces that pulse through human evolution in the region in which, for instance, nations, peoples, come into being. Evolution progresses in accordance with definite laws; it is regular and comes about through certain forces. But human beings interfere, in some part unconsciously, though if they are members of secret brotherhoods, then they do so consciously.

To be able to judge these things you need what yesterday I called a wider horizon; you need the acquisition of a wider horizon. I showed you the forces of which Blavatsky became the plaything, in order to point out how such a plaything can be tossed about, from West to East, from America to India. This is because forces are at work which are being managed by human beings for certain ends, by means of utilizing the passions and feelings of nationality, which have, however, in their turn first been manufactured. This is most important. It is important to develop an eye for the way in which a person who, because of the type of passions in her—in her blood—can be put in a certain position and be brought under the sway of certain influences. Equally, those who do this must know that certain things can be achieved, depending on the position in which the person is placed. Many attempts fail. But account is taken of long periods of time and of many possibilities. Above all, account is taken of how little inclination people have to pay attention to the wider—the widest, contexts.

Let us stop here and turn to yesterday's story. It tells us about the time around the tenth century, when the constitution of souls was still that of the fourth post-Atlantean period. We saw how the spiritual world intervened in the life of Emperor Otto of the Red Beard. His whole life is transformed because the spiritual world makes him aware of Gerhard the Good. From Gerhard the Good he is to learn the fear of God, true piety, and that one must not expect—for largely egoistic reasons—a blessing from heaven for one's earthly deeds. So he is told by the spiritual world to seek out Gerhard the Good. This is the one side: what plays in from the spiritual world.

Those who know that age—not as it is described by external history, but as it really was—are aware that the spiritual world did indeed play in through real visions such as that described in connection with Emperor Otto the Red, and that spiritual impulses definitely played a meaningful part. The one who wrote down this story says expressly that in his youth he had also written many other stories, as had other contemporaries of his. The man who wrote down the story of Gerhard the Good was Rudolf von Ems, an approximate contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. He said he had written other stories as well but that he had destroyed them because they had been fairy tales. Yet he does not consider this story to be a fairy tale but strictly historical, even though externally it is not historical—that is it would not be included in today's history books which only take physical maya into account. In the way he tells it, it cannot be compared with external, purely physical history; and yet his telling is more true than purely physical history can be for, on the whole, that is only maya. He tells the story for the fourth post-Atlantean period.

You know, for I have repeatedly said this, that I am not taking sides in any way but simply reporting facts which are to provide a basis on which judgements may be formed. Only those who do not wish to be objective will maintain that what I shall attempt to say is not objective. Someone who does not wish to be objective cannot, of course, be expected to find objectivity in what is, in fact, objective. The fact that the spiritual world plays into human affairs is not the only important aspect of the story of Gerhard the Good. It is also significant that a leading personality receives from the spiritual world the impulse to turn to a member of the commercial world, the world of the merchant. It is indeed a historical fact that, in Central Europe, at that time the members of the ruling dynasty to which Otto the Red belonged did start to patronize the merchant classes in the towns. In Europe this was the time of the growth of commerce.

We should further take into account that at that time there were as yet no ocean routes between Orient and Occident. Trade routes were definitely still overland routes. Merchants such as Gerhard the Good who, as you know, lived in Cologne, carried their trade overland from Cologne to the Orient and back again. Any use of ships was quite insignificant. The trade routes were land routes. Shipping connections were not much more than attempts to achieve with the primitive ships of those days what was being done much more efficiently by land. So in the main the trade routes were overland, while shipping was only just beginning. That is what is characteristic of this time, for comprehensive shipping operations only came much later.

We have here a contrast arising out of the very nature of things. So long as Orient and Occident were connected by land routes, it was perfectly natural that the countries of Central Europe should take the lead. Life in these Central European countries was shaped accordingly. Much spiritual culture also travelled along these routes. It was quite different from what came later. As the centuries proceeded, the land routes were supplanted by ocean routes. As you know, England gradually took control of all the ocean connections which others had opened up. Spain, Holland and France were all conquered as far as their sea-faring capacities were concerned, so that in the end everything was held under the mighty dominance which encompassed a quarter of the earth's dry land, and gradually also all the earth's oceans.

You can see how systematic is this conquering, this almost exterminating, of other seafaring powers when you remember how I told you some time ago that in the secret brotherhoods, especially those which grew so powerful from the time of James I onwards, it was taught as an obvious truth that the Anglo-Saxon race—as they put it—will have to be given dominance over the world in the fifth post-Atlantean period. You will see how systematic the historical process has been when you consider what I have also mentioned and what was also taught: that this fifth post-Atlantean race of the English-speaking peoples will have to overcome the peoples of the Latin race.

To start with, the main thing is the interrelation between the English-speaking peoples and those whose languages are Latin in origin. Recent history cannot be understood without the realization that the important aim—which is also what is being striven for—is for world affairs to be arranged in such a way that the English-speaking peoples are favoured, while the influence of any peoples whose language is based on Latin fades out. Under certain circumstances something can be made to fade out by treating it favourably for a while, thus gaining power over it. This can then make it easy to engulf it.

In those secret brotherhoods, about which I have spoken so often, little significance is attached to Central Europe, for they are clever enough to realize that Germany, for instance, owns only one thirty-third of the earth's land surface. This is very little indeed, compared with a whole quarter of the land surface plus dominance over the high seas. So not much importance is attached to Central Europe. A great deal of importance was attached, however—especially during the period when present events were being prepared—to the overcoming of all those impulses connected with the Latin races.

It is remarkable how short-sighted the modern historical view is and how little inclination there is to go more deeply into matters which are quite characteristic of situations. I have already pointed out that what has so long been practised as a pragmatic view of history is not important, reporting as it does on one event, followed by another, and another, and yet another. What is important is to recognize the facts characterized by the many interrelationships in the events which follow one another. What matters is to point out what is characteristic about the facts, namely, what reveals the forces lying behind maya. Pragmatic history must today give way to a history of symptoms.

Those who see through things in this way will be in a position to form judgements about certain events which differ considerably from those of people who reel off the events of world history—this fable convenue—one after the other, as is done in historical science today. Consider some of the things you know well in connection with some others about which I shall tell you. First of all, a simple fact: In 1618 the Thirty Years War began because certain ideas of a reformative kind developed within the Czech Slav element. Then certain aristocrats belonging to these Slav circles took up the movement and rebelled against what might be called the Counter-Reformation, namely, the Catholicism from Spain which was favoured by the Habsburgs. The first thing usually told about the Thirty Years War is the story of the rebels going to the town hall in Prague and throwing the councillors Martinitz and Slavata and the secretary Fabrizius out of the window. Yet this is quite insignificant. The only interesting point is perhaps that the three gentlemen did not hurt themselves because they fell onto a dunghill. These are not things which can bring the Thirty Years' War to life for us or show us its real causes.

The reformative party elected Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, as counter-King of Bohemia in 1619. Then followed, as you know, the battle of the White Mountain. Up to the election of the Elector Palatine, all the events were caused by the passionate feelings of these people for a reform movement, by a rebellion against arbitrary acts of power such as the closure or destruction of Protestant churches at Braunau and Kloster Grab. There is not enough time for me to tell you the whole story. But now think: Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, is elected King. Up to this point the events are based on human passions, human enthusiasm, it is even justified to say human idealism—I am quite happy to concede this.

But why, of all people, was the Elector Palatine of the Rhine chosen as King of Bohemia? It was because he was the son-in-law of James I, who stands at the beginning of the renewal of the brotherhoods! Here, then, we may discern an important finger in the pie if we are trying to look at history symptomatically. Attempts were being made to steer events in a particular direction. They failed. But you see that there is a finger in the pie. The most significant sign of what kind of impulses were to be brought to bear in this situation is that the son-in-law of one of the most important occultists, James I, was thrown into this position.

You see, the fact is that the whole of recent history has to do with the contrast between the ancient Roman-Latin element and that element, not of the English people—for they would get on perfectly happily with the world—but that element which, as I have described sufficiently, is to be made out of the English people if they fail to put up any resistance. It is the conflict between these two elements that is at work.

Meanwhile something else is manipulated, for a great deal can be achieved in one place by bringing about events in another.

Let us look at a later date. You might pick up a history book and read the history of the Seven Years War. Of course the history of this war is read just as thoughtlessly as any other. For to understand what is really going on and investigate what forces of history are playing a part, you have to look properly at the various links between the different circumstances. You have to consider, for instance, that at that time the southern part of Central Europe, namely Austria, was linked with every aspect of the Latin element and even had a proper alliance with France, whereas the northern part of Middle Europe—not at first, but later on—was drawn to what was to be made, by certain quarters, into the English-speaking, fifth post-Atlantean race.

When you look closely at the alliances and everything else that went on at that time—those things which were not maya, of course—you discover a war that is in reality being waged about North America and India between England and France. What went on in Europe was really only a weak mirror image of this. For if you compare everything that took place on the larger scale—do extend your horizons!—then you will see that the conflict was between England and France and that North America and India were already starting to have their effect. It was a matter of which of these two powers was cleverer and more able to direct events in such a way that dominion over North America or India could be snatched away from the other. At work in this were long-term future plans and the control of important impulses. It is true: The influence snatched by England from France in North America was won on the battle fields of Silesia during the Seven Years' War!

Watch how the alliances shift when the situation becomes a little awkward and difficult; watch the alliances from this point of view!

Now, another story. It is necessary to look at these things, and once one is not misunderstood, once it is assumed that one's genuine purpose is to gain a clear picture of what is going on in the world, once one strives to be objective, it will not be taken amiss when such stories are told; instead it will be understood that our concern is for comprehension and not for taking sides. In fact, it is precisely those people who feel they are affected by a particular matter who ought to be particularly glad to learn more about it. For then they are lifted above their blindness and given sight, and nothing is better for a person than real insight into how things work in the world. So let us now take an example which can show you a different side of how things work.

Through circumstances which you can look up in a history book, the kingdoms of Hanover and England were once linked. The laws of succession in the two countries were different—we need not go into this in detail—and as a result of this, when Victoria came to the throne of England, Hanover had to become separate. Another member of the English royal house had to take the throne of Hanover. The person elected, or rather the person jostled onto the throne of Hanover was Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, who had previously been connected with the throne of England. So this Ernst August came to the throne of Hanover at the age of sixty-six. His character was such that, after his departure to become the king of Hanover, the English newspapers said: Thank goodness he's gone; let's hope he doesn't come back! He was considered a dreadful person because of the whole way he behaved. When you look at the impression he made on his contemporaries and those who had dealings with him, a certain type of character emerges which is striking for one who understands characters of this kind. The Hanoverians could not understand him. They found him coarse. He was indeed coarse, so coarse that the poet Thomas Moore said: He surely belonged to the dynasty of Beelzebub. But you know the saying: The German lies if he is polite. So they had a certain understanding for coarseness, but they did presuppose that someone who is coarse is at least honest. Ernst August, however, was always a liar as well as being coarse, and this the Hanoverians could not understand. He had other similar traits as well.

First, Ernst August repealed the Hanoverian constitution. Then he dismissed the famous ‘seven professors’ of Göttingen University. He had them sent straight out of the country, so that it was not until they reached Witzenhausen, which lay beyond his majesty's borders, that their students were permitted to take leave of them. I need not tell you the whole story. But what is the explanation? Those who seek no further for an explanation of this extraordinary mask merely find Ernst August coarse and dishonest. He even cheated Metternich, which is saying much indeed, and so on. But there is something remarkably systematic in all this. And the systematic aspect is not changed by the fact that he lived most of his life up to the age of sixty-six in England, where he was an officer of the Dragoons.

An explanation may be found in the fact that in his whole manner he was manifesting the impulses one has when one is a member of the so-called ‘Orange Lodge’. His whole manner was an expression of the impulses of the Orange Lodge, of which he was a member.

What we must do is learn to understand history symptomatically and widen our horizons. We need to develop a sense for what is important and what really gives insight. So I told you the tale of Gerhard the Good in order to demonstrate how, through such phenomena as the Orange Lodge, and so on, what had been Central Europe was quite systematically drawn over to the West. I am not uttering any reproach, for it was a historical necessity. But one ought to know it and not apply moral judgements to such things. What is essential is to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. I have often stressed that this is not something that enables one to say: But I really believed it, it was my honest and sincere opinion! No indeed. One who possesses the sense for truth is one who unremittingly strives to find the truth of the matter, one who never ceases to seek the truth and who takes responsibility for himself even when he says something untrue out of ignorance. For, objectively, it is irrelevant whether something wrong is said knowingly or unknowingly. Similarly it is irrelevant whether you hold your finger in the candle flame through ignorance or on purpose; either way you burn it.

At this point we must understand what happened at the transition from the fourth post-Atlantean period-when commerce was still just under the influence of the spiritual world, as is indicated in the story of Gerhard the Good—to the fifth period, when everything commercial was drawn over into the occult sphere which is guided by the so-called ‘Brothers of the Shadow’. These brotherhoods guard certain principles. From their point of view it would be extremely dangerous if these principles should be betrayed. That is why they were so careful to prevent Blavatsky from making them public or causing them to pass over into other hands. They were, in fact, to be passed over from the West to the East; not to India but to the East of Russia.

Someone with a sense for what lies behind maya can understand that external institutions and external measures can have differing values, differing degrees of importance in the total context. Consider an incident in recent history. I have told you so many occult, spiritual things that I have, in a way, ‘done my time’ and am now free to go on and give you some indications out of more recent history. No one should say that I am taking this time away from that devoted to occult matters; these things are also important.

So let us take an example from more recent history. In 1909 a meeting was arranged between the King of Italy and the Tsar of Russia. So far there had not been much love lost between these two representatives, but from then on it was considered a good thing to manoeuvre them into each other's company. So the meeting at Racconigi took place. It was not easy to arrange. In the description of all the measures he had to take to prevent ‘incidents of an assassinatory nature’ you can read how difficult it was for poor Giolitti, who was Prime Minister at the time.

Then there was the question of finding a suitable personage who would pay Rome's homage to the Tsar. This had to be a personage of a particular kind. Such things have to be prepared well in advance so that when the right moment arrives they can be set in train on the spot. For a really ‘juicy’ effect to be achieved, not just any personage would do for the purpose of paying Rome's homage to the Tsar—the homage of the Latin West to the self-styled Slav East. It would have to be a special personage, even one who might not easily be persuaded to undertake this task. Now ‘by chance’, as the materialists would say, but ‘not by chance’, as those who are not materialists would say, a certain Signor Nathan—what a very Italian name!—was at that time the mayor of Rome. For many reasons his attitude was rather democratic and not at all one that would make him inclined to pay homage to the Tsar, of all people. He had only taken Italian citizenship shortly before becoming mayor of Rome. Before that he had been an English citizen. The fact that he was of mixed blood should be taken into account; he was the son of a German mother and had assumed the name of Nathan because his father was the famous Italian revolutionary Mazzini. This is a fact.

So persuading him to pay homage to the Tsar made it possible to say: See how thoroughly democracy has been converted. Here was someone who was not an ordinary person but one who had been anointed with all the oils of democracy, but—also someone who had been well prepared. From that moment onwards certain things start to become embarrassing. Today it is known, for example, that from that moment onwards all the correspondence within the Triple Alliance was promptly reported to St Petersburg! Human passions also played some part in the matter, since a special role was carried out in this reporting by a lady who had found a ‘sisterly’ route between Rome and St Petersburg. Such things can obviously be ascribed to coincidence. But those who want to see beyond maya will not ascribe them to coincidence but will seek the deeper connections between them. Then, when one seeks these deeper connections, one is no longer capable of lying as much, is no longer capable of deceiving people in order to distract them from the truth, which is what matters.

For instance—I am saying this in order to describe the truth—it would obviously have been most embarrassing for the widest circles if people's attention had been drawn to the fact that the whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place if that sentence I have already mentioned, which could have been spoken by Lord Grey—Sir Edward Grey has now become a lord—if that sentence had really been spoken. The whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place. It would have been a non-event, it would not have happened. But instead of speaking about the real cause, in so far as this is the cause because it could have prevented the invasion, it was obviously more comfortable to waste people's time by telling them about the ‘Belgian atrocities’. Yet these, too, would not have happened if Sir Edward Grey had taken this one, brief measure. In order to hide the simple truth something different is needed, something that arouses justified human passions and moral indignation. I am not saying anything against this. Something different is needed. It is a characteristic of our time, even today when it is particularly painful, to make every effort to obscure the truth, to blind people to the truth.

This, too, had to be prepared carefully. Any gap in the calculation would have made it impossible. The whole of the periphery, which had prudently been created for this very purpose, was needed.

But these things were very carefully prepared, both politically and culturally. Every possibility was reckoned with; and this was certainly necessary, since the most unbelievable carelessness sometimes prevailed, even in places where such a thing would be least expected. Let me give you an example, an objective fact, which will allow us to study this carelessness.

At one time Bismarck had a connection with a certain Usedom in Florence and Turin. I have told you before: Modern Italy came into being by roundabout means and actually owes her existence to Germany; but this is connected with all sorts of other things. What I am saying has profound foundations, and in politics all sorts of threads interweave. Thus at one time threads were woven which were to win over the Italian republicans. In short, at a certain time one such link existed between Bismarck and Usedom in Florence and Turin. Usedom was a friend of Mazzini and of others who enjoyed a certain prominence in nationalistic circles. Usedom was a man who posed very much as a wise person. He employed as his personal secretary somebody who was supposed to be a follower of Mazzini. Later it turned out that this personal secretary, of whom it had been said that he was initiated into Mazzini's secret societies, was nothing but an ordinary spy. Bismarck tells this tale quite naively and then adds, as an excuse for having been so mistaken: But Usedom was a high-grade Freemason. Many things could be told in this way and often it would turn out that those involved are totally innocent because the ones who pull the strings remain in the background.

You cannot maintain that there is no point in asking why such things are permitted to happen by the wise guides of world evolution—why human beings are, to a large degree, abandoned to such machinations, by making the excuse that there is no way of getting to the bottom of these things. For, indeed, if one only seeks them honestly, there are many ways of finding out what is going on. But we see, even in our own Society, how much resistance is put up by individuals when there is a question of following the simple path of truth. We see how many things which should be taken objectively in pursuit of knowledge, when they would best serve the good of mankind, are instead taken subjectively and personally. There are—are there not?—within our Society groups who have studied very attentively an essay of, I believe, 287 pages which they have taken utterly seriously and about which they are still puzzling, as to whether the writer—who is well enough known to us—might be right. In short, within our own circles we may sometimes discover why it is so difficult to see through things. Yet it is, in fact, not at all difficult to see through things if only one strives honestly for the truth. For years so much has been said within our Society. If you were to bring together all that has been said since 1902 you would see that it contains much that could help us to see through a great deal that is going on in the world. Yet our anthroposophical spiritual science has never been presented as belonging to a secret society. Indeed the most important things have always been dealt with in public lectures open to anybody. This is a contrast which should be noted.

I might as well say now: If certain streams within our Anthroposophical Society continue to exist and if, for the sake of human vanity, they continue to interpret to their own advantage certain things which have been said behind closed doors—for no more reason than one would exclude first-year students in a university from what is told to those in their second year—then, eventually there will be nothing esoteric left. If things are not taken perfectly naturally, if people continue to stand up and say: This is secret, that is very esoteric, this is occult, and I am not allowed to speak about this!—if this policy continues to be followed by certain streams in our Society, if they continually fail to understand that any degree of vanity must stop, then everything mankind must be told about today will have to be discussed in public. Whether it is possible to make known certain things, the needs of the moment will tell. But the Anthroposophical Society is only meaningful if it is a ‘society’, that is, if each individual is concerned to make a stand against vanity, against folly and vanity and everything else which clothes things in false veils of mysticism, serving only to puzzle other people and make them spiteful. The mysteriousness of certain secret brotherhoods has nothing to do with our Society, for we must be concerned solely with bringing about what is needed for the good of mankind. As I have often said, our enemies will become more and more numerous. Perhaps we shall discover what our enemies are made of by the manner in which they quarrel with us. So far we have had no honest opponents worth mentioning. They would, in effect, only be to our advantage! The kind of opposition we have met hitherto is perfectly obvious through their ways and means of operation. We might as well wait patiently to discover whether further opponents will be from within our circle, as is frequently the case, or from elsewhere! I have just had news of opposition from one quarter which will empty itself over us like a cold shower. A forthcoming book has been announced during some lectures. The author, a conceited fellow, has never belonged to our Society but has been entertaining the world with all sorts of double egos and such like. He has now used the opportunity of the various national hatreds and passions to mount an attack on our Anthroposophy of a kind which shows that his hands are not clean.

So we must not lose sight of these things and we must realize that it is up to us to hold fast to the direction which will lead to truth and knowledge. Even when we speak about current issues it must only be in pursuit of knowledge and truth. We must look things straight in the eye and then each individual may take up his own position in accordance with his feelings. Every position will be understandable, but it must be based on a foundation of truth.

This is a word which must occupy a special place in our soul today. So much has taken place in our time which has puzzled people and which should have shown them that it is necessary to strive for a healthy judgement based on the truth. We have experienced how the yearning for peace only had to make itself felt in the world for it to be shouted down. And we still see how people actually get angry if peace is mentioned in one quarter or another. They are angry, not only if one of the combatants mentions peace, but even if it is mentioned in a neutral quarter.

It remains to be seen whether the world will be capable of sufficient astonishment about these things. Experience so far has been telling, to say the least. In April and May 1915 a large territory was to have been voluntarily ceded, but the offer was rejected so that war could be waged. Since world opinion failed to form an even partially adequate judgement about this event, there seems to be really nothing for it but to expect the worst. We might as well expect the worst, because people seem bent on telling, not the truth, but what suits their purposes. Their thinking is strange and peculiar to a degree. Yet to tackle things properly the right points have to be found.

Let me read you a short passage written by an Italian before the outbreak of the present war, at a time when the Italians were jubilant about the Tripoli conflict—which I am not criticizing. I shall never say anything against the annexation of Tripoli by Italy, for these things are judged differently by those who know what is necessary and possible in the relationships between states and nations. They do not form judgements based on lies and express opinions steeped in all kinds of moralistic virtues. But here we have a man, Prezzolini, who writes about an Italy which pleases him, which has evolved out of an Italy which did not please him. He starts by describing what this Italy had come to, how it had gone down in the world, and he then continues—directly under the impression of the Tripoli conflict:

‘And yet, totally unaware of this economic risorgimento, Italy underwent at the same time the period of depression described above. Foreigners were the first to notice the reawakening. Some Italians had also expressed it, but they were windbags carrying on about the famous and infamous “primacy of Italy”. The book by Fischer, a German, was written in 1899, and that by Bolton-King, an Englishman, in 1901. To date no Italian has published a work comparable to these, even to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of “unification”. The exceptional good sense of these foreigners is notable for, truly, outsiders have neither wanted, nor do they now want, to know anything about modern Italy. Then, as now, people's judgement, or rather prejudgement of Italy amounted to saying: Italy is a land of the past, not the present; she should “rest on her past glory” and not enter into the present. They long for an Italy of archives, museums, hotels for honeymooners and for the amusement of spleen and lung patients—an Italy of organ-grinders, serenades, gondolas—full of ciceroni, shoe-shiners, polyglots and pulcinelli. Though they are delighted to travel nowadays in sleeping cars instead of diligences, they nevertheless regret a little the absence of Calabrese highwaymen with pistol and pointed velvet hat. Oh, the glorious Italian sky, defaced by factory chimneys. Oh, la bella Napoli, defamed by steamships and the unloading thereof; Rome filled with Italian soldiers; such regret for the wonderful days of Papal, Bourbon and Leopoldine Rome! These philanthropic feelings still provide the basis for every Anglo-Saxon and German opinion about us. To show how deeply they run, remember that they are expressed by people of high standing in other directions, such as Gregorovius and Bourget. The Italy who reformed herself and grew fat, the Italy who is seen to carry large banknotes in her purse—this is the Italy who has at last gained a proper self-confidence. We should forgive and understand her if she now reacts by going a little further than she ought in her enthusiasm. Ten years have hardly sufficed for the idea of the future and strength of Italy to pass from those who first saw it, to the populace at large who are now filled and convinced by it. It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’

This is the attitude, my dear friends! ‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’ All this would be worthless, he thinks, to raise up a people. This modern man has no faith in the worth and working of culture and spiritual values!

‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art; neither the people nor the foreigners would ever have been convinced, at least not before the passage of very many years.’

So this man has no confidence in creating spiritual culture in this way.

‘A great and brutal force was needed to smash the illusion and give every last and miserable village square a sense of national solidarity and upward progress.’

To what does he attribute the capacity to achieve what no spiritual culture could produce? He says:

‘It is the war which has served to do this.’

There you have it! This is what people believed. Tripoli was there and it had to be there. Moreover, they also said: War is needed to bring the nation to a point which it was not found necessary to reach by means of spiritual culture.

Indeed, my dear friends, such things speak to us when we place them side by side with another voice which says: We did not want this war; we are innocent lambs who have been taken by surprise. Even from this side comes the cry: To save freedom, to save the small nations, we are forced to go to war. This man continues:

‘We young people born around the year 1880 entered life in the world with the new century. Our land had lost courage. Its intellectual life was at a low ebb.’

These were the people born around the year 1880.

‘Philosophy: positivism. History: sociology. Criticism: historical method, if not even psychiatry.’

This may indeed be said in the land of Lombroso!

‘Hot on the heels of Italy's deliverers came Italy's parasites; not only their sons, our fathers, but also their grandsons, our elder brothers. The heroic tradition of risorgimento was lost; there was no idea to fire the new generation. Among the best, religion had sunk in estimation but had left a vacuum. For the rest it was a habit. Art was reeling in a sensuous and aesthetic frenzy and lacked any basis or faith. From Carducci, whom papa read to the accompaniment of a glass of Tuscan wine and a cheap cigar, they turned to d'Annunzio, the bible of our elder brothers, dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart.’

Yet this marionette—of whom it is said here that he was ‘dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart’—this marionette had made clear to the people at Whitsuntide in 1915 that they needed what no work of the spirit could give them!

When times are grave it is most necessary to make the effort to look straight at the truth, to join forces with the truth. If we do not want to recognize the truth we deviate from what may be good for mankind. Therefore it is necessary to understand that precisely in these times serious words need to be spoken. For we are in a position today in which even one who is seven-eighths blind should see what is happening when the call for peace is shouted down. Someone who believes that you can fight for permanent peace while shouting down the call for peace might, conceivably, hold worthwhile opinions in some other fields; but he cannot be taken seriously with regard to what is going on. If, now that we are faced with this, we cannot commit ourselves to truth, then the prospects for the world are very, very bad indeed.

It is for me truly not a pleasant task to draw attention to much that is going on at present. But when you hear what is said on all sides, you realize the necessity. We must not lose courage, so long as the worst has not yet happened. But the spark of hope is tiny. Much will depend on this tiny spark of hope over the next few days. Much also depends on whether there are still people willing to cry out to the world the utter absurdity of such goings on—as has been done just now, even in the great cities of the world.

The world needs peace and will suffer great privation if peace is not achieved. And it will suffer great privation if credence continues to be given to those who say: We are forced to fight for permanent peace; and if these same people continue to meet every possibility for peace with scorn, however disguised in clever words. But we have reached a point, my dear friends, when even a Lloyd George can be taken for a great man by the widest circles! We may well say: Things have come a very long way indeed!

Yet these things are also only trials to test mankind. They would even be trials if what I permitted myself to express at the end of the Christmas lecture were to happen, namely, if it were to be recorded for all time that, in the Christmas season of the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the Mystery of Golgotha, the call for ‘peace on earth among men and women who are of good will’ was shouted down on the most empty pretexts. If the pretexts are not entirely empty, then they are indeed more sinister still. If this is the case, then it will be necessary to recognize what is really at work in this shouting down of every thought of peace: that it is not even a question of what is said in the periphery, but of quite other things. Then it will be understood that it is justified to say that what happens now is crucial for the fortune or misfortune of Europe.

I cannot go further tonight because of the lateness of the hour. But I did want to impress these words on your heart!

In September and October of this year, we held courses at the Goetheanum in Dornach that attempted to apply the anthroposophical perspective to a wide range of academic subjects and to various areas of practical life. The aim of these college courses was not merely to discuss anthroposophy as such, but rather to bring together experts from a wide range of scientific fields, artists and also practitioners of commercial, industrial and other practical life. was precisely that they should show how the anthroposophical point of view, the anthroposophical way of examining life and the world, can be used to fertilize the most diverse scientific and practical areas of life.

You are aware that today, despite the great triumphs fully recognized by spiritual science, in particular in the field of natural science, the scientist everywhere comes up against certain limits wherever questions arise that cannot be answered at all with the methods and means of observation recognized by official science today. Then one is inclined to say: Well, there we have insurmountable limits to human knowledge, to human cognitive power, and man simply cannot transcend these limits. Anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to show precisely how the research methods, the way of thinking and looking at things, which the more materialistically oriented scientific and life attitude of modern times has brought about, can be fertilized when one moves on to a completely different way of knowing, to a completely different way of looking at things.

And here I touch upon the point that still earns anthroposophy the most opponents and even enemies in the present day. Opposition to anthroposophy does not arise so much from certain logical foundations or from scientifically well-tested objections, but this opposition comes from a quarter that recently - whole books are now appearing, almost every week one, to refute anthroposophy - a licentiate in theology described it in the following way: He said that anthroposophy makes one angry, that it is unpleasant and unsettling. So it is not from logical grounds that a certain antagonism arises, but, one might say, from feeling. And this stems from the fact that anthroposophy does not simply accept the knowledge that has been developed by mankind to date, which is simply structured in such a way that one says: Man has inherited certain abilities for his cognition; he gradually brings these to light through his natural development; through ordinary education he is then further trained to become a useful member of human society - and so on, and so on. With what one acquires on one side, one now also approaches knowledge itself, scientific life. One then tries to develop different methods: methods of observation, methods of experimentation, logical methods, and so on. But if one looks at the whole methodology of today's science, it is based on the assumption that one has once achieved something in the normal in terms of cognitive power, and that is not exceeded. No matter how much one is armed with the microscope, the telescope, the X-ray apparatus and so on, one does not go beyond a certain level of cognitive ability, which is regarded today as the average human being. Scientific progress is made by developing this ordinary method of knowledge in a complicated way or in exact detail, but above all, it is not thought of in the way that anthroposophy does. It starts from what I would call 'intellectual modesty'. And that is precisely where it becomes provocative for people of the present day, who, to a certain extent, do not want to hear anything like that from the outset. But one cannot help but present the facts in an unembellished way.

You see, if a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethe's poetry, all they might know how to do with it is tear it up. When the child is ten years older, they will do something completely different with the volume of Goethe's poetry. They will delve into what is written on the individual pages. Something has grown with the child. The child has matured. The child has brought forth from its depths something that was not there ten years ago. A real, not merely a logical process has taken place. The child has, as it were, become a different being.

Intellectual modesty, I said, must be shown by anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense. At a certain moment in their lives, they must be able to say to themselves: just as a real process takes place with the child between the ages of five and fifteen, and just as soul forces that have not revealed themselves before actually do so after ten years, so can one further develop what the cognitive faculty and the soul forces are in ordinary life. One can move away from the scientific point of view that one once accepts as the normal one; one can undergo a real process in one's knowledge. One can also develop further that which most people today already regard as the end of the cognitive faculty and at most further develop in science logically or through experimental arrangements - one can develop this further by bringing forth further powers from within the soul. And the anthroposophical method is based on this bringing forth of the forces slumbering in the soul. It is based on the fact - I will characterize it quite concretely right away - that one completely subordinates to the will that which otherwise exists as thinking merely in reference to the external world.

So how do we actually think in everyday life? How do we think in science? We think in science in such a way that we abandon ourselves to the external world or to our experiences. We think, so to speak, along the thread of our experiences or of appearances. To a certain extent we apply our will to our thinking, in judgment and in drawing conclusions; but something entirely different arises when that which otherwise lives only instinctively as a thought in man, when that, if I may use the comparison, is taken up by man inwardly in self-education into his hand.

When a person has practised for years the art of placing easily comprehended ideas in his consciousness, when he has brought certain ideas (and I emphasize the term “easily comprehended”) into the centre of his consciousness entirely through his own will and not through stimuli from the outside world, and when he has then, again with the application of his full will, on such inner visualization, inwardly resting, diverting attention from everything else and inwardly resting on a complex of ideas that he himself has placed at the center of his consciousness, he can exercise the powers of the soul in a different way than one does in ordinary life and also in science. And just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it is exercised, so the soul powers acquire a definite power through exercise. They are trained in a very definite direction when one applies these inner methods, these intimate soul methods that I have described, to oneself as a spiritual researcher. I have described these methods in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science' and in other books; there one can read in full detail what I now only want to characterize in principle. I have called meditation and concentration that which the soul undertakes with itself, which is an inward, intimate spiritual-scientific method. But I would like to make it very clear that these things cannot be mastered in a short time. It is rather the case that spiritual scientific research takes no less time than research in clinics, in chemical laboratories or at the observatory. Just as in these fields one must acquire methods through years of practice, so too must one, and with a strong inner power of concentration, greater conscientiousness, still bring the soul faculties out of the soul itself.

And then, when such methods are applied to the soul, the capacity for knowledge expands. Then one certainly comes to see how man can recognize quite different things than he can perceive through his sensory eyes and through the combination of appearances presented by the sensory eyes or the senses in general.

That is one way. It goes through concentration, through the power of imagination, and through this one arrives at inner beholding, at what I have called in my book 'Mysteries of the Soul', the human being's power of beholding, of beholding cognition.

One can also develop the soul powers in another way, indeed one must do so if one really wants to achieve something. We must also train that faculty, which you all know well in its simplest manifestation: attention. We do not relate to external life and internal phenomena merely by surrendering to them passively, but we direct our power of observation, our attention, to something in particular, which I might call, we carve out of our surroundings. Even when we are doing scientific research, we have to focus on something in particular and link the other things to it. Then, when you train this attentiveness through inner will, through the application of the most active soul powers, when you do exercises that make you aware of the power you use when you pay attention to something, when one practices this power of focusing, this ability to concentrate one's soul life on something isolated from life, over and over again, then one makes a remarkable discovery. Then one makes the discovery that one gradually develops more and more the soul power that otherwise only comes to us in what we call interest in the world around us. We pay more or less interest to the one object and less to the other. This reveals a gradation in our soul's behavior towards the inner world. This interest is accompanied by an enormous liveliness; it becomes such a liveliness that one can truly say: it becomes something quite different from what it is in ordinary life and in science. It becomes what one can call: one feels at one with things. The soul's powers gradually permeate the essence of things. And this experience of an increased power of interest goes even further. It now goes so far as to develop a special power that is otherwise only brought to bear in another area of life, but which, through anthroposophical spiritual science, becomes a power of knowledge.

We have arrived at a point where, if we express the realities that are within Anthroposophy and reveal themselves as such, we are quite understandably considered to be amateurs or fantasists when compared to the views of today. What at first is attention in itself is transformed into the power of interest with which one experiences so clearly how the whole human being can be drawn out of the world; how one does not first have to prove and hypothesize whether this or that wave vibration underlies red or blue, but rather one grows with red and blue; where that is further developed, which Goethe so ingeniously developed in the chapter “Sensual-moral effect of color” in his theory of colors, where man really feels his soul life flowing out into the world, so that his cognitive faculty becomes like a flowing out of his soul life into the world phenomena. And his power of knowledge is transformed into that which we otherwise call love in life. Love, through which we become one with another being, is present in ordinary life, I would say only in its beginning; through the soul exercises I have indicated, it becomes such a soul power that recognizes itself in the whole environment.

And so one can say – I can only hint at all this, in my books it is presented in more detail – by developing the imagination on the one hand, and on the other hand the power of attention, the power of interest, the power of love, which underlie the life of the will, new powers of knowledge develop, and the human being experiences an expansion of his knowledge. What is otherwise called the limit of knowledge and what is often described as insurmountable, especially by contemporary researchers, can only be transcended through the development of the soul's inner powers - not by arming the eye with the microscope and telescope or with the X-ray apparatus, but only by training the human soul itself, by developing that power of knowledge that takes us beyond the sensual and the combination of the sensual through the mind. What now reveals itself to the human being is not a second edition of the sensory world, but the real spiritual world. And by awakening in this way what works in him supernaturally as spiritual life – for that is awakened by these two powers that I have mentioned – by awakening this in himself and bringing it to real exactness, in a way that otherwise only mathematics can achieve, he is led beyond the world of the senses, not through speculation about atoms and molecules, but through direct experience and observation of what the senses present. And man comes to recognize that which underlies him as a supersensible world just as his physical body underlies him as a physical thing. Man comes to know the spiritual world.

The anthroposophical spiritual science that emanates from the Goetheanum in Dornach is not to be confused with the many attempts today to study the mind by imitating the methods that are otherwise used in laboratories. There are certain people — just think of spiritualism — who believe that today, through external actions, through external experiments, they can penetrate deeper into the essence of things; they would like to recognize the supersensible through sensory research. That is precisely the essential point: that the supersensible can only be recognized with supersensible powers. And since these supersensible powers are slumbering in man at first - because, as he is once constituted between birth and death, he must first become proficient in the sensory world - he must get to know through the development of supersensible powers that which goes beyond death and birth, that which belonged to him even before he entered into this existence through birth, that which he retains when he passes through the gate of death.

I will just briefly mention how, in fact, when man penetrates to this supersensible faculty of knowledge, regions are opened up that cannot be opened up in any other way, namely, precisely that which is beyond birth and beyond death. Today it is almost entirely left to the faith of the creeds to teach people anything about what is beyond death. But even our language testifies to the fact that we are actually proceeding in a fundamentally one-sided way in this respect. We have the word 'immortality'. Admittedly, it does not come from knowledge, but from faith. But this immortality only wants to speak of the life that is beyond death. Spiritual science shows, by opening up the supersensible worlds, that man was also present in the spiritual world before birth, or let us say before conception. And the fact that we do not have the word “unborn” testifies that we have not recognized a real spiritual science in the present. As soon as man penetrates into the supersensible world through knowledge, not merely through faith, not only the prospect of the immortality of his being opens up to him, but also of the unborn of his being.

I can only briefly touch on all this, because my task today is to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science – which is intended to be modelled on a very exact science, but which is also taken entirely from the human soul: mathematics – can actually lead to cognitive insights into spiritual and supersensible life. We draw mathematics from the inner being, and if one person is familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, thousands or millions of people could come and deny it, he would know the truth of the mathematical field simply by having this content in his consciousness. It is the same with the inner experiences of the supersensible, as they come to light through spiritual science. This spiritual science is already developed in many details today, and, as I indicated in my introduction, it can have a fruitful effect on individual sciences as well as on practical life. Although this spiritual science is already being actively researched in the field of medical therapy, for example, I myself held a course for doctors and medical students in Dornach this spring, in which I tried to show how spiritual scientific observations can lead to a much more rational therapy than the one we have today.

We have also founded institutions for practical life, such as the Futurum in Dornach, which is intended to be a purely practical undertaking and to found an association in which various branches of industry are united in order to make further progress in rational administration than time has brought us, which has led us so much into an economic catastrophe. Everything in practical life today testifies that humanity is at a boundary that must be crossed.

Now, I do not have to spread out today over the other areas in which spiritual science is already proving its fertility through the practice of life itself; I have to speak primarily about the fertilization that education, the pedagogical art, can experience through this spiritual science.

First of all, it should be noted that the knowledge and understanding that is gained in the way I have just described is not the kind that has been brought to humanity in particular in the last three to four centuries. This knowledge of the last three to four centuries, although based on experiment and observation, is essentially knowledge that is developed by the intellect and speaks only to the intellect. It is essentially head knowledge. The knowledge and insight that is gained through anthroposophical spiritual science speaks to the whole person. It not only engages the intellect, but it spreads out in such a way that what can be recognized there also permeates our emotional life. We do not draw a conclusion from our feelings — that would be an ambiguity, a nebulous mysticism. Knowledge is attained through vision. But what is attained in this way then has an effect on the human emotional life, it stimulates the human will, it leads the human being to develop this knowledge, this insight, into their daily life, so that it permeates them like a soul blood, which in turn communicates itself to the physical body's functions, impulses and practical life. And so we can say that the whole human being is affected.

And it is precisely for this reason that this anthroposophical spiritual science, when it permeates the individual, is a foundation for what the educator, the teacher, has as a task in relation to the developing human being. As you know, it is always emphasized today that the art of education must be based on psychology, on the study of the soul. But if we look around at what is considered psychology by our contemporaries, we have to say that the many judgments and discussions that take place show how much it is all just empty words, how little this contemporary science, which has achieved such great triumphs in its research into the external world, can penetrate into the actual knowledge of the human being. This is the peculiarity of anthroposophical spiritual science: it does not acquire this knowledge through external experimental psychology – although nothing should be said against this, because its results only become truly fruitful when they are also fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. What one must penetrate in the science of the soul, if one wants to become an educator, a teacher, one acquires by allowing oneself to be seized by anthroposophical spiritual science. One learns to recognize what actually lives in the human being as body, soul and spirit when one approaches the anthroposophical methods and through them inwardly grasps the human being.

I have already described how anthroposophical spiritual science strives to inwardly grasp what lives in our environment by means of its special methods of knowledge. But we must penetrate to the core of the human being, especially if we want to treat him pedagogically. And here it is a matter of the fact that our time cannot at all build a bridge between the soul-spiritual on the one hand and the physical-bodily on the other. All manner of psychological hypotheses have been put forward, ranging from the interaction of body and soul to 'psychophysical parallelism', in order to explain the mystery that lies before us in the relationship between body and soul or the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But our psychology, because it does not use spiritual scientific methods for research, is not at all so far advanced that it could provide any basis for real pedagogy, for the real art of teaching. And I must point out something here that I only hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' ('On Soul Mysteries'), but which is the result of thirty years of research by me. I would not have allowed myself to express it earlier, what I now have to say and what I hinted at in that book after thirty years of research. It is that today it is commonly believed that mental life is mediated only by the nervous system. The nervous system is regarded as the sole physical basis of human mental life. It is not! It can be shown in detail – and I have also hinted at such details in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' – that only what we call the life of thinking has the nerve sense system as its physical basis and that the actual organ of the life of feeling in man is not the nerve sense system, but directly the rhythmic system, the respiratory system, the blood circulation system. Just as the nervous system underlies the life of thinking, so the rhythmic system underlies the life of feeling in the human being, and the life of will is based on the metabolic system.

These three systems, however, comprise all the inner processes that a person undergoes. The human being is a threefold creature. But we must not imagine that these three parts of the human being - the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic system - are juxtaposed. No, they are interwoven, and we have to separate them from each other in a spiritual-soul-like way if we want to see through the essence of the human being at all; because, of course, the nerves also need to be nourished. The metabolic system also plays a role in the nervous system, and also in the organs of the rhythmic system; but the organs of the rhythmic system serve only the will insofar as the metabolism plays a role in them; whereas insofar as they represent actual rhythmic movements, they serve the emotional life. And again, when our rhythmic being encounters something, when our breathing rhythm, for example, encounters our nervous system indirectly through the cerebral fluid, the interaction between the life of feeling and of imagination arises. In short, the human being is a more complex creature than is usually believed. Even that which one can ultimately have as the correct physical view of a person cannot be achieved with today's scientific methods, but only through inner vision, through growing together with the person himself in such an insight as I have described.

When one grows together with the being of a person in this way, when one sees the soul's activity in the physical body, then the growing person also presents himself in a new light. For someone who does not grasp things with a sober, dry intellect, but who can recognize the world through feeling, the growing child is a wonderful mystery as it reveals more and more of its inner life from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. That which we cannot observe merely with the abstract faculty of knowledge, that which we can only observe if we ourselves can inwardly immerse ourselves in what is revealed on the face, what is revealed in the movements, what is revealed in the development of speech and so on, that can only be truly grasped with a knowledge that inwardly penetrates the outer world.

And such knowledge reaches us not only by grasping our intellect – with this intellect we then want to recognize externally the tasks that we should apply to educate and teach the child – no, anthroposophical spiritual science encompasses the whole human being. And in that it reveals the developing child to the whole human being in the interaction of body, soul and spirit, anthroposophical knowledge permeates our minds and our will — I would say in a way that is as natural as the blood, enlivened by the breath, permeates the human body. We are not only inwardly connected with the child through our intellect, we are also connected through our soul. We are connected through our will, in that we know directly: when we recognize how the child develops, we know what we have to do in this or that year of the child's development. Just as the air sets our blood in motion, just as the organism comes into its functions through what the outside world invigorates in it, just as it is seized by what the outside world accomplishes in it, so our soul and spirit are seized by such a living knowledge as we receive through anthroposophical spiritual science. And then, that which is developing within the human being as his individuality reveals itself to us, and we learn in an inward way to treat this individuality in an educational and teaching way.

Do not expect anthroposophical spiritual science to establish new educational principles. Educational principles, beautiful ones – I am completely serious when I say this – deeply penetrating pedagogical rules: the great educators have found them, and no spiritual science would dare to object to the genius of the great educators of the 18th and 19th centuries. But there is something here that needs to be pointed out very clearly.

You see, people say today, and have been saying for decades, that education should not be about just introducing something to the child; rather, one should develop what is in the child, his or her inner individuality. One should draw everything out of the child. In an abstract form, spiritual science must also say this. But precisely for this reason, spiritual science is misunderstood. If I want to make myself understood, I would like to recall something that I am using for comparison. It was in 1858 when the socialist Proudhon was accused of disrupting society. After the judges had reproached him with various things, he said that it was not at all his aim to disrupt human society, but rather to lead human society towards better conditions. The judges then said: Yes, that is what we all want, we want exactly the same as you. So spiritual science says: We want to develop human individuality. It has also been said in a certain abstract form for a long time that human individuality should be developed. But the point at issue is not to express such a principle in abstract forms; the point at issue is to really see this human individuality developing in a living contemplation, to really grasp the human being inwardly.

And now I would like to illustrate how the developing human being presents himself to spiritual science. First of all, we have clearly definable stages of life in a human being. We have a stage of life that begins at birth and lasts until about the age of seven, when the teeth change. Then, if one is able to observe correctly, a very intense change takes place in the human being – physically, mentally and spiritually. Then the development continues again until about sexual maturity, when a new change takes place. Within these individual stages of life, there are smaller stages. I would like to say that in each of these stages, we can distinguish three smaller stages that can only be properly obtained through observation that penetrates into the inner being of the human being. That is what it is about. Because what we want to know about the human being is at the same time the driving force for pedagogy, in that pedagogy should become art.

First of all, the first phase of life up to the age of seven shows us, above all, how the human being, as a spiritual, soulful and bodily creature, is entirely inclined to be an imitative being. If you study the human being in this phase of life and see how strongly he is predisposed to devote himself entirely to his surroundings, to carry out within himself what is presented to him in his surroundings, then you understand the human being. But one must be able to observe this concretely. One must then see how, for example, in the first two and a quarter years of life - these are, of course, all approximate figures - what occurs in the human being does not yet show itself as a real imitation, how organizing forces prevail inwardly, but But then, as the human being progresses in the third year of life, they show themselves in such a way that the human being becomes more attentive to his fellow human beings with these forces, so to speak directing these forces to what emanates from his fellow human beings. And then, around the fifth year, the time begins when the human being actually becomes an imitative being. And now one must be able to observe in the right intimate way what the relationship is like from person to person, and thus also between educator and child. One must know that this is profound for the whole human development, that this phase of life tends towards imitation.

For those who work with such things, I would say professionally, some of the complaints of a mother or father, for example, are on a par with that. They come and say: my child has stolen! - Well, one asks: Yes, what has the child actually done? He opened the drawer in the cupboard, took out some money, and - I am telling you a specific case - didn't even use this money to buy something for himself, but even distributed what he had bought among his fellow pupils! You have to say: Yes, my dear woman, at this age it cannot be called theft at all, because the child has clearly seen how you go to the cupboard every day and open the drawer; the child has done nothing other than try to do the same. It imitates that. In the first seven years, there is no other way to approach the child than to set an example for the child and let it imitate intimately what is to be brought to the child through education. Therefore, it is of such great importance for the first seven years of life that the educator, the parents, not only act as role models for the child in their outer actions, so that everything can be imitated, but that they also think and feel only what the child can think and feel. There is no boundary between the person with the child in his or her environment and the child itself. Through mysterious powers, our innermost thoughts are also transferred to the child. A person who is moral, who is truthful, makes different movements, has a different expression, walks differently than a person who is untruthful. This is something in the outer appearance, which is completely blurred in later life – but it is there for the child. The child does not merely see the morality of those around it through its ideas, but the child sees, through its movements, not with intellectual knowledge but through a subconscious knowledge that rests deep within, if I may use the paradoxical word, from mysterious hints in the way the person expresses themselves, what it should imitate. There are imponderables not only in nature, but also in human life.

Then, when the child has passed the age of imitation, what the child brings to school comes into play, and here it is particularly important to ensure that teaching and education really do help the developing human being to grow in terms of his or her individuality, humanity and human dignity. We have already made a practical attempt in this direction. The Waldorf School has existed for more than a year in Stuttgart, and there the lessons are taught entirely according to the principles that arise from this anthroposophical worldview and scientific method.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart is not a school of any particular worldview. We are not interested in introducing anthroposophy to children in the same way that we would a religion. Oh no, that is not what we consider to be the main focus. We leave the parents and the children themselves entirely free, because it could not be otherwise in the present situation. Those who wish to be taught in the Protestant faith are taught by the Protestant pastor, those who wish to be taught in the Catholic faith are taught by the Catholic pastor; those who wish to have free religious education in line with their parents' beliefs or their own will receive such education from us. We cannot help the fact that the number of the latter - but not by our will, but in accordance with the current circumstances - is overwhelmingly large, especially in the Waldorf School. We have no interest in making the Waldorf school a school of direct world view, but we want to let what the anthroposophical knowledge gives flow into the art of education, into the practice of this educational art. How we do it with the child, not what we bring to the child, that is what matters to us.

And so we see that, as the child passes the change of teeth and crosses a significant point in life, the power of imitation continues to have an effect into the seventh or eighth year. The power of imitation continues to have an effect until about the age of eight. It is particularly strong in the child during this time, which is an element of will in the human being.

When a child starts school, we should not focus on the intellectual side of things, but rather take the whole person into account. I would like to explain this in relation to something specific. We take this into account in Waldorf schools. We don't start by teaching children to write by teaching them the letters of the alphabet. These letters, as they are written today, actually only speak to the intellect. They have become conventional signs. The head has to be strained on one side. We therefore teach writing by starting from drawing or even from painting visible forms. We first introduce the child to something that is artistic and then develop the forms of the letters from the artistic, from drawing, from painting. It is not so important to go back to the study of primitive peoples and their writing, which has developed in a similar way. Rather, one can trace the individual letters back to what one can make of them in terms of painting and drawing. But the essential thing is that one methodically starts from that which takes hold of the whole person, which is not just to be thought about, but where the will comes to expression. In what the child accomplishes through painting, the whole human being lives, so to speak, the whole human being becomes one with what the child can create. Then, on the one hand, what should interest the head can also be developed from what engages the whole person.

So we start from that which initially affects the child's will. And even what is expressed in an intellectualistic way in writing lessons, we first develop out of the will. Then the soul is particularly involved. The child feels something by first developing the form, and then letting the forms merge into the existing signs. Only then do we develop reading more out of what writing has become. So that, as I said, we appeal to the whole person, not just to the head. And it becomes clear when we carry out something like this, what a difference it makes whether you simply teach people from the point of view of the current external social life in that to which they have no reference, or bring them to that which you extract from their inner whole person, which is inherent in them.

During this time from the age of seven to sexual maturity, we see how the child's inner development is not focused on imitation – which continues to play a role until after the age of eight with the particular application of the will – but we now gradually see a completely different force entering the child's life. This is what I would call the natural sense of authority. This is something that is perhaps more or less mentioned today, but it is not properly considered. Just as a plant must have its growth forces if it is to develop flowers at a certain time and in a certain way, so the child must develop an elementary sense of authority within itself from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, because this belongs to its physical, mental and spiritual growth forces. It must rely on the teacher and educator, and it must accept the things that it then believes, that then approach it, that become the content of its feeling, its will, it must accept them, just as it in imitation, now it must accept them on the basis that it sees them in the behavior of the teacher, that it hears them expressed by the educator, and that the child looks up to its educator in such a way that what lives in the educator is a guiding force for it. This is not something that one can hope for through anything else, let us say in a more free-spirited time than today, which one is supposed to long for. No, one cannot replace what simply grows up with us through this elementary sense of authority, through devotion to the educator or instructor, with anything else. And throughout one's entire life, it has an enormous significance whether, between the ages of seven and fourteen, one has been at the side of teachers or educators in relation to whom one has developed a natural sense of authority.

This touches on a point where the materialistic view goes too far astray, for example when it says: after all, what does the individuality of the teacher do in its effect on the child! We should teach the child primarily through observation; we should lead it to think and feel for itself. I need hardly say that in some methods this has been reduced to the absurdity that we should only bring to the child what it already understands, so that it can analyze it in its own observations. I would like to draw attention to the following: In this phase of life, which I am now talking about, it is of particular importance what we accept on authority, what we take in out of a sense of authority, even if we do not immediately understand it, and that we do not just acquire what is tangible. For just as willpower underlies the imitation instinct in the first seven years of life, so between the seventh year and the year of sexual maturity everything that is memorized underlies the child's expressions. The child wants to memorize things under the influence of the sense of authority. And precisely what is said against the memory-based appropriation shows that, basically, all possible life practices are built on theories today, without taking the whole of human life into account.

Those who want to trace everything back to intuition fail to take two things into account: firstly, there are very broad areas of the world that cannot be made vivid. These are the realms of the beautiful; but above all, they are the moral and religious realms. Those who want to base everything on intuition do not take into account the fact that the most valuable thing, without which man cannot be, the moral and religious and its impulses, cannot be brought to man intuitively - especially not in these years of life - but that it must take hold of man supersensibly. In these years of life, when it is time, it can only do so through a sense of authority. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is this. If you look at the whole of human life, not just a period of life in theory, then you know what it means when you are thirty-five or forty years old and look back on something you experienced in childhood, assuming it without understanding it at the time, because you said to yourself: the person who lives next to you as a teacher knows, it must be so. You accept it. You are in much older decades – it comes up again. Now you are mature enough to understand it. It has become a force of life. It is a wonderful thing in human life when you see something emerging from the depths of the human soul, for which you are ripe in later human life, but which has already been implanted in youth. It is a remedy against growing old; it is a life force. One has an enormous amount of what one has absorbed in childhood.

It is not a matter of demanding something out of some prejudice, of taking something on the authority of someone else, or of accepting something literally on mere authority, but it is a matter of demanding this for the sake of human salvation. Why do people today grow old so quickly? Because they have no life forces within them. We must know in detail what forces we must implant in the child if we want to see these forces emerge in a rejuvenating way in the later decades of life.

I will now give another example. Anyone who has a good understanding of how children play in the first years of life, up to around the age of five, and who pleasantly arranges their play according to the child's individuality, prepares something in the child that will in turn be expressed in much later life. To do this, one must understand human life in its totality. The botanist looks at the plant in its totality. What today wants to be “psychology” only ever looks at the moment. Anyone who observes a person at around the ages of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight – or a little earlier – when they are supposed to find their way into life experience, find a relationship with life practice, become a skillful person, a purposeful person, anyone who can be properly and accurately observed, it can be seen how, in childhood play — between birth and about five years of age — the nature of the playing has announced the way in which, in one's twenties, the person finds their way into life as a practical person, as a skillful, purposeful person. In earliest childhood we bring forth what later comes as a flower, I might say at the root of development. But this must be understood from such an inner knowledge as anthroposophy offers, which delves into human nature. This must be recognized by observing the whole human being. We must, so to speak, if we want to be teachers and educators, feel the whole burden of the human being on us. We must feel what we can learn from each individual, what we can find in the child.

And so we know that up to the age of nine, a child cannot yet distinguish between subject and object in the right way. The outer world merges with the inner. Therefore, in these years, only that which lives, I would say, more in the form of fantasy, in images, should be brought to the child – so [should] everything [be designed] that one wants to bring as teaching in these years. Observation of plants, simple natural science, history can only be taught to the child from the ninth year onwards. Physical or historical facts that are not biographical but concern the context of historical epochs can only be taught to children after the age of twelve because only then can they be built upon something related in the child's nature. And again, one should not stick to the abstract principle of developing individuality, but one must really be able to observe this individuality from week to week.

This has proved to be a fruitful method in Waldorf schools and must be so by its very nature. When the teacher is imbued and enkindled by all that can be awakened in his soul and will, he enters into a quite different relationship with his pupils. I will again make this clear by means of an example. It is not only the rough line that extends from the educator to the child or from the teacher to the child, which is the result of the external materialistic way of observing, but there are always imponderables at play. Let us assume that the child is to be taught the idea of immortality at a suitable age. Now this idea of immortality can be very easily conveyed in pictures, and up to the age of nine one should actually teach quite pictorially. Everything should be transformed into pictures. But if you first develop the picture with your mind, if you proceed abstractly in developing the picture, then you do not stand in the picture. For example, you can say to a child: Look at a butterfly chrysalis; the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis. Just as the butterfly visibly crawls out of the butterfly chrysalis here, so the human being's immortal soul escapes from the body. But if I have first created this image from my inner abstraction, if I am not present myself, if I am only adjusting everything for the child, I am not teaching the child anything. It is a peculiar secret that when one regards the whole of nature as spiritualized, as is natural in spiritual science, one does not merely adjust the image, but knows: What higher level than immortality is not conceived by my intellect but is modeled on things themselves; for example, the butterfly struggling out of its chrysalis is an image presented by nature itself. I believe in what I tell the child. I am of the same faith and conviction that I wish to instill in the child. Anyone who is observant can see that it makes a completely different impression on the child if I teach it a belief that I can believe in myself, that I do not merely present to the child intellectually and have stated because I am so clever and the child is still so stupid.

This shows what imponderables are at play. And I would like to mention one more thing. During the time at primary school, the situation is such that, initially, up to about the age of nine, what remains is the tendency to imitate what the predominant will is. But then something occurs for the child that teaches it to distinguish itself from its environment. Anyone who is really able to observe children knows that it is only between the ages of nine and ten that the child really begins to distinguish between subject and object, between itself and its environment. Everything must be organized with this in mind. But one would look at many things in life differently than one does, and in particular shape them differently than one does, if one were to see that in the same phase of life in which the child between the ages of nine and ten really learns to distinguish between its surroundings, in this phase of life it is indispensable for the whole moral life of the human being in the future that he can attach himself with the highest respect and with the highest sense of authority to someone who is his teacher or educator.

If a child crosses this Rubicon between the ages of nine and ten without this feeling, it will have a deficiency in its whole life and can later, at best with great effort, conquer from life itself what should be transmitted to the child in a natural way at this point in life. Therefore, we should organize our education and teaching in such a way that, especially in the class where the child crosses the Rubicon between the ninth and tenth year, we stand before the child in such a way that we really have something to offer the child through our own inner morality, through what we have in the way of inner truthfulness, of inner soul content, we can really be something for the child, that we do not just act as a model for it, that everything we say to it is felt by it as the truth. And one must establish in it the feeling that must exist in social life between the maturing child and the adult and the old person. The fact that this child goes through its reverence at this point in life between the ages of nine and ten is also the basis of what moral religious education is. Developing intellectuality too early, not taking into account the fact that the will must be influenced by images – especially from primary school onwards – and that one must not immediately penetrate into the abstract of writing and reading , nor does such an understanding of the human being provide those feelings and sensations that become useful when we want to teach the child moral maxims, ethical principles, when we want to instill religious feelings in it. They do not take effect later, nor do they work through a sense of authority, if we are not able to use the individual predisposition of the whole human being from the age of seven, for example, from the age of seven.

And so we can follow the development of the child in a very real way. Teachers and educators become pedagogical artists when they allow the knowledge they can gain about the human being through anthroposophical spiritual science to take effect in them. We do not want to create new, abstract educational principles, but we do believe that the human being's entire personality is stimulated by what anthroposophy can give as a spiritual-soul breath of life. Just as blood invigorates the organism as a matter of course, so spiritual science should invigorate those whose profession it is to educate and teach in such a way that they truly become one with the child and education and teaching become a matter of course. We would like those who enter the gates of their class to do so with such an attitude before the children in the Waldorf school.

Not because we want to add our two cents in every possible field, we also talk about pedagogical art, we also cultivate pedagogical art, but because we have to believe from our insights that a new fertilization is actually also necessary there. The phenomena of life have led to such terrible times that they demand a new fertilization. Not out of some foolish attitude or ideology, or because it wants to agitate for something, but out of the realization of the true needs of our time, anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect on the art of education. It wants to understand and feel correctly that which must underlie all real education and all real teaching. A true sense of this can be summarized in the words with which I want to conclude today, because I believe that if anthroposophy shows that it has an understanding for these words, the most inner, truest understanding, one will also not deny it its calling to speak into the pedagogical art, into the science of education. She does not want this out of some revolutionary sentiment, she wants this out of the needs of the time, and she wants this out of the great truths of humanity, which lie in the fact that one says: Oh, in the hand of the educator, in the hand of the teacher, the future of humanity, the near future, the future of the next generation, is given. The way in which education is provided, the way in which the human being is introduced to life as a becoming, depends, firstly, on the inner harmonious strength with which he can lead his life to his inner satisfaction as an individual. And this determines how he will become a useful and beneficial member of human society. A human being can only fulfill his destiny if, first, he has inner harmony and strength, so that he cannot be complacent about himself, but can always draw from this harmony the strength to work, the strength to be active and to feelings for his surroundings, and if, on the other hand, through his diligence, through his growing together with the needs of the time and the humanity surrounding him, he is a useful, a salutarily effective member of the whole of society. Anthroposophical spiritual science would like to contribute to making him such, for the reason that it believes that one can find a very special understanding of the human being in its way and thereby also a very special art of treating people.

Answering Questions

Rudolf Steiner: First of all, a written question has been received:

In what way should the individuality of the child be influenced by play?

The spiritual science referred to here should be completely realistic and never work as an abstraction and from theories; therefore, those questions that one is otherwise accustomed to answering, I might say, briefly, in a nutshell, cannot be answered briefly for spiritual science. But one can always point to the direction in which spiritual science sees. One will indeed come across it in the play of the youngest children. Play is most characteristic up to about the age of five. Of course children play afterwards too, but then all kinds of other things get mixed into the game, and the game loses the character, completely, I would like to say, of flowing out of the arbitrariness of the inner being. Now, if you want to guide the game appropriately, you will, above all, have to keep an eye out for what is called the child's temperament and other things that are related to temperament. The usual approach is to think that a child who, for example, shows a phlegmatic character should be guided towards the right path by something particularly lively that will excite them; or a child who shows a tendency towards a more introverted nature, such as a melancholic temperament – even if this does not yet appear in the child as such, but it may be there in the disposition – one would like to bring it, in turn, onto the right path by means of something uplifting. This is basically, especially as far as play is concerned, not very well thought out, but on the contrary, it is a matter of trying to study the child's basic character – let us say whether he is a slow or a quick child – and then one should also try to adapt the game to this. So, for a child who is slow, one should try to maintain a slow pace in the game, too, and for a child who is quick, maintain a quick pace in the game and only seek a gradual transition. One should give the child just what flows from his inner being. The worst educational mistakes are made precisely because one thinks that the same should not be treated the same, but the opposite should be treated by the opposite. There is one thing that is always particularly missed.

There are excited children. Of course, you want to calm these excited children down, and you think that if you buy them toys in darker colors, i.e., the less exciting colors, blue and the like, or if you buy them clothes in blue, it would be good for the child. In my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science', I pointed out that this is not the case, that one should make the toys reddish for the excited child, and blue and violet for the careless child, the child who is not lively. Through all these things one will find out what is suitable for the child according to his or her particular individual disposition. There is an extraordinary amount to be considered. You see, it is commonly believed – as I said – that if you have a lively child, too lively a child, you should approach him with dark colors, with blue or violet; but you can see for yourself that if you look at red, at a red surface, and then look away at a white one, you have the tendency to see the so-called complementary color as a subjective form. So it is the complementary color that is inwardly stimulated. The dark colors are inwardly experienced by the light ones. Therefore, when a child is excited, it is good to keep its toys and clothes in light colors so that it is inwardly stimulated. So these things, too, may only be considered in such a way that one penetrates, as it were, into the inner nature of human nature and being.

Then I would like to point out that, as a rule, one does not meet the individuality of a child, or any individuality at all, if one listens too intently to the combinative aspects of the games. Therefore, from his point of view, the humanities scholar must actually consider everything that is a game of combinations, building blocks and the like, to be of lesser value because it is too much like an intellectual exercise for children; on the other hand, anything that brings more life to the child – appropriately varied according to their individuality – will make a particularly good toy. I have long endeavored to somehow bring about a movement for this - but it is so difficult in the present day to inspire people for such little things, seemingly little things - that more would be reintroduced the movable picture books for children. There used to be such picture books, which had pictures and you could pull on strings at the bottom; the pictures moved, whole stories were told by the pictures. This is something that can have a particularly favorable effect on children when it is varied in different ways. On the other hand, anything that remains static and requires a particular combination, such as a building-block story, is not really suitable for children's play, and building blocks are just one manifestation of our materialistic age.

Then I would also like to point out that when it comes to games, it is important to consider how much the child's imagination is involved. You can kill the most beautiful powers in a person by giving them, the developing human, a “beautiful” clown as a boy or a very “beautiful” doll as a girl - after all, they are always hideous from an artistic point of view, but people strive for “beautiful dolls”. The child is best served when the imagination itself is given the greatest possible leeway when it comes to such toys. The child is happiest when it can make a doll or a clown out of a handkerchief that is tied at the top to form a little head. This is something that should be encouraged. The activity of the soul should be able to be set in motion. If we have an eye for temperament, we will get it right, for example, by giving a particularly excited child the most complicated toys possible and a slow child the simplest toys possible, and then, when it comes to handling, proceeding in the same way. What the child does with himself is also of particular importance in later years. You can also tell by letting a child run fast or slow: you let an excited child run fast, and you force a casual child, a child who is lazy in thinking, to run slowly in games and the like. So it is a matter of treating like with like when adapting the game to the individuality, and not with the opposite. This will go a long way for those who really strive in this direction to treat children accordingly.

Question: What about introducing fairy tales to children? If we bring, for example, the image of the butterfly pupa and the butterfly, then we ourselves can believe in it; but if we tell stories such as about the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, stories that we ourselves do not believe in but that make children so happy, does that have a damaging effect on the child, or is it harmless simply as an image?

Rudolf Steiner: It is only a matter of approaching these things in the right way. Of course, there are some things that you have to tell the child in his childlike way, and that will be the case with such things because the image is somewhat far removed from what it is about. But I certainly can't say, for example, that I don't believe in the Easter Bunny! So it's just a matter of finding the way to this belief. You'll forgive me for making such a frank confession. But I don't know of anything, especially in this area, that I couldn't believe if only I could find the way to it. The point is that where things are not as simple as with the butterfly, but more complicated, one must then also undergo a certain more complicated mental process in order to have within oneself the frame of mind that brings this to the child in the right, credible way. There is a meaning to the legend that lives on in certain parts of the Orient that when the Buddha died he was transported to the moon and there he looks down on us in the form of a hare. These things, which are originally contained in the deeper legends, point to the fact that deep natural secrets underlie things.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that today such things are extremely difficult to judge. There is a very famous philosopher of nature, Ernst Mach. Most of you will know the name. Mach claims that it is no longer appropriate to teach children fairy tales or the like; this is not appropriate for such an enlightened time as ours. He assures us that he raised his children without fairy tales and the like. Now Mach has also given us a remarkable example of his inability to get to the human ego at all. Mach once said – I don't want to say anything against his importance in a limited area, where he has it; but we live in a time in which even a person like that can say something like this – he said: self-knowledge is actually something that is very far from a person, because he was once he was quite tired – he was a university professor – walking along, a bus had just come along, so he jumped in and saw a strange man getting in on the other side – as if the bus could have been boarded from the other side as well. He was amazed at that, but he just saw a man approaching, and he thought to himself: What kind of a neglected schoolmaster gets on there! Only then did he realize that there was a mirror on the other side and that he knew so little about his own outward appearance that he had not recognized his reflection. Another time, the same thing happened to him: he was walking along the sidewalk on the street and there was a mirror that was slightly askew, so that he also saw himself there, without immediately recognizing himself.

In this instance, he offers this as a kind of explanation of how little a person actually penetrates to his or her true self. He also regards this self-knowledge only from an entirely external point of view. He rejects fairy tales out of the same impulse. Now, of course, the fact is that, as the fairy tales are widely available today, it seems that one cannot cling to the fairy tales as an adult with inner involvement and a certain inner conviction; but that is something deceptive. If you go back to what is actually experienced, then you come to something completely different.

In this respect, it is truly regrettable that certain beginnings, which, according to spiritual science, have been pending for a long time, have not been developed at all. My old friend Ludwig Laistner had written his two-volume work “The Riddle of the Sphinx” in the 1880s. x», in which he proves what a foolish idea it is to believe that myths, sagas and legends came about because people made up something about clouds, something about the sun, earth and the like; that spring myths came about because the popular imagination invented them. Ludwig Laistner – in this respect his book is, of course, imperfect because he knows nothing of the actual state of mind of earlier people, which was more directed towards the real observation of reality – attributes everything to dreams, but at least he goes so far as to ascribe an experience, even if a dream experience, to every mythical construct.

Now, let us look at the dream. It certainly does not correspond to the kind of knowledge we have during the day, when we approach things through our senses; but anyone who studies the dream life intimately – of course, there is no need to stray to the side of the dream books – will see that the dream life is also an expression of a reality. You dream of a tiled stove, feel the heat radiating on you – and wake up with a pounding heart. The dream has symbolized an inner process for you. You dream – I am telling you real things – of snakes that represent all kinds of things to you; you wake up and have some kind of pain in your intestines; the pain in the intestines is symbolized by the snakes. Every dream is basically indicative of a person's inner processes, and a person's inner processes are in turn an expression of the great soul processes. Truly, the world is much deeper than we think in our so-called enlightened times. And anyone who actually studies fairy tales will find such significant psychology in them, for example, that there is already a way to believe in fairy tales, so that the degree of inner soul mood that I use to teach the child something from “Snow White” or “The Easter Bunny” or “St. Nicholas” is such that it can give rise to the very feeling that has a belief in me. I just have to be inwardly imbued with a relationship to the thing. Take 'St. Nicholas': St. Nicholas is definitely what leads back to the old Germanic Wotan, is actually the same as the old Germanic Wotan, and then we come to the World Tree, and we have a clue in the branch that St. Nicholas carries. It is this branch – the Christmas tree is hardly a hundred and fifty years old, it is still quite young – that gradually grows into the Christmas tree. You can see that there are inner connections everywhere. It is only necessary to find one's way into these inner connections, but it is already possible. And then there are quite different imponderables that extend from the mind of the teacher and educator to that of the child. I am not sure whether my answer quite meets the point of your question; it is something like this.

Question (not recorded verbatim): What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and spiritual science?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in relation to many things, anthroposophical spiritual science is in a position where it has to speak. There are small circles and it forms a large circle; the small circle lies within the large one, but the large one does not lie within the small one, and mostly those people who have the small circles are the most fanatical. Anthroposophy is absolutely the opposite of any fanaticism. Isn't it true that there is a quarter or half truth in psychoanalysis? They try to extract the soul provinces and so on from within, the isolated soul provinces and so on. There is a truth in this, but you have to dig deeper if you want to find the actual basis. So that one can say, as we find with very many views, “Yes, but the other person does not return the same love for us, he finds that because one has to present it more comprehensively, one contradicts him.

I will remind you only of the shining example that is almost always given in most books of psychoanalysis. You will remember it if you have studied the material: a lady is invited to an evening party. The lady of the house – not the invited guest – is supposed to leave for a spa that very evening, leaving the master of the house at home alone. Now the evening party is taking place; the lady of the house is sent off to the spa, the master is back again, the evening party breaks up. The people are walking on the street. Around the corner rushes a droshky – not a car, a droshky. The evening party moves aside to the left and right, but one lady runs in front of the horses, always away, running, running, running, as the others also try and the coachman curses and swears, but she runs until she comes to a stream. She knows very well that you can't drown in the stream – she throws herself into it and is of course now saved. The people don't know what else to do: she is taken back to the house where she just came from, where the master of the house is, in which the lady of the house has just been sent to the bathroom.

Now, a real Freudian – I followed this from the beginning, was very well acquainted with Dr. Breuer, who together with Freud founded psychoanalysis – yes, a real Freudian looks for some hidden complex of the soul: In her seventh or eighth year, when the lady was still a child, she was followed by a horse; this is now a suppressed complex of the soul, and it is coming out. But things are not that simple. I must now apologize, but things are such that the subconscious can sometimes be quite sophisticated. This subconscious has been working in the lady the whole time: if only she could be with the man after the other one has been sent to the bathroom! And now she is getting everything ready – in her conscious mind, of course, the lady would be terribly ashamed to do this, she would not be trusted to do this in her conscious mind, but the deeper, the subconscious mind is much more sophisticated, much worse – she knows how to arrange everything, knows very well in advance: If she runs ahead of the horse and throws herself into the water, she will be carried back into the house because the others know nothing of her real intention.

Sometimes you have to look at completely different things. There is far too much artifice in the method of psychoanalysis today, although it basically points to part of the truth. It is simply an experiment with inadequate means, which is understandable from the materialistic spirit of the age, where one also seeks the spiritual first with materialistic methods.

Many people who are naturally fitted to receive Anthroposophy in our present age will find it necessary to clear away various contradictions that may arise in their minds. In particular, the soul can be brought up against a certain contradiction when it wants to take seriously the memories of such a season of festival as that which includes Christmas and the New Year. When we take these memories seriously, then it becomes clear to us that at the same time as we try to gain knowledge, we must penetrate into the spiritual history of mankind if we are to understand rightly our own spiritual evolution. We need only take a certain thought, and we shall find it on the one hand full of light, while on the other it makes us disturbingly aware of how contradictions, difficulties, must pile up before the soul of anyone who wants to accept in the right sense our anthroposophical knowledge concerning man and the evolution of the world.

Among the varied forms of knowledge that we try to reach through our anthroposophical studies we must of course include knowledge of the Christ; knowledge of the fundamentally important impulse—we have called it the Christ Impulse—which came in at the beginning of our era. And we are bound often to ask ourselves how we can hope to penetrate more effectively, with deepened anthroposophical knowledge, into the course of human evolution, in order to understand the Christ Impulse, than those who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were able to do. Was it not much easier for them to penetrate into this Mystery, whose secret is specially bound up with the evolution of humanity, than it is for us, at this great distance in time? That might be a troublesome question for persons who want to seek an understanding of Christ in the light of Anthroposophy. It might become one of those contradictions which have a depressing effect just when we want to take most earnestly the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge. This contradiction can be cleared away only when we call up before our souls the whole spiritual situation of humanity at the beginning of our era.

If we try—at first without any kind of religious or similar feeling—to enter into the psychic disposition of man at that time, we can make a most peculiar discovery. We can say to ourselves that we will rely on what cannot be denied even by minds most given over to externals; we will draw on the old tradition as found in history, but we will try to penetrate into that part of it which embraces the purest spiritual life. In this way we may hope to lay hold of essential elements in the evolution of humanity. Let us therefore try to enter quite historically into the endeavours that were made by men, say two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and a hundred and fifty years after it, to deepen their thinking in order to understand the secrets, the riddles, of the world. Then we realise that during the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha a change of far-reaching significance occurred in the souls of men with regard to the life of thought. We find that a large part of the civilised world received the influence of that which Greek culture and other deepened forms of thinking had achieved some centuries previously.

When we consider what mankind had accomplished in this way by its own efforts, not in response to any impulse from without, and how much had been attained by men called “sages” in the Stoic sense (and a good many personalities in Roman history were so ranked), then we are bound to say: These conquests in the realm of thought and ideas were made at the beginning of our era, and Western life has not added very much to them. We have gained an endless amount of knowledge concerning the facts of Nature and have been through revolutions in our ways of thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, through which these advances have been made, and with which men have tried to discern the secrets of existence in external, spatial terms, have really developed very little since the beginning of our era. They were all present—even those of which the modern world is so proud, including the idea of evolution—in the souls of that period. What might be called an intellectual laying hold of the world, a life of ideas, had reached a certain summit, and not only among particular individuals, such as the pupils of Socrates a little earlier; it had become popular in a limited sense and had spread widely over Southern Europe and other regions. This deepening of thought is truly astonishing.

An impartial history of philosophy would have to pay special attention to this triumph of human thinking at that time.

But if we now take these highly significant advances in the realm of ideas, and on the other hand the secrets bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha, we become aware of something different. We realise that as the story of the event on Golgotha became known in that age, an immense wrestling of thought with that Mystery occurred. We see how the philosophies of the period, especially the Gnostic philosophy in its much profounder form, struggled to bring all the ideas it had gained to bear on this one purpose. And it is most important to let this struggle work upon us. For we then come to recognise that the struggle was in vain; that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to human understanding as though it were dispersed through far-distant spiritual worlds and would not unveil itself.

Now from the outset I would like to say that when in these lectures I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, I do not wish to invest this term with any colouring drawn from religious traditions or convictions. We shall be concerned purely with objective facts that are fundamental to human evolution, and with what physical and spiritual observation can bring to light. I shall leave aside everything that individual religious creeds have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha and shall look only at what has happened in the course of human evolution. I shall have to say many things which will be made clear and substantiated later on.

In setting the Mystery of Golgotha by the side of the deepest thought of that time, the first thing that strikes one is what I expressed by saying: The nature of this Mystery lies far, far beyond what can be reached by the development of thinking. And the more exactly one studies this contrast, the more is one brought to the following recognition. One can enter deeply into the thought-world that belongs to the beginning of our era; one can try to bring livingly before one's soul what thinking meant for those men of Greece and Rome; one can call up before one's soul the ideas that sprang from their thinking, and then one comes to the feeling: Yes, that was the time when thought underwent an unprecedented deepening. Something happened with thought; it approached the human soul in a quite new way. But if then, after living back into the thought-world of that time and recreating it in one's soul, one brings clairvoyant perception to bear on this experience, then suddenly something surprising emerges. One feels that something is happening far, far away in the spiritual worlds and that the deepening of thought is a consequence of it.

We have already called attention to the fact that behind our world lie other worlds—the Astral, the Devachanic, and the Higher Devachanic. Let us first remind ourselves that these three worlds lie behind our own! Then, if the clairvoyant state of soul is raised to full activity within oneself, the impression is received that neither in the Astral world nor in the lower Devachanic world can a complete explanation of the deepening of thought at that time be found. Only if one could place one's soul in the higher Devachanic world—so says clairvoyant insight—would one experience what it is that streams through the other two worlds and penetrates right down into our physical world.

On this physical plane there is no need to be aware, while steeping oneself in that past world of ideas, of anything told concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. One can leave that quite out of account and ask simply: No matter what happened over there in Palestine, what does external history indicate? It shows that in Greece and Rome an infinite deepening of thought took place. Let us put a circle round this Greek and Roman thought-world and make it an enclosed island, as it were, in our soul-life—an island shut off from everything outside; let us imagine that no report of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached it. Then, when we inwardly contemplate this world, we certainly find there nothing that is known to-day about the Mystery of Golgotha, but we find an infinite deepening of thought which indicates that here in the evolution of humanity something happened which took hold of the innermost being of the soul on the physical plane. We are persuaded that in no previous age and among no other people had thinking ever been like that! However sceptical anyone may be, however little he may care to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, he must admit one thing—that in this island world that we have enclosed there was a deepening of thought never previously known.

But if one places oneself in this thought-world, and has a clairvoyant faculty in the background, then one feels truly immersed in the individual character of this thought. And then one says to oneself: Yes, as this thinking flowers into idea, with Plato and others, as it passes over into the world we tried to enclose, it has a quality which sets the soul free, which lays hold of the soul and brings it to a loftier view of itself. Whatever else you may apprehend in the external world or in the spiritual world makes you dependent on those worlds; in thinking you take hold of something which lives in you and which you can experience completely. You may draw back from the physical world, you may disbelieve in a spiritual world, you may refuse to know anything about clairvoyant impressions, you may shut out all physical impressions—with thoughts you can live in yourself; in your thinking you lay hold, as it were, of your own being!

But then—and it cannot be otherwise if one enters with clairvoyant perception into this sea of thought, as I might call it—a feeling of the isolation of thought comes over one; a feeling that thought is still only thought; that it lives first of all only in the soul, and that one cannot draw from it the power to go out into a world where the ground of the rest of our being—the ground of what else we are—is to be found. In the very moment when one discerns the grandeur of thought, one discerns also its unreality. Then one can see also how in the surrounding world that one has come to know through clairvoyance, there is fundamentally nothing to sustain thought.

Then why should thought be there at all? The physical world can do nothing but falsify it. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who refuse to ascribe to thought any primal reality of its own, should really prefer to prohibit it. For if the natural world is the only real world, thought can only falsify it. It is only because materialists are illogical that they do not embrace the only theory of cognition that goes with monistic Materialism—the refrain-from-thinking, think-no-more theory. But to anyone who immerses himself with clairvoyant perception in the world of thought there comes this disquieting awareness of the isolation of thought, as though he were standing quite alone with it. And then only one thing remains for him; but it does remain. Something comes towards him, even though it be from a far spiritual distance, separated from him by two worlds; and it becomes apparent—so the clairvoyant soul says to itself—that in this third world lies the true origin, the fountain-head, of that which is in the life of thought. For clairvoyant souls in our time it could be a powerful experience to immerse themselves, alone with their thinking, in the time when thought underwent its deepening; to shut out everything else, including knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect how the thought-content on which we still nourish ourselves came forth in the Graeco-Roman world.

Then one should turn one's gaze to other worlds and feel rising over the Devachanic world a star that belongs to a higher spiritual world; the star from which rays out the power that makes itself felt in the thought world of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Then one feels oneself here on Earth, but carried away from the world of today and plunged into the Graeco-Roman world, with its influence spreading out over other regions at that time, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one lets the spiritual world make its impression on one, there appears again, shining over Devachan, the star (I speak symbolically), or the spiritual Being of whom one says to oneself: Yes, the experience of the isolation of thought, and of the possibility of thought having undergone such a deepening at the beginning of our era—this is a consequence of the rays that shine out from this star in the higher spiritual world. And then comes a feeling which at first knows nothing of the historical tradition of the Mystery of Golgotha but can be expressed thus: Yes, you are there in the Graeco-Roman world of ideas, with all that Plato and others were able to give to the general education of mankind, with what they have imparted to the souls of men—you feel yourself living in the midst of that. And then you wait ... and truly not in vain, for as though deep in the background of spiritual life appears the star which sends forth its rays of power; and you can say that what you have experienced is a result of that power.

This experience can be gone through. And in going through it one has not relied on any kind of tradition, but has quite impartially sought the origin of what took place in the Graeco-Roman world. But one has also had the experience of being separated by three worlds from understanding the root-causes of that Graeco-Roman world.

And then, perhaps, one turns to the men of that time who tried in their own way to understand the change. Even the external scholarship of today has come to recognise that in this period of transition at the beginning of our era some religious-philosophic geniuses lived. And they can best be encountered by looking at Gnosticism. The Gnosis is known in the most varied ways. Externally, remarkably little is really known about it, but from the available documents one can still get an impression of its endless depth. We will speak of it only in so far as it bears on our present considerations.

Above all we can say that the Gnostics had a feeling for what I have just described; that for the causes of what happened in that past epoch one must look to worlds lying infinitely far away in the background. This awareness was passed on to others, and if we are not superficial we can, if we will, see it glimmering through what we may call the theology of Paul, and in many other manifestations also.

Now, anyone who steeps himself in the Gnosis of that period will have great difficulty in understanding it. Our souls are too much affected and infected by the fruits of the materialistic developments of the last few centuries. In tracing back the evolution of the world they are too readily inclined to think in terms of the Kant-Laplace theory of a cosmic nebula, of something quite material. And even those who seek for a more spiritual conception of the world—even they, when they look back to the beginning of time, think of this cosmic nebula or something similar. These modern people, even the most spiritual, feel very happy when they are spared the trouble of discerning the spiritual in the primal beginnings of cosmic evolution. They find it a great relief, these souls of today, when they can say to themselves: “This or that rarefied form of material substance was there to start with, and out of it everything spiritual developed side by side with everything physical.” And so we often find souls who are greatly comforted when they can apply the most materialistic methods of inquiry to the beginning of the cosmos and arrive at the most abstract conception of some kind of gaseous body.

That is why it is so difficult to enter into the thoughts of the Gnosis. For what the Gnosis places at the beginning of the world carries no suggestion of anything at all material. Anyone thoroughly attuned to modern education will perhaps be unable to restrain a slight smile if he is invited to think in the sense of the Gnosis that the world in which he finds himself, the world he explains so beautifully with his Darwinism, bears no relation to a true picture of how the world began! Indeed, he will hardly be able to help smiling when he is asked to think that the origin of the world resides in that cosmic Being who is beyond all concepts, not to be reached by any of the means that are applied nowadays to explaining the world. In the primal Divine Father—says the Gnosis—lies the ground of the world, and only in what proceeds from Him do we find something to which the soul can struggle through if it turns away from all material conceptions and searches a little for its own innermost depth. And this is Silence: the eternal Silence in which there is neither space nor time, but silence only.

It was to this duality of the primal Father and the Silence preceding time and space that the Gnostic looked up; and then, from the union of the primal Father with the Silence, as it were, he conceived other existences proceeding: one can equally well call them Worlds or Beings. And from them others, and again others, and again others—and so on through thirty stages. And only at the thirtieth stage did the Gnostic posit a condition prior to our present mentality—a condition so delightfully explained by Darwinism in terms of that mentality. Or, strictly speaking, at the thirty-first stage, for thirty of these existences, which can be called Worlds or Beings, precede our world. “Aeon” is the name generally given to these thirty Beings or Worlds that precede our own.

One can get a clear idea of what is meant by this Aeon-world only by saying to oneself: To the thirty-first stage there belongs not only what your senses perceive as the external world, but also the way in which your thinking as physical man tries to explain the sense world. It is easy enough to come to terms with a spiritual conception of the world if one says: Yes, the external world is certainly Maya, but with thinking we penetrate into a spiritual world—and if one hopes that this thinking really can reach the spiritual world. But according to the Gnostic this is not so; for him, this thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world. So not only sense perception, but human thinking, lies outside the thirty Aeons, who can be looked up to through the stages of spiritual evolution, and who reveal themselves in ever-mounting perfection.

One can easily imagine the smile that comes to a Monist, standing at the summit of his time, if he is asked to believe in thirty preceding worlds—thirty worlds with a content entirely different from anything his thinking can conceive. But that was the view of the Gnostics. And then they asked themselves: How is it with this world?

We will disregard for a while what we have ourselves said about the world in the sense of the early twentieth century. What I am now telling you must not be taken as offering a convincing world-picture. In the Anthroposophy of the twentieth century we have naturally to get beyond the Gnosis, but just now we want to sink ourselves in it.

Why is this surrounding world, including the human faculty of thinking about it, shut off from the thirty Aeons? We must look, said the Gnostic, to the lowest but still purely spiritual Aeon. And there we find the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She had evolved in a spiritual way through the twenty-nine stages, and in the spiritual world she looked up to the highest Aeon through the ranks of spiritual Beings or Worlds. But one day, one cosmic day, it became evident, to her that if she was to maintain a free vision into the spiritual world of the Aeons, she had to separate something from herself. And she separated from herself that which existed in her as desire. And this desire, being no longer present in the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, now wanders through the realms of space and permeates everything that comes into being in the realms of space. Desire does not live only in sense perception, but also in human thinking, and in the longing that looks back to the spiritual world; but always as something cast out into the souls of men. As an image, but as an image of the Divine Sophia cast out from her, lives this desire, Achamod, thrown out into the world and permeating it.

If you look into yourself, without raising yourself into spiritual worlds, you look into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because this world is filled with desire, it cannot disclose within itself that which is revealed by looking out into the world of the Aeons. Far, far away in the world of the Aeons—so thought the Gnosis—the pure spirituality of the Aeons engenders what the Gnostics called the Son of the Father-God, and also what they called the pure Holy Spirit. So we have here another generation, as it were, another evolutionary line, different from that which led to the Divine Sophia. As in the propagation of physical life the sexes are separate, so in the progression of the Aeons another stream took its origin from a very high level in the spiritual world: the stream of the Son and the Holy Spirit stemming from the Father. So in the world of Aeons there was one stream leading to the Divine Sophia and another to the Son and the Holy Spirit. If one rises through the Aeons, one comes eventually to an Aeon from whom there arose on the one hand the succession leading to the Divine Sophia, and on the other the succession leading to the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then we ascend to the Father-God and the Divine Silence.

Because the human soul is shut off with Achamod in the material world, it has in the sense of the Gnosis a longing for the spiritual world, and above all for the Divine Sophia, from whom it is separated through being filled with Achamod. This feeling of being separated from the Divine, of not being within the Divine—this feeling is actually experienced, according to the Gnostic, as the material world. And the Gnostic sees originating from the divine-spiritual world, but bound up with Achamod, what one might call (to borrow a Greek word) the Demiurgos, the cosmic Architect.

This Demiurgos is the real arch-creator and sustainer of that which is permeated with Achamod and the material. The souls of men are woven into his world. But they are imbued also with longing for the Divine Sophia. As though in the far distance of the Aeon-world appear the Son and the Holy Spirit in their pure divine spirituality, but they appear only to someone who has—in the sense of the Gnosis—raised himself above everything in which is embodied Achamod, the desire that pervades space.

Why is there this longing in the souls that have been drawn into the world of Achamod? Why, after their separation from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for it? The Gnostics also asked themselves these questions, and they said: Achamod was cast out from the Divine Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, but before Achamod had completely become this material world, where men now live, there came to her something like a brief raying-out of light from the Son of God; and then immediately the light vanished again. For the Gnostic this was an important concept: that Achamod—the same Achamod that lives in the souls of men—had been granted in the primal remote past a glimpse of Divine light, which had then immediately disappeared. But the memory of it lives on today in human souls, however deeply enmeshed in the material world the soul may be. “I live in the world of Achamod, the material world”, such a soul might have said. “I am surrounded with a sheath drawn from the material world, but when I sink into my inner being, a memory comes to life within me. The element that holds me bound to the material world longs after the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; for the being of Achamod, which lives in me, was once illuminated by a. ray from the Son of God, who dwells in the world of the Aeons.”

We should try to picture clearly to ourselves such a soul as this, a disciple of the Gnosis. There were such souls: they are not a hypothetical invention. Anyone who studies history with understanding will come to realise through the external documents that many souls of this kind lived in that period.

. We need to see clearly why there are such strong objections nowadays to what I have been saying. What will a thoroughly level-headed man of today have to say about the Gnosis? We have already had to listen to the view that the theology of Paul gives an impression of rabbinical subtleties, far too intricate for a sensible Monist to concern himself with—a Monist who looks out proudly over the world and draws it all together with the simple concept of evolution or with the still simpler concept of energy, and says: “Now at last we have grown up; we have acquired the ideas which give us a picture of the world based on energy, and we look back at these children, these poor dear children, who centuries ago built up the Gnosis out of childishness—they imagined all sorts of spirits, thirty Aeons! That is what the human soul does in its time of nursery play. The grown-up soul of today, with its far-reaching Monism, has left such fancies far behind. We must look back indulgently at these Gnostic infantilisms—they are really charming!”

Such is the prevailing mood today, and it is not easily teachable. One might say to it: Yes, if a Gnostic, with his soul born out of the Gnosis, were to stand before you, he might also take the liberty of expressing his outlook, somewhat like this: “I understand very well how you have become so proud and arrogant, with your ideas of evolution and energy, but this is because your thinking has become so crude and simple and primitive that you are satisfied with your nebulae and your entirely abstract concepts. You say the words ‘evolution’ and ‘energy’ and think you have got something, but you are blind to the finer spiritual life that seeks its way up into that which rises through thirty stages above anything you have.”

But for us the antithesis mentioned at the beginning of this lecture becomes all the sharper. We see on the one hand our own time, with its quite crude and primitive concepts, and on the other the Gnosis. And we have seen how the Gnosis employs endlessly complicated concepts—thirty Aeons—in order to find in the course of evolution the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find in the soul the longing for the Divine Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

Then we ask ourselves: Is it not from the deepening of thought in the Graeco-Roman world that we have gained what we have carried so splendidly far in our thoughts about energy and evolution? And in this Gnosis, with its complicated ideas, so unsympathetic to the present day, are we not looking at something quite strange? Are not these colossal contrasts? Indeed they are. And the contradiction, lying like a weight on the soul, becomes even greater if we reflect on what was said about clairvoyant souls: that they can transpose themselves into the thought-world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star, of which we have spoken. And mingled everywhere with this deepening of Greek thought we find that other deepening which the Gnosis exemplifies. Yet when we look at this with the aid of what Anthroposophy should give us today, and are yet powerless to understand what the star should signify, separated as we are from it by three worlds—and if we ask the Gnostics: Have you understood what happened at that time in the historical evolution of humanity? ... then, standing on the ground of Anthroposophy, we cannot take the answer from the Gnostics, for it could never satisfy us; it would throw no light on what is shown to the clairvoyant soul.

It is not my wish that you should treat our considerations today as offering an explanation of anything. The more you feel that what I have told you is not an explanation; the more you feel that I have put before you contradiction after contradiction and have shown you only one occult experience, the perception of the star, the better will you have understood me for today. I would wish you to see clearly that at the beginning of our era there appeared in the world something which influenced human understanding and was yet far, far from being understood; I would like you to feel that the period at the beginning of our era was a great riddle. I want you to feel that in human evolution there happened something which seemed at first like a deepening of thought, or a discovery of thought; and that the root causes of this are a profound enigma. You must seek in hidden worlds for that which appeared in the Maya of the physical sense-world as a deepening of Graeco-Roman thought. And it is not an explanation of what we have heard, but the setting out of a riddle, that I wished to give you today. We will continue tomorrow.

Anyone called on to look after a very young child—either as a parent or in any other capacity of child care—will experience the great responsibility this task involves. Such people feel morally obligated to lay the best foundations for the child’s future development. Therefore it grieves me deeply that our Waldorf school in Stuttgart can accept only children who have reached the official school age, and it would give me the greatest satisfaction if we could take in the younger children as well. In addition to other difficulties, our goal of opening a nursery has been thwarted by a lack of funds, as happened with so many other anthroposophic activities. This continual shortage of money leaves us with at least the hope that, if we can win support from the general public, we will eventually be able to build a nursery class as an integral part of our Waldorf school.

Very young children are the least accessible to us. The gates to the soul life are absolutely closed to the outer world, and outer influences cannot touch it. Those who take care of infants of this age are powerless when they struggle and cry; these children do what they want. Thus, observant adults must accept the fact that the will of children is beyond their control—even during later stages and occasionally the latest stages of life.

You may know that early in 1894, well before publishing other anthroposophic works, I published Die Philosophie der Freiheit [Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path]. This book was intended to give the world a true assessment of the human quality that develops, within the social context, the impulse toward individual freedom. If you accept its message—the matter of freedom, on the one hand, and destiny, on the other—you can see that it is relevant even to a baby.

If you listen to what lives in the human heart, you find that real human happiness on earth depends on the awareness of human freedom, an appreciation of human values, and a feeling for human dignity. Anthroposophy shows us that—apart from what a person may have developed even before birth or conception while still in the spiritual world and apart from what one will meet again after death—the very purpose of earthly incarnation involves enlivening the impulse toward freedom. This impulse depends completely on plunging into an earthly body. This freedom can be realized only during physical incarnation; we can attain freedom only while living on earth, and when we enter other worlds, we can take with us only the degree of freedom we have attained here on earth.

If you approach young children with such feelings (and feelings are the most potent source for those engaged in the art of education), this question will always be present in your mind as you take charge of an infant: What must I do to enable this child to develop the fullest consciousness of human freedom at maturity? And with this question, a new truth begins to dawn. The outer conditions of life are already clearly pointing at it, and, through anthroposophic insight, it can be understood with inner certainty. It is the fact that, despite one’s freedom, each person has a destiny, or to use the Eastern term, karma.

Let us imagine that, later in life, a man meets a person he has known before, and that this person has a profound influence on the life of this man. Perhaps such people might even begin a partnership for life. At first it may seem to them as if their meeting were simply chance. But when they look back over the years of their lives—even with no knowledge of spiritual science—this man may well discover the strange fact that, during the years before this meeting, he had unconsciously taken numerous steps that eventually led to this other person. Though at first it appeared to be mere chance, hindsight revealed an inherent pattern and underlying plan. Looking back over his life, Goethe’s old friend Nobel spoke these meaningful words from the depths of his soul: “If, in later years, we survey our early life, everything seems to fall into a definite pattern; everything fits together.” Since our will is woven into all our actions, we can see everywhere how destiny confronts us in the events of life. One could quote many others who, through observing ordinary life, reached the same conclusion. When we look at life’s external events, we find confirmation of the hidden truths of karma.

Anyone in charge of young children—especially those who work in children’s homes—who is aware of the activity of destiny, must ask, Have I been specifically chosen for the important task of guiding and educating these children? And other questions follow: What must I do to eliminate as far as possible my personal self, so I can leave those in my care unburdened by my subjective nature? How do I act so I do not interfere with a child’s destiny? And, above all, How can I best educate a child toward human freedom? If you come to understand what happens in a child between birth and the change of teeth—during the first seven years—you will realize how vulnerable young children are and how deeply we can affect their being (I will speak later about the period of embryonic development). The change of teeth represents a decisive turning point in the life of children. Close observation reveals that, after the seventh year, an entirely new interrelationship emerges between the child’s thinking, feeling, and willing.

We have become accustomed to applying certain concepts gained from observing physical processes to the life of the human being. For instance, in natural processes, when we notice the sudden emergence of heat that was imperceptible in a previous state and had not been introduced externally, we say that latent heat is being released. Just as latent heat can be set free by material processes, similarly, soul and spirit forces are set free after the change of teeth, forces that have thus far been bound up with the organism and instrumental for its growth. Freed from processes of growth and nourishment, however, these forces go to work in the child’s soul; they are transformed into soul forces.

Natural science today forms abstract concepts about the relationship between body and soul; theories are invented to explain the effects of one on the other. One speaks of a psychophysical parallelism and so on. Instead of making exact observations, one philosophizes. But all this leads nowhere. If you want to fathom the secrets of human nature, you have to observe it with the same precision used to observe the phenomena of outer nature. Then you will discover that, after approximately the seventh year, forces that were engaged in building the physical organism of the child are now transformed into soul forces that will determine a child’s relationship to the outer world.

If we wish to find out what the soul of a child is like between birth and the seventh year, we must observe the child’s development from the seventh year on. Then, in the child’s soul, we can see the very same forces that were active in the physical organization. And we will find that the hidden, organic activity that molds and shapes the child’s brain and the rest of the organism has a very special significance. Through birth, or conception, children carry into their physical organization what they brought from the worlds of soul and spirit. When children are fully engaged in building up the physical organs in this way, they must be left free to do so, and consequently the doors leading to the outer world remain closed. It is essential that we refrain from interfering in our clumsy ways with these inner activities in children, because they are doing what they have to do and are thus inaccessible to outer will forces.

We must also realize, however, that despite the preoccupation of children with their processes of growth, everything we do around them nevertheless makes deep and distinct impressions on them. I will go into further detail later, but we must not forget that everything at work within the child’s soul after the seventh year was directly involved in the process of building organs up to that age. This means that until the seventh year, the impressions coming from the outer world directly affect their physical constitution—the lungs, stomach, liver, and other organs. In children at this age, the soul has not yet become free of the physical organization, where it is still actively engaged. Because of this, all of the impressions they receive from us through our general conduct have a decisive effect on their future constitution of health or illness.

You came expecting to learn something about our educational principles, but it is the practical application of these principles that is most important. What really matters in education are the mood and soul attitude that teachers carry in their hearts toward the human being. We cannot truly serve the art of education unless we approach the growing human being with real insight. One could even say that teachers are free to approach subjects in their own individual ways, since, in any event, they must prepare their subject material according to what they have learned from life. The important thing is that teachers each carry within themselves a true picture of the human being; if this picture is present to their inner eyes, they will do the right thing, although outwardly each teacher may act in very different ways.

I visited parallel classes as the spiritual guide of the Waldorf school (the large numbers already require parallel classes), and when I saw how the teachers each treat the same subject in very individual ways, I never object or insist that they all follow the same set courses. Even when two versions of the same subject appear contradictory externally, each may nevertheless be correct in its own way. In fact, if one teacher were to copy another, the results could be entirely wrong. There is a good reason that our school is called the “Free Waldorf School.” This is not just because of our independence from the state system, but the name very much reflects the atmosphere of freedom that pervades its entire makeup.

During the previous lecture I pointed out that a suprasensory contemplation of the human being will reveal to us—apart from the physical body—another, finer body that we call the ether body, or body of formative forces. This ether body provides not just the forces that sustain nourishment and growth; it is also the source of memory faculties and the ability to create mental images and ideas. It does not become an independent entity until the change of teeth, and its birth is similar to the way the physical body is born from one’s mother. This means that, until the change of teeth, the forces of the ether body work entirely in the processes of a child’s organic growth, whereas after that time—while still remaining active in this realm to a great extent—those forces partially withdraw from those activities. The released forces of the ether body then begin to work in the soul realm of mental images and memory, as well as in many other nuances of a child’s soul life.

The change of teeth is a unique event. The forces needed to push out the second teeth existed prior to this event, but now they are no longer needed. Once the second teeth have appeared, this particular activity of the ether body becomes redundant. The final activity of pushing out the second teeth is an external manifestation of the sort of activity that is happening within a child’s organism. At the end of the first seven-year period, most of these ether forces are released to flow into a child’s soul and spiritual nature.

One can recognize these seven-year periods throughout the entire human life, and each again can be seen in three clearly differentiated shorter periods. If we observe the gradual withdrawal of some of these ether forces until approximately the seventh year, we see how during the first two and a half years after physical birth the ether body frees itself from the head region; in the next two and a half years, it frees itself from the chest region; and finally, until the change of teeth, it frees itself from the child’s metabolic-limb system. Thus we see three phases in the gradual withdrawal of ether forces. And we clearly recognize how, while the ether body is still connected with the head region, a child rejects any intentional influence coming from outside.

What children learn during this first two-and-a-half-year period is extremely important for their whole life. They do so through an incoming activity and from what they have brought with them from prenatal existence. Just consider how children learn to speak and walk during this first short period. These are two human faculties that are closely connected with maintaining self-confidence, both from a personal and a social point of view. These two important faculties are developed while the ether body is still engaged in shaping the brain and radiating into the rest of the organism. If these ether forces radiate too strongly into the organism and disturb the infant’s delicate processes of metabolism, breathing, and blood circulation—if they become too powerful within a baby’s organism—scarlet fever and similar childhood illnesses may occur even at this young age. Basically, because of all this activity within children at this stage, they remain inaccessible to conscious approaches directed by the will and demands from the outside. They want to be left to work on their own organism.

Being inaccessible to the outer world during the first two and a half years is one significant factor. Another is the fact that children have a fine, instinctive perception for everything going on around them, especially what is happening in people with whom they have established a certain rapport. Anyone caring for such a child naturally belongs to this category. I am not speaking of a child’s ability to use the senses as an older person does. It is not a matter of what children see with their eyes, but a general perception of the most intimate kind that takes in what is happening in their surroundings. This perception, however, excludes anything that seeks to impose itself from outside, against which children will defend themselves instinctively during those first two and a half years.

To get a better understanding of children’s susceptibility to the outer world when their sensory perceptions are still deeply immersed in feeling, it may help to look at animals, the creatures immediately below the human being, because they show a similar, acute sensitivity toward the outer world. I am not contradicting what I said about senility in a previous lecture; one must simply observe accurately. Animals are especially sensitive to their surroundings. I do not know whether those who have come from England or other European countries have ever heard of the horses that, a few years before the war, created a sensation by appearing to do simple mathematical calculations. In Berlin, there was the famous horse of Mr. von Osten, and in Elberfeld there were several horses that could do numeric calculations. Well, I cannot say anything about the Elberfeld horses, but I did make the acquaintance of von Osten’s horse in Berlin, and I was able to observe the close relationship between this horse and its master. It is true that the horse stamped its legs—three times three is nine—which, for a horse, is a very respectable achievement.

All kinds of theories were advanced to explain the horse’s reactions to questions from von Osten. There was one university lecturer—a most erudite man—who even wrote a whole book on this horse. He wrote, “Of course the horse cannot calculate, but whenever Mister von Osten says, ‘Three times three,’ he accompanies his words by barely noticeable facial expressions. He sort of mimes, and when he pronounces the word nine, the horse is capable of observing these facial expressions and stamps accordingly.” His was certainly a learned treatise. He continued, “I myself was unable to detect the miming on von Osten’s face and therefore I cannot guarantee that my theory is correct. But it must have been there and the horse was able to observe it.” It seems to me that the author merely states that he, a university lecturer, considered the horse more capable of observation than he was himself. In my opinion, the crucial point was von Osten’s procedure, for he had large pockets filled with sweets that he shoved into the horse’s mouth, thus maintaining an uninterrupted flow of sensation and gratification. The result was an intimate relationship between master and horse. Everything was immersed in a feeling of sympathy, which made the horse extremely receptive, in keeping with its animal nature, to all that came from its master, even his thoughts and shades of feeling, but hardly the play of mysterious expressions on his face. The processes of calculation going on in von Osten’s mind were transferred to the horse via the taste of sweetness. This phenomenon does not become any less interesting when interpreted this way, but it can teach us a great deal about the relationship of living beings. It cannot be explained hypothetically by observing the facial expressions a horse can detect, though not a university lecturer.

During the first two and a half years, children have a similar rapport with the mother or with others they are closely connected with as long as their attitude and conduct make this possible. Then children become perfect mimics and imitators. This imposes a moral duty on adults to be worthy of such imitation, which is far less comfortable then exerting one’s will on children. Children take in all that we do, such as the ways we act and move. They are equally susceptible to our feelings and thoughts. They imitate us, and even if this is not outwardly noticeable, they nevertheless do this by developing tendencies for imitation that, through their organic soul forces, they press down into the physical organism. Therefore, education during these first two and a half years should be confined to the self-education of the adults in charge, who should think, feel, and act in a way that, when perceived by children, will cause them no harm. Fundamentally, the stage of imitation continues until the change of teeth, and thus children will be strongly influenced by their environment later on as well.

The following example may demonstrate this. Two disconsolate parents once came to me, saying, “Our child has always been good, but now she has stolen money.” Was this really true? At a superficial glance, yes, for she had taken money out of the cupboard where it was always kept by her mother. The child then bought sweets with the money and even gave some to other children. I reassured the parents that their child had not stolen at all, but that she had merely imitated her mother, who regularly took money from the cupboard to buy things. There was never any intention of stealing; this concept did not yet exist in the child’s mind. But children are imitators and will do what mother does. If we wish to avoid confusion, it is up to adults to realize this and act differently in front of the children.

Neither will children learn to walk through our efforts to make them stand and do all sorts of movements. Such instruction belongs in gym much later on. If we intervene by making children stand and walk prematurely, we may do irreparable damage to the nerve processes, which may persist for their whole life. If children see adults in an upright position, as imitator they try to raise themselves to the same position when the time comes. We must always see the human being during the initial stages as an imitator and arrange our child rearing accordingly.

This can certainly be very trying at times, and we all know that there are babies who seem to be yelling all day and, apart from the ear-splitting noise, inflict all kinds of other provocations on the adult. True, there are situations that have to be dealt with, even drastically, to avoid serious damage by a child. But such measures do not really belong to the field of education. Admittedly, it is hard to put up with a screaming child, but when we behave as described, our conduct gradually sinks into the deeper layers of a child’s soul and spiritual forces (which are still closely connected to organic processes) and eventually brings about more positive results.

If we observe small children without preconceived ideas, we find that their screaming and other unpleasant features come from their physical organization. Although the inherent forces in the behavior of intense crying remain with the child, the habit of crying will gradually pass. Such forces are very intense. If we influence the child correctly by setting the proper example and acting morally, the forces behind a baby’s crying will reveal themselves as intensely moral forces in later life. A strong morality later in adult life is an expression of those same forces that lived in the intense crying of a young child. On the other hand, if those close to a child have an immoral attitude—even if only in thoughts—these forces will reappear later as intensely immoral forces. And we must be careful not to harm the development of children while they are learning to speak. This easily happens when we make them say words we choose; this, too, is an imposition of our will on the child. It is best to speak naturally in front of children (as long as we speak in a moral way) so that they have opportunities to hear us. In this way, children find their own way into language.

Now you can appreciate the real point of what has been said so far—that we must not be tempted by a false kind of instinct to make baby talk for the child’s benefit. This is not an instinct but something we may have acquired through misguided customs. Nurses or others dealing with young children should never speak to them in an artificial or childish way. We really do a great wrong when we change our normal way of speaking to “suit” a child, for children always want to imitate us as we really are, not as we pretend to be. They reject anything that approaches them as an expression of another person’s will, such as childish and naive baby talk. Children have to put up with it, but they have a deep inner resentment toward such an approach. The effects of such well-intended folly is so farreaching that it may come to light in later years as a weakened digestion. When an older person is diagnosed as having a weak digestion, it might be nothing but the result of the wrong approach by an over-zealous but misguided nurse during that person’s early childhood.

These are the main points regarding the first third of the first seven-year period, and they need to be kept in mind.

At the age of two and a half, the head organization in children is developed far enough so that the forces of the ether body that have been working on it may be released. This gradual withdrawal continues into the area of the chest until about the fifth year, when breathing and blood circulation have also reached a certain stage of completion. Thus, by the time children learn to speak and walk, the formative forces released from the head (now acting now as soul and spiritual forces) join those being released in the chest region. This change can be recognized externally by the emergence of an exceptionally vivid memory and wonderful imagination, which children develop between two and a half and five. However, you must take great care when children develop these two faculties, since they are instrumental in building the soul. Children continue to live by imitation, and therefore we should not attempt to make them remember things we choose. At this stage it is best to leave the evolving forces of memory alone, allowing children to remember whatever they please. We should never give them memory exercises of any kind, otherwise, through ignorance, we might be responsible for consequences we can see only when viewing the entire course of human life.

Sometimes we meet people who, around the age of forty or later, complain of shooting pains or rheumatism. This may certainly have various causes, but if we carry our research far enough, we may find that the rheumatism was caused by a premature overloading of the memory during early childhood. The pattern of life is indeed very complex, and only by trying to recognize its many hidden links can we engender the love that is the true basis of growing human beings.

Whatever one’s attitude may be, as educators we must respond to the imagination and fantasy of children, which tries to express itself outwardly when they play with toys or join in games with other children. The urge to play between the ages of two and a half and five is really just the externalized activity of a child’s power of fantasy. And if we have the necessary ability of observation for such matters, we can foretell a great deal about the future soul life of children merely by watching them play. The way young children play provides a clear indication of their potential gifts and faculties in later life. The most important thing now is to meet their inborn urge to play with the right toys. People in the past responded to this need according to their own particular understanding.

Perhaps this also happened in the West, but at one time a regular epidemic spread throughout Central Europe of giving children boxes of building bricks, especially at Christmas. From separate cubic and quadrilateral stones, children were expected to build miniature architectural monstrosities. This sort of thing has a far-reaching effect on the development of imagination in children, since it leads to an atomistic, materialistic attitude—a mentality that always wants to put bits and pieces together to form a whole. In dealing with practical life, it is far better to give full freedom to children’s flexible and living powers of imagination than to nurture intellectual capacities that, in turn, encourage the atomistic nature of modern thinking. Imagination in children represents the very forces that have just liberated themselves from performing similar creative work within the physical formation of the brain. This is why we must avoid, as much as possible, forcing these powers of imagination into rigid, finished forms.

Imagine two nurses who are looking after a child between two and a half and five years of age. One of them—she may be very fond of the little girl in her charge—gives her a “beautiful” doll, one that has not only painted cheeks and real hair but eyes that close and a moveable head. I believe there are dolls that can even speak. Well, she gives this doll to the little girl, but since it is finished in every detail, there is nothing left for the child’s imagination to create, and her yearning for creative flexibility remains unsatisfied. It is as if its forces of imagination were put into a straitjacket. The other nurse, who has a little more understanding for the inner needs of the child, takes an old piece of cloth that is of no use for anything else. She winds a thread around its upper end until something resembling a head appears. She may even ask the little girl to paint two black dots on the face or perhaps more, for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Now, because the child’s imagination is stimulated, because she can create instead of having to put up with fixed and finished forms, the child experiences a far more lively and intimate response than she does toward the so-called beautiful doll. Toys, as much as possible, should leave the power of fantasy free in children. And since intellect is not the same as fantasy or imagination, the activity of assembling many parts is really not in harmony with the type of fantasy that is characteristic of children at this age.

Anything that evokes an inner feeling of liveliness and flexibility is always suitable for young children. For example, there are children’s books with cut-outs and nicely colored figures that can be moved by pulling strings attached below, so they will do all kinds of things, such as embracing or thrashing each other. These always stimulate children to invent whole stories, and thus they are very wholesome objects of play. Similarly, games with other children should not be too formal but should leave plenty of scope for children’s imagination.

All these suggestions spring from a knowledge of the human being, based on reality and allowing educators to acquire the necessary understanding, especially in terms of the practical side of life.

When children approach the fifth year, the ether forces of the body—which have thus far been building the breathing and the blood circulation—now become available for other activities. Likewise, up to the change of teeth, ether forces will struggle free and, after completing their task within the metabolic-limb system, become redundant. At that time, new spiritual soul forces gradually awaken and emerge fully after the seventh year (we will study this in more detail later). However, these forces already shine with a dawning light in this third and final period, which concludes the first seven-year period of human life.

When ether forces from the chest area reappear as soul and spiritual forces, children are becoming amenable to exhortations and to a sense of authority. Previously, unable to understand what they should or should not do, they could only imitate, but now, little by little, they begin to listen to and believe what adults say. Only toward the fifth year is it possible to awaken a sense of right and wrong in children. We can educate children correctly only by realizing that, during this first seven-year period until the change of teeth, children live by imitation, and only gradually do they develop imagination and memory and a first belief in what adults say.

Faith in the adult induces a feeling of authority, especially for teachers with whom children have a very close relationship. However, at this stage, children are too young for any formal education. It pains me to know that the sixth year has been fixed as the official school age. Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.

In the next few days I will show you how we try to treat our children without inflicting harm on them when they enter the Waldorf school. Tomorrow I will begin by introducing you to the Waldorf school, though only by speaking of it.

From what I have said as to the way. in which we should teach the child about Nature, about plant and animal, I think you will have realized that the aim of the Waldorf School is to adapt the curriculum exactly to the needs of the child's development at the successive stages of growth. I have already spoken of the significant turning-point occurring between the ninth and tenth years. Only now does the child begin to realize himself as an individual apart from the world. Before this age there is in his life of thought and feeling no sense of separation between himself and the phenomena of the outer world. Up to the ninth year, therefore, we must speak of plants, animals, mountains, rivers and so on in the language of fairy-tales, appealing above all to the child's fantasy. We must make him feel as if his own being were speaking to him from the outer world, from plant, mountain and spring.

If you will bear in mind the way in which after this age we lead on into botany and zoology, you will realize that the aim of the teaching is to bring the child into a true relationship with the world around him. He learns to know the plants in their connection with the earth and studies them all from this point of view. The earth becomes a living being who brings forth the plants, just as the living human head brings forth hair, only of course the forms contained in the earth, the plants, have a much richer life and variety. Such a relationship with the plant world and with the whole earth is of great value to the well-being of the child in body and soul. If we teach him to see man as a synthesis of the animal species spread over the earth, we help to bring him into a true relationship with other living beings standing below him in the scale of creation. Until the age of eleven or twelve, the mainspring of all Nature-study should be the relationship of the human being to the world.

Then comes the age when for the first time we may draw the child's attention to processes going on in the outer world independently of man. Between the eleventh and twelfth years, and not until then, we may begin to teach about the minerals and rocks. The plants as they grow out of the earth are in this sense related to stone and mineral. Earlier teaching about the mineral kingdom in any other form than this injures the child's mobility of soul. That which has no relationship with man is mineral. We should only begin to deal with the mineral kingdom when the child has found his own relation to the two kingdoms of nature which are nearest to him, when in thought and feeling he has grasped the life of the plants and his will has been strengthened by a true conception of the animals.

What applies to the minerals applies equally to physics and chemistry, and to all so-called causal connections in history and geography, in short, to all processes that must be studied as only indirectly related to the human being in the sense of which I spoke yesterday. The teaching of all this should be postponed until the period lying between the eleventh and twelfth years.

The right age for a child to begin his school life is when he gets his second teeth, i.e. at about the seventh year. Until then, school is not really the place for him. If we have to take a child before this age, all kinds of compromises are necessary. I will however, explain certain basic principles When the child first comes to school, we teach him in such a way that as yet he makes no distinction or separation between himself and the world at large. Between the ninth and tenth years we begin to awaken a living understanding through a knowledge of the plants, and to strengthen his will through a knowledge of the animals. In mineralogy, physics, and chemistry we can only work through the intellect, and then as a necessary counterbalance art must be introduced. (I shall be speaking more of this in tomorrow's lecture.) From the eleventh or twelfth year onwards we shall find that the child is able to form a rational, intellectual conception of cause and effect and this must now be elaborated by physics and chemistry. These processes which should gradually lead into the study of astronomy must not however be explained to the child before he has reached the age of eleven or twelve. If we describe simple chemical processes—combustion for instance—before this age, our descriptions must be purely pictorial and imaginative. Abstract reasoning from cause to effect should not be introduced until the child is between eleven and twelve years of age. The less we speak of causality before this time the stronger, the more vital and rich will the soul become; if, on the other hand, we are constantly speaking of causality to a younger child, dead concepts and even dead feelings will pass with a withering effect into his soul.

The aim of the Waldorf School has been on the one hand to base the whole curriculum upon the actual nature of the human being; thus we include in the curriculum all that answers to the needs of the child at each of the different life-periods. On the other hand, we strive to enable the child to take his rightful part in the social life of the world.

To achieve this we must pass on from physics and chemistry to various forms of practical work when the child has reached the fourteenth and fifteenth years. In the classes for children of this age, therefore, we have introduced hand-spinning and weaving, for these things are an aid to an intelligent understanding of practical life. It is good for boys and girls to know the principles of spinning and weaving, even of factory-spinning. They should also have some knowledge of elementary technical chemistry, of the preparation and manufacture of colours and the like.

During their school life children ought to acquire really practical ideas of their environment. The affairs of ordinary life often remain quite incomprehensible to many people to-day because the teaching they receive at school does not lead over at the right moment to the practical activities of life and of the world in general. In a certain direction this is bound to injure the whole development of the soul. Think for a moment of the sensitiveness of the human body to some element in the air, for instance, which the organism cannot assimilate. In the social life of the world of course conditions are not quite the same. In social life we are forced to put up with many incongruities, but we can adapt ourselves if at the right age we have learnt in some measure to understand them.

Just think how many people nowadays get into a train without having the least idea of the principles governing its motion, its mechanism. They see a railway every day and have absolutely no notion of the machinery of an engine! This means that they are surrounded on all hands by inventions and creations of the human mind with which they have no contact at all. It is the beginning of unsocial life simply to accept these creations and inventions of the mind of man without understanding them. At the Waldorf School therefore when the children are fourteen or fifteen years old, we begin to give instruction in matters that play a role in practical life. This age of adolescence is nowadays regarded from a very limited, one-sided point of view. The truth is that at puberty the human being opens out to the world. Hitherto he has lived chiefly within himself, but he is now ready to understand his fellow-men and the social life of the world. Hence to concentrate before puberty on all that relates man to Nature is to act in accordance with true principles of human development, but at the age of fourteen or fifteen the children must be made acquainted with the achievements of the human mind. This will enable them to understand and find their right place in social life. If educationalists had followed this principle some sixty or seventy years ago, the so-called “Social Movement” of to-day would have taken a quite different form in Europe and America. Tremendous progress has been made in technical and commercial efficiency during the last sixty or seventy years. Great progress has been made in technical skill, national trade has become world trade, and finally a world-economy has arisen from national economies. In the last sixty or seventy years the outer configuration of social life has entirely changed, yet our mode of education has continued as if nothing had happened. We have utterly neglected to acquaint our children with the practical affairs of the world at the time when this should be done, namely, at the age of fourteen or fifteen.

Nevertheless at the Waldorf School we are not so narrow-minded as to look down in any way on higher classical education, for in many respects it is extremely beneficial; we prepare pupils whose parents desire it, or who desire it themselves, both for a higher classical education and for final certificates and diplomas. But we do not forget how necessary it is for our age to understand the reason that induced the Greeks, whose one purpose in education was to serve the ends of practical life, not to spend all their time learning Egyptian, a language belonging to the far past. On the other hand, we make a special point of familiarizing our boys, and girls too, with a world not of the present but of the past. What wonder that human beings as a rule have so little understanding of how to live in the world of the present.

The world's destiny has grown beyond man's control simply because education has not kept pace with the changing conditions of social life. In the Waldorf School we try to realize that it is indeed possible to develop the human being to full manhood and to help him to find his true place in the ranks of humanity.

Our endeavour to develop the child in such a way that he may later reveal the qualities of full manhood and on the other hand be able to find his true place in the world is more especially furthered by the way in which languages are taught.

So far as the mother-tongue is concerned, of course, the teaching is adapted to the age of the child; it is given in the form I have already described in connection with other lessons. An outstanding feature of the Waldorf School, however, is that we begin to teach the child two foreign languages, French and English, directly he comes to school, at the age of six or seven. By this means we endeavour to give our children something that will be more and more necessary in the future for the purposes of practical life. To understand the purely human aspect of the teaching of languages we must remember that the faculty of speech is rooted in the very depths of man's being. The mother-tongue is so deeply rooted in the breathing system, the blood circulation, and in the configuration of the vascular system, that the child is affected not only in spirit and soul, but in spirit, soul and body by the way in which this mother-tongue comes to expression within him. We must realize however that the forces of languages in the world permeate man and bring the human element to expression in quite different ways. In the case of primitive languages this is quite obvious; that it is also true of the more civilized languages often escapes recognition.

Now amongst European languages there is one that proceeds purely from the element of feeling. Although in the course of time intellectualism has tinged the element of pure feeling, feeling is nevertheless the basis of this particular language; hence the elements of intellect and will are less firmly implanted in the human being through the language itself. By a study of other languages then, the elements of will and intellect must be unfolded. Again, we have a language that emanates particularly from the element of plastic fantasy, which, so to say, pictures things in its notation of sounds. Because this is so, the child acquires an innately plastic, innately formative power as he learns to speak. Another language in civilized Europe is rooted chiefly in the element of will. Its very cadences, the structure of its vowels and consonants reveal that this is so. When people speak, it is as though they were sending back waves of the sea along the out-breathed air. The element of will is living in this language.

Other languages call forth in man to a greater extent the elements of feeling, music, or imagination. In short each different language is related to the human being in a particular way.

You will say that I ought to name these various languages, but I purposely avoid doing so, because we have not reached a point of being able to face the civilized world so objectively that we can bear the whole impersonal truth of these things!

From what I have said about the character of the different languages, you will realize that the effects produced on the nature of man by one particular “genius of speech” must be balanced by the effects of another, if, that is to say, our aim is really a human and not a specialized, racial development of man. This is the reason why at the Waldorf School we begin with three languages, even in the case of the very youngest children; a great deal of time, moreover, is devoted to this subject.

It is good to begin teaching foreign languages at this early age, because up to the point lying between the ninth and tenth years the child still bears within him something of the quality characteristic of the first period of life, from birth to the time of the change of teeth. During these years the child is pre-eminently an imitative being. He learns his mother-tongue wholly by imitation. Without any claim whatever being made on the intellect, the child imitates the language spoken around him, and learns at the same time not only the outer sounds and tones of speech, but also the inner, musical, soul element of the language. His first language is acquired—if I may be allowed the expression—as a finer kind of habit which passes into the depths of his whole being.

When the child comes to school after the time of the change of teeth, the teaching of languages appeals more to the soul and less strongly to the bodily nature. Nevertheless, up to the ages of nine and ten the child still brings with him a sufficient faculty of fantasy and imitation to enable us to mould the teaching of a language in such a way that it will be absorbed by his whole being, not merely by the forces of soul and spirit.

This is why it is of such far-reaching importance not to let the first three years of school-life slip by without any instruction in foreign languages. On purely educational principles we begin to teach foreign languages in the Waldorf School directly the child enters the elementary classes.

I need hardly say that the teaching of languages is closely adapted to the different ages. In our days men's thinking, so far as realities are concerned, has become chaotic. They imagine themselves firmly rooted in reality because of their materialism, but in point of fact they are theorists. Those who flatter themselves on being practical men of the world are eminently theorists; they get it into their heads that something or other is right, without ever having tested it in practical life. And so, especially in education and teaching, they fall with an utterly impracticable radicalism into the opposite extreme when anything has been found wrong. It has been realized that when the old method of teaching languages, especially Latin and Greek, is based entirely on grammar and rules of syntax, the lessons tend to become mechanical and abstract. And so exactly the opposite principle has been introduced simply because people cannot think consistently. They see that something is wrong and fall into the other extreme, imagining that this will put it right. The consequence is that they now work on the principle of teaching no grammar at all. This again is irrational, for it means nothing else than that in some particular branch of knowledge the human being is left at the stage of mere consciousness and not allowed to advance to self-consciousness. Between the ninth and tenth years the child passes from the stage of consciousness to that of self-consciousness. He distinguishes himself from the world.

This is the age when we can begin gradually of course to teach the rules of grammar and syntax, for the child is now reaching a point where he thinks not only about the world, but about himself as well. To think about oneself means, so far as speech is concerned, to be able not merely to speak instinctively, but to apply rational rules in speech. It is nonsense, therefore, to teach languages without grammar of any kind. If we avoid all rules, we cannot impart to the child the requisite inner firmness for his tasks in life. But it is all-important to bear in mind that the child only begins to pass from consciousness to self-consciousness between the ages of nine and ten. To teach grammar before this age, therefore, is absolutely irrational.

We must know when the change occurs between the ninth and tenth years in order to lead over gradually from an instinctive acquiring of language to the rational element of grammar. This applies to the mother-tongue as well. Real injury is done to the child's soul if he is crammed with rules of grammar or syntax before this eventful moment in his life. Previously the teaching must appeal to instinct and habit through his faculty of imitation. It is the task of speech to inaugurate self-consciousness between the ninth and tenth years and generally speaking the principle of self-consciousness comes to light in grammar and syntax. This will show you why at the Waldorf School we make use of the two or three preceding years in order to introduce the teaching of languages at the right age and in accordance with the laws of human development.

You see now how Waldorf School education aims, little by little, at enabling the teacher to read, not in a book and not according to the rules of some educational system, but in the human being himself. The Waldorf School teacher must learn to read man—the most wonderful document in all the world. What he gains from this reading grows into deep enthusiasm for teaching and education. For only that which is contained in the book of the world can stimulate the all-round activity of body, soul and spirit that is necessary in the teacher. All other study, all other books and reading, should be a means of enabling the teacher ultimately to read the great book of the world. If he can do this he will teach with the necessary enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone can generate the force and energy that bring life into a classroom.

The principle of the “universal human,” which I have described in its application to the different branches of teaching, is expressed in Waldorf School education in that this school does not in any sense promulgate any particular philosophy or religious conviction. In this connection it has of course been absolutely essential, above all in an art of education derived from Anthroposophy, to remove from the Waldorf School any criticism as to its being an “anthroposophical school.” That certainly it cannot be. New efforts must constantly be made to avoid falling into anthroposophical bias, shall I say, on account of possible over-enthusiasm or of honest conviction on the part of the teachers. The conviction of course is there in the Waldorf teachers since they are anthroposophists. But the fundamental principle of the Waldorf School education is the human being himself, not the human being as an adherent of any particular philosophy.

And so, with the various religious bodies in mind, we were willing to come to a compromise demanded by the times and in the early days to confine our attention to principles and methods to be adopted in a “universal human” education. To begin with, all religious instruction was left in the hands of the pastors of the various denominations, Catholic teaching to Catholic Priests, Protestant teaching to Protestant Priests. But a great many pupils in the Waldorf School are “dissenters,” as we say in Central Europe, that is to say they are children who would receive no religious instruction at all if this were limited to Catholic and Protestant teaching. The Waldorf School was originally founded for the children of working-class people in connection with a certain business, although for a long time now it has been a school for all classes of the community, and for this reason a large majority of the children belonged to no religious confession. As often happens in schools in Central Europe, these children were being taught nothing in the way of religion, and so for their sake we have introduced a so-called “free religious instruction.” We make no attempt to introduce theoretical Anthroposophy into the School. Such a thing would be quite wrong. Anthroposophy has been given for grown-up people; one speaks of Anthroposophy to grown-up people, and its ideas and conceptions are therefore clothed in a form suitable for them. Simply to take what is destined for grown-up people in anthroposophical literature and introduce that would have been to distort the whole principle of Waldorf School education. In the case of children who have been handed over to us for free religious instruction, the whole point has been to recognize from their age what should be given to them in the way of religious instruction.

Let me repeat that the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School—and a certain ritual is connected with it—is not in any sense an attempt to introduce an anthroposophical conception of the world. The ages of the children are always taken into fullest account. As a matter of fact the great majority of the children attend, although we have made it a strict rule only to admit them if their parents wish it. Since the element of pure pedagogy plays an important and essential part in this free religious teaching, which is Christian in the deepest sense, parents who wish their children to be educated in a Christian way, and also according to the Waldorf School principles, send them to us. As I say, the teaching is Christian through and through, and the effect of it is that the whole School is pervaded by a deeply Christian atmosphere. Our religious instruction makes the children realize the significance of all the great Christian Festivals, of the Christmas and Easter Festivals, for instance, much more deeply than is usually the case nowadays. Also the ages of the children must always be taken into account in any teaching connected with religion, for infinite harm is wrought if ideas and conceptions are conveyed prematurely. In the Waldorf School the child is led first of all to a realization of universal Divinity in the world.

You will remember that when the child first comes to school between the ages of seven and ten, we let plants, clouds, springs, and the like, speak their own language. The child's whole environment is living and articulate. From this we can readily lead on to the universal Father-Principle immanent in the world. When the rest of the teaching takes the form I have described, the child is well able to conceive that all things have a divine origin.

And so we form a link with the knowledge of Nature conveyed to the child in the form of fantasy and fairy-tales. Our aim in so doing is to awaken in him first of all a sense of gratitude for everything that happens in the world. Gratitude for what human beings do for us, and also for the gifts vouchsafed by Nature, this is what will guide religious feeling into the right path. To unfold the child's sense of gratitude is of the greatest imaginable significance. It may seem paradoxical, yet it is nevertheless profoundly true that human beings should learn to feel a certain gratitude when the weather is favourable for some undertaking or another. To be capable of gratitude to the Cosmos, even though it can only be in the life of imagination, this will deepen our whole life of feeling in a religious sense. Love for all creation must then be added to this gratitude. And if we lead the child on to the age of nine or ten in the way described, nothing is easier than to reveal in the living world around him qualities he must learn to love. Love for every flower, for sunshine, for rain this again will deepen perception of the world in a religious sense. If gratitude and love have been unfolded in the child before the age of ten, we can then proceed to develop a true sense and understanding of duty. Premature development of the sense of duty by dint of commands and injunctions will never lead to a deeply religious sense. Above all we must instil gratitude and love if we are to lay the foundations of morality and religion.

He who would educate in the sense of true Christianity must realize that before the age of nine or ten it is not possible to convey to the child's soul an understanding of what the Mystery of Golgotha brought into the world or of all that is connected with the personality and divinity of Christ Jesus. The child is exposed to great dangers if we have failed to introduce the principle of universal divinity before this age, and by ‘universal divinity’ I mean the divine Father-Principle. We must show the child how divinity is immanent in all Nature, in all human evolution, how it lives and moves not only in the stones, but in the hearts of other men, in their every act. The child must be taught by the natural authority of the teachers to feel gratitude and love for this ‘universal divinity.’ In this way the basis for a right attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha between the ninth and tenth years is laid down.

Thus it is of such infinite importance to understand the being of man from the aspect of his development in time. Try for a moment to realize what a difference there is if we teach a seven-or-eight-year-old child about the New Testament, or, having first stimulated a consciousness of universal divinity in the whole of Nature, if we wait until he has reached the age of nine or ten before we pass to the New Testament as such. In the latter case right preparation has been made and the Gospels will live in all their super-sensible greatness. If we teach the child too early about the New Testament it will not lay hold of his whole being, but will remain mere phraseology, just so many rigid, barren concepts. The consequent danger is that religious feeling will harden in the child and continue through life in a rigid form instead of in a living form pervaded through and through with feeling for the world. We prepare the child rightly to realize from the ninth and tenth years onwards the glory of Christ Jesus if before this age he has been introduced to the principle of universal Divinity immanent in the whole world.

This then is the aim of the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School to an ever-increasing number of children whose parents wish it. The teaching is based on the purely human element and associated moreover with a certain form of ritual. A service is held every Sunday for the children who are given this free religious instruction, and for those who have left school a service with a different ritual is held. Thus a certain ritual similar in many respects to the Mass but always adapted to the age of the child is associated with the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School.

Now it was very difficult to introduce into this religious instruction the purely human evolutionary principle that it is our aim to unfold in the Waldorf School, for in religious matters to-day people are least of all inclined to relinquish their own point of view. We hear a great deal of talk about a ‘universal human’ religion, but the opinion of almost everyone is influenced by the views of the particular religious body to which he belongs. If we rightly understand die task of humanity in days to come, we shall realize that the free religious teaching that has been inaugurated in the Waldorf School is a true assistance to this task.

Anthroposophy as given to grown-up people is naturally not introduced into the Waldorf School. Rather do we regard it as our task to imbue our teaching with something for which man thirsts and longs: a realization of the Divine, of the Divine in Nature and in human history, arising from a true conception of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This end is also served when the whole teaching has the necessary quality and colouring. I have already said that the teacher must come to a point where all his work is a moral deed, where he regards the lessons themselves as a kind of divine office. This can only be achieved if it is possible to introduce the elements of morality and religion into the school for those who desire it, and we have made this attempt in the religious instruction given at the Waldorf School in so far as social conditions permit to-day. In no sense do we work towards a blind rationalistic Christianity, but towards promoting a true understanding of the Christ Impulse in the evolution of mankind. Our one and only aim is to give the human being something that he still needs, even if all his other teaching has endowed him with the qualities of manhood. Even if this be so, even if full manhood has been unfolded through all the other teachings, a religious deepening is still necessary if the human being is to find a place in the world befitting his inborn spiritual nature. To develop the whole man and deepen him in a religious sense; this we have tried to regard as one of the most essential tasks of Waldorf School education.

Dear friends,

There is something that is always overlooked in this present age, something that has to do with the working, and the wanting to work, of the spiritual world. It is this: that total spiritual activity must include the creative activity to be found in human thought and feeling. What really lies at their foundation has been completely forgotten in this age of materialistic thought; today humankind is fundamentally entirely unaware of it. That is why in this very field a kind of evil mischief is perpetrated throughout our present civilization. You surely know that from every possible center, whatever it may be called, all kinds of instructions go out to people telling how they can enhance their thought power, how their thoughts can become powerful. In this way seeds are strewn in every direction of something that in earlier spiritual life was called—and still is called—“black magic.” Such things are the cause of both soul illnesses and bodily illnesses, and the physician and priest must be aware of them in the course of their work. If one is alert to these things, one already has a clearer perception of the illnesses and symptoms of human soul-life. Moreover one can work to prevent them. This is all of great importance. The intent of instruction about thought power is to give people a power they would otherwise not possess, and this is often used for pernicious reasons. There is every possible kind of instruction today with this intent—for instance, how business executives can be successful in their financial transactions. In this area a tremendous amount of mischief is perpetrated.

And what is at the bottom of it all? These things will simply become worse unless clear knowledge of them is sought precisely in the field of medicine and in the field of theology. For human thinking in recent times, particularly scientific thinking, has come enormously under the influence of materialism. Often today people express their satisfaction over the fact that materialism in science is on the decline, that the tendency everywhere is to try to reach out beyond materialism. But truly this is slight satisfaction for those who see through these things. In the eyes of such people, the scientists or the theologians who want to overcome materialism in a modern manner are much worse than the hard-shell materialists whose assertions gradually become untenable through their very absurdity. And those who talk so glibly about spiritualism, idealism, and the like are strewing sand in people's eyes—and it's going into their own eyes as well.

For what do Driesch¹³ and others do, for instance, when they want to present something that is beyond physical-material events? They use exactly the same thoughts that have been used for hundreds of years to think about the material world alone, thoughts that indeed have no other capacity than to think about the material world alone. These are the thoughts they use to think about something that is supposed to be spiritual. But such thoughts do not have that capacity. For that, one has to go to true spiritual science. That is why such strange things appear and today it is not even noticed that they are strange. A person like Driesch, for instance, recognized officially by the outer world but in reality a dilettante, holds forth to the effect that one must accept the term “psychoid.” Well, if you want to ascribe to something a similarity to something else, that something else must itself be around somewhere. You can't speak of apelike creatures if there are no apes to start with. You can't speak of the “psychoid” if you say there's no such thing as a soul! And this silly nonsense is accepted today as science, honest science, science that is really striving to reach a higher level. These things must be realized. And the individuals in the anthroposophical movement who have had scientific training will be of some value in the evolution of our civilization if they don't allow themselves to be blinded by the flaring-up of will-o'-the-wisps but persist in observing carefully what is now essential to combat materialism.

Therefore the question must be asked: How is it possible for active, creative thinking to arise out of today's passive thinking? How must priests and physicians work so that creative impulses can now flow into the activity of individuals who are led and who want to be led by the spirit? Thoughts that evolve in connection with material processes leave the creative impulse outside in matter itself; the thoughts remain totally passive. That is the peculiar characteristic of our modern thought world, that the thoughts pervading the whole of science are quite passive, inactive, idle. This lack of creative power in our thinking is connected with our education, which has been completely submerged in the current passive science. Today human beings are educated in such a way that they simply are not allowed to think a creative thought—for fear that if they should actually entertain a creative thought they wouldn't be able to keep it objective but would add some subjective quirk to it! These are things that must be faced. But how can we come to creative thoughts? This can only happen if we really develop our knowledge of the human being. Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature they themselves are creative. One must re-create if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking one can only understand the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being.

It is important that we really understand the place humanity has been given in this world. Today therefore, let us put something before our souls as a kind of goal that lies at the end of a long perspective, but that can make our thoughts creative—for it holds the secret for making human thought creative.

Let us think of the universe in its changing and becoming—say in the form of a circle. (Plate VII) We may picture it like this because actually the universe as it evolves through time presents a kind of rhythmic repetition, upward and downward, with respect to many phenomena. Everywhere in the universe we find rhythms like that of day and night: other, greater rhythms that extend from one Ice Age to another, and so forth. If first we confine our inquiry to the rhythm that has the largest intervals for human perception, it will be the so-called Platonic year, which has always played an important role in human thoughts and ideas about the world when these were filled with more wisdom than they are now.

We can come to the Platonic year if we begin by observing the place where the sun rises on the first day of spring, the twenty-first of March of each year. At that moment of time the sun rises at a definite spot in the sky. We can find this spot in some constellation; attention has been given to it through all the ages, for it moves slightly from year to year. If, for instance, in 1923 we had observed this point of spring, its place in the sky in relation to the other stars, and now in 1924 observe it again, we find it is not in the same place; it lies farther back on a line that can be drawn between the constellation of Taurus and the constellation of Pisces. Every year the place where spring begins moves back in the zodiac a little bit in that direction. This means that in the course of time there is a gradual shift through all the constellations of the starry world; it can be seen and recorded. If we now inquire what the sum of all these shifts amounts to, we can see what the distance is from year to year. One year it is here, the next year there, and so on—finally it has come back to the same spot. That means after a certain period of time the place of spring's beginning must again be in the very same spot of the heavens, and for the place of its rising the sun has traveled once around the entire zodiac. When we reckon that up, it happens approximately every 25,920 years. There we have found a rhythm that contains the largest time-interval possible for a human being to perceive—the Platonic cosmic year, which stretches through approximately 25,920 of our ordinary years.

There we have looked out into the distances of the cosmos. In a certain sense we have pushed our thoughts against something from which the numbers we use bounce back. We are pushing with our thoughts against a wall. Thinking can't go any further. Clairvoyance must then come to our aid; that can go further. The whole of evolution takes place in what is encircled by those 25,920 years. And we can very well conceive of this circumference, if you will—which obviously is not a thing of space, but of space-time—we can conceive of it as a kind of cosmic uterine wall. We can think of it as that which surrounds us in farthest cosmic space. (Plate VII, red-yellow)

Now let us go from what envelops us in farthest cosmic space, from the rhythm that has the largest interval of time that we possess, to what appears to us first of all as a small interval, that is, the rhythm of our breathing. Now we find—again, of course, we must use approximate numbers—we find eighteen breaths a minute. If we reckon how many breaths a human being takes in a day, we come to 25,920 breaths a day. We find the same rhythm in the smallest interval, in the human being the microcosm, as in the largest interval, the macrocosm.

Thus the human being lives in a universe whose rhythm is the same as that of the universe itself. But only the human being, not the animal; in just these finer details of knowledge one finally sees the difference between the human and the animal. The essential nature of the human physical body can only be realized if it is related to the Platonic cosmic year; 25,920 years: in that span of time the nature of our physical body is rooted. Take a look in An Outline of Esoteric Science at the tremendous time periods, at first determined otherwise than by time and space as we know them, through the metamorphosis of sun, moon, and earth. Look at all the things that had to be brought together, but not in any quantitative way; then you can begin to understand the present human physical body with all its elements.

And now let us go to the center of the circle, (Plate VII) where we have the 25,920 breaths that, so to speak, place humanity in the center of the cosmic uterus. Now we have reached the ego. For in the breathing—and remember what I said about the breathing, that in the upper human it becomes a finer breathing for our so-called spiritual life—we find the expression of the individual human life on earth. Here, then, we have the ego. Just as we must grasp the connection of our physical body to the large time interval, the Platonic cosmic year, so we must grasp the connection of our ego—which we can feel in every breathing irregularity—to the rhythm of our breathing.

So you see, our life on earth lies between these two things—our own breathing and the cosmic year. Everything that is of any importance for the human ego is ruled by the breath. And the life of our physical body lies within those colossal processes that are ruled by the rhythm of 25,920 years. The activity that takes place in our physical body in accordance with its laws is connected with the large rhythm of the Platonic year in the same way that our ego activity is connected with the rhythm of our breathing. Human life lies in between those two rhythms. Our human life is also enclosed within physical-etheric body and astral body-ego. From a certain point of view we can say that human life on earth lies between physical body-etheric body and astral body-ego; from another point of view, from the divine, cosmic aspect, we can say human life on earth lies between a day's breathing and the Platonic year. A day's breathing is in this sense a totality; it relates to our whole human life.

But now let us consider from the cosmic standpoint what lies between human breathing, that is, the weaving life of the ego, and the course of a Platonic year, that is, the living force out in the macrocosm. As we maintain our rhythm of breathing through an entire day of twenty-four hours, we meet regularly another rhythm, the day-and-night rhythm, which is connected with how the sun stands in relation to the earth. The daily sunrise and sunset as the sun travels over the arch of heaven, the darkening of the sun by the earth, this daily circuit of the sun is what we meet with our breathing rhythm. This is what we encounter in our human day of twenty-four hours.

So let us do some more arithmetic to see how we relate to the world with our breathing, how we relate to the course of a macrocosmic day. We can figure it out in this way: Start from one day; in a year there are 360 days. (It can be approximate.) Now take a human life (again approximate) of seventy-two years, the so-called human life span. And we get 25,920 days. So we have a life of seventy-two years as the normal rhythm into which a human being is placed in this world, and we find it is the same rhythm as that of the Platonic sun year.

So our breathing rhythm is placed into our entire life in the rhythm of 25,920. One day of our life relates to the length of our entire life in the same rhythm as one of our breaths relates to the total number of our breaths during one day. What is it, then, that appears within the seventy-two years, the 25,920 days in the same way that a breath, one inhalation-exhalation, appears within the whole breathing process? What do we find there? First of all we have inbreathing-outbreathing, the first form of the rhythm. Second, as we live our normal human life there is something that we experience 25,920 times. What is that? Sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human life, just as inbreathing and outbreathing are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human day. But now we must ask, what is this rhythm of sleeping and waking? Every time we go to sleep we not only breathe carbon dioxide out, but as physical human beings we breathe our astral body and ego out. When we wake, we breathe them in again. That is a longer inbreathing-outbreathing: it takes twenty-four hours, a whole day. That is a second form of breathing that has the same rhythm. So we have a small breath, our ordinary inhalation-exhalation; and we have a larger breath by which we go out into the world and back, the breath of sleeping-waking.

But let us go further. Let us see how the average human life of seventy-two years fits into the Platonic cosmic year. Let us count the seventy-two years as belonging to one great year, a year consisting of days that are human lives. Let us reckon this great cosmic year in which each single day is a whole human life. Then count the cosmic year also as having 360 days, which would mean 360 human lives. Then we would get 360 human lives x 72 years = 25,920 years: the Platonic year.

What does this figure show us? We begin a life and die. What do we do when we die? When we die, we breathe out more than our astral body and ego from our earthly organism. We also breathe our etheric body out into the universe. I have often indicated how the etheric body is breathed out, spread out into the universe. When we come back to earth again, we breathe our etheric body in again. That is a giant breath. An etheric inbreathing-outbreathing. Mornings we breathe in the astral element, while with our physical breath we breathe in oxygen. With each earth-death we breathe the etheric element out; with each earth-life we breathe the etheric element in.

So there we have the third form of breathing: life and death. If we count life to be our life on earth, and death to be our life between death and a new birth, then we have the largest form of breathing in the cosmic year:

1. Inhalation-exhalation, the smallest breath.
2. Sleeping-waking, a larger breath.
3. Life-death, the largest breath.

Thus we stand first and foremost in the world of the stars. Inwardly, we relate to our ordinary breathing; outwardly, we relate to the Platonic year. In between, we live our human life, and exactly the same rhythm is revealed in this human life itself.

But what comes into this space between the Platonic year and our breathing rhythm? Like a painter who prepares a canvas and then paints on it, let us try painting on the base we have prepared, that is, the rhythms we have found in numbers. With the Platonic year as with smaller time rhythms, especially with the rhythm of the year, we find that continual change goes on in the outer world. Also it is change that we perceive; we perceive it most easily in temperatures: warmth and cold. We need only to think of cold winter and warm summer—here again we could present numbers, but let us take the qualitative aspect of warmth and cold. Human beings live life within this alternation between warmth and cold. In the outer world the alternation is within the element of time; and for so-called nature, changing in a time sequence from one to the other is quite healthful. But human beings cannot do this. We have, in a certain sense, to maintain a normal warmth—or a normal coldness, if you will—within ourselves. We have to develop inner forces by which we save some summer warmth for winter and some winter cold for summer. In other words, we must keep a proper balance within; we must be so continually active in our organism that it maintains a balance between warmth and cold no matter what is happening outside.

There are activities within the human organism of which we are quite unaware. We carry summer within us in winter and winter within us in summer. When it is summer, we carry within us what our organism experienced in the previous winter. We carry winter within us through the beginning of spring until St. John's Day; then the change comes. As autumn approaches, we begin to carry the summer within us, and we keep it until Christmas, until December 21, when the balance shifts again. So we carry in us this continual alternation of warmth and cold. But what are we doing in all this?

When we examine what we are doing, we find something extraordinarily interesting. Let this be the human being (see drawing below).

We realize from simple superficial observation that everything that enters the human being as cold shows the tendency to go to the nerve-sense system. And today we can point out that everything that works as cold, everything of a winter nature, works in the building up of our head, of our nerve-sense organization. Everything of a summer nature, everything that contains warmth, is given over to our metabolic-limb system. If we look at our metabolic-limb system, we can see that we carry within it everything summery. If we look at our nerve-sense functions, we can see that we carry in them everything we receive out of the universe that is wintry. So in our head we always have winter; in our metabolic-limb system we always have summer. And our rhythmic system maintains the balance between the one and the other. Warmth-cold, warmth-cold, metabolic system-head system, with a third system keeping them in balance. Material warmth is only a result of warmth processes, and material cold the result of cold processes. So we find a play of cosmic rhythm in the human organism. We can say that winter in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human nerve-sense system centered in the head. Summer in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human metabolic-limb system.

This way of looking into the human organism is another example of the initiatic medicine of which I spoke when I said it has a beginning in the book¹⁴ that Dr. Wegman worked out with me. The beginning is there for what must more and more become a part of science.

If we climb the rocks where the soil is so constituted that winter plants will grow in it, we come to that part of the outer world that is related to the organization of the human head. Let us suppose that we collect medicinal substances out in the world. We want to make sure that the spiritual forces appearing in an illness that originates in the nerve-sense system will be healed by the spirit in outer nature, so we climb very high in the mountains to find minerals and plants and bring them down for medicines for head illnesses. We are acting out of our creative thinking. It starts our legs moving toward things we must find in the earth that correspond to our medical needs. The right thoughts—and they come out of the cosmos—must impel us all the way to concrete deeds. These thoughts can stir us without our knowledge. People, say, who work in an office—they also have thoughts, at least they sometimes have them—now they are impelled by some instinct to go off on all sorts of hikes. Only they don't know the real reason—but that doesn't matter. It only becomes important if one observes such people from a physician's or a priest's standpoint. But a true view of the world also gives one inspiration for what one has to do in detail.

Now again, if we have to do with illnesses in the metabolic-limb system, we look for low-growing plants and for minerals in the soil. We look for what occurs as sediment, not for what grows above the earth in crystal form. Then we get the kind of mineral and plant remedies we need. That is how observation of the connection between processes in the macrocosm and processes in man lead one from pathology to therapy.

These connections must again be clearly understood. In olden times people knew them well. Hippocrates was really a latecomer as far as ancient medicine is concerned. But if you read a little of what he is supposed to have written, of what at any rate still preserved his spirit, you will find this viewpoint throughout. All through his writings you will find that the concrete details relate to broad knowledge and observation such as we have been presenting. In later times, such things were no longer of any interest. People came more and more to mere abstract, intellectual thinking and to an external observation of nature that led to mere experimentation. We must find the way back again to what was once vision of the relation between the human being and the world.

We live as human beings on the earth between our ego and our physical body, between breathing and the Platonic year. With our breathing we have a direct relation to the day. What do we relate to with our physical body? How do we relate physically to the Platonic year? There we relate to totally external conditions in the evolution of large natural processes—for instance, to climatic changes. In the course of the large natural processes human beings change their form, so that, for instance, successive racial forms appear, and so forth. We relate qualitatively to what happens in the shorter external changes, to what successive years and days bring us. In short, we evolve as human beings between these two farthest boundaries. But in between we can be free, because in between, even in the macrocosm, a remarkable element intervenes.

One can be lost in wonder in pondering over this rhythm of 25,920 years. One is awed by what happens between the universe and the human being. And as one contemplates all this, one realizes that the whole world—including the human being—is ordered according to measure, number, and weight. Everything is wonderfully ordered—but it all happens to be human calculation! And at important moments when we are explaining a calculation—even though it is correct—we always have to add that curious word “approximately.” For our human calculation never comes out exactly right. It is all absolutely logical; order and reason are in everything, they are alive and active, everything “works,” as we say. And yet there is something in all of it, something in the universe that is completely irrational. Something is there so that however profound our awe may be, even as initiates, when we go for an afternoon walk we still take an umbrella along. We take an umbrella because something could happen that is irrational. Something can appear in the life of the universe that simply “doesn't come out right” when numbers are applied to it. And so one has had to invent leap years, intercalary months, all kinds of things. Such things have always had to be used for the fixing of time. What is offered by a well-developed astronomy that has deepened into astrology and astrosophy (for one can think of it in that way) is all destroyed for immediate use by meteorology. This latter has not attained the rank of a rational science; [This lecture was given in 1924.] it is more or less permeated by vision, and will be, more and more. It takes an entirely different path; it consists of what is left over by the other sciences. Modern astronomy itself lives only in names; it is really nothing more than a system for giving names to stars. That is why even Serenissimus came to the end of his knowledge when newly found stars had to have names. He would visit the observatories in his country and let them show him various stars through the telescope, then after seeing everything he would say, “Yes, I know all that—but how you know what that star's name is, that very distant star, that's what I don't understand.” Yes, of course it's obvious, the standpoint you've adopted at this moment when you laugh at Serenissimus. But there's another standpoint: one could laugh at the astronomers. I'd rather you'd laugh at the astronomers, because there's something very strange going on in the world as it evolves.

If you want to inquire into the old way of naming things, Saturn and so forth, you should think back to our speech course,¹⁵ and recall that in olden times names were given from the feeling the astrologers and astrosophers had for the sound of some particular star. All the old star names were God-given, spirit-given. The stars were asked what their names were, because the tone of the star was always perceived and its name was then given accordingly. Now, indeed, you come to a certain boundary line in the development of astrosophy and astrology. Earlier they had to get the names from heaven. When you come to more recent times when the great discoveries were made, for instance, of the “little fellows” (Sternwichten), then everything is mixed up. One is called Andromeda, another has another Greek name. Everything is mixed up in high-handed fashion. One can't think that Neptune and Uranus are as truly characterized by their names as Saturn was. Now there is only human arbitrariness. And Serenissimus made one mistake. He believed the astronomers were carrying on their work similarly to the ancient astrosophers. But this was not so. They possessed only a narrow human knowledge, while the knowledge of the astrosophers of olden times, and astrologers of still older times, came directly out of humanity's intercourse with the gods. However, if today one would return from astronomy to astrology or astrosophy, and thereby have a macrocosm to live in that is rational throughout, then one would reach Sophia. Then one would find too that within this rationality and Sophia-wisdom meteoronomy, meteorology, and meteorosophy are the things that “don't come out right” by our human calculation, and one can only question them at their pleasure! That's another variety of Lady! In ordinary everyday life, one calls a lady capricious. And the meteorological Lady is capricious all the way from rainshowers to comets. But as one gradually advances from meteorology to meteorosophy one discovers the finer attributes of this world queen, attributes that do not come merely from caprice or cosmic emotion, but from the Lady's warm heart. But nothing will be accomplished unless in contrast to all the arithmetic, all the thinking, all that can be calculated rationally one acquires a direct acquaintance with the beings of the cosmos and learns to know them as they are. They are there; they do show themselves—shyly perhaps at first, for they are not obtrusive. With calculations one can go further and further, but then one is getting further and further away from the true nature of the world. For one is only reaching deeds from the past.

If one advances from ordinary calculation to the calculating of rhythms as it was in astrology for the harmony of the spheres, one goes on from the calculating of rhythms to a view of the organization of the world in numbers, as we find them in astrosophy. On the other hand one finds that the ruling world beings are rather shy. They do not appear at once. First they only present a kind of Akasha photography, and one is not sure of its source. One has the whole world to look at, but only in photographs displayed in various parts of the cosmic ether. And one does not know where they come from.

Then inspiration begins. Beings come out of the pictures and make themselves known. We move out of “-nomy” - but just to “-logy.” Only when we push through all the way to intuition does the being itself follow from inspiration and we come to Sophia. But this is a path of personal development that requires the effort of the whole human being. The whole human being must become acquainted with such a Lady, who hides behind meteorology—in wind and weather, moon and sun insofar as they intervene in the elements. Not just the head can be engaged as in “-logy,” but the whole human being is needed.

Already there is a possibility of taking the wrong path in this endeavor. You can even come to Anthroposophy through the head—by coming from anthroponomy, which is today the supreme ruling science, to anthropology. There you just have rationality, nothing more. But rationality is not alive. It describes only the traces, the footprints, of life and it gives one no impulse to investigate details. Yet life really consists of details and of the irrational element. What your head has grasped, you have to take down into the whole human being, and then with the whole human being progress from “-nomy” to “-logy,” finally to “-sophy,” which is Sophia.

We must have a feeling for all this if we want to enliven theology on the one side and medicine on the other through what can truly enliven them both—pastoral medicine. But the essential thing is that first of all, at the very outset of our approach to pastoral medicine, we learn to know the direction it should take in its observation of the world.

• 13. Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Scientist and philosopher.
• 14. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Extending Practical Medicine (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996).
• 15. Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

Dr. Steiner: Today, we have come together to discuss the results of the official school inspection. From what you told me over the telephone, I have formed a picture. Before I take any position, though, I think it would be a good idea to hear what each of you who participated in the inspection has to report, so that we all have a complete picture. I have repeatedly said that I am willing to meet with the man, but that has not occurred as yet.

We need to discuss all this to attain a perspective from which we can ward off any blows that may come from the public. It is unnecessary, and it would be fruitless, to make objections to the officials. If such things could be successful, we would not need a Waldorf School. The reason the Waldorf School exists is because the official bureaucracy does not understand our methods and our direction.

Let us go through the classes, then each of you can say what occurred in your class.

The teachers report about the inspection in each of the classes. The inspector had asked only very superficial questions..

Dr. Steiner: A boy in Zurich told me that he does not want to go to the school any more because the teaching through illustrative material was too dumb. When I gave the course in Berlin, I spoke about learning to read.1 Such things are very current and should be put into the Threefold newspaper and be used. For instance, how children learn to read, or the fact that our children—this is something I say everywhere—thank God, learn to read only at the age of eight or nine. We need to put such things right under people’s noses. They are certainly more important than some essay about a convention in Honolulu. We should also criticize the practice of failing children. We should mention that, too.

A teacher: He wanted to have quick answers in arithmetic.

Dr. Steiner: If children cannot do arithmetic quickly, their body is still slow.

A teacher: My perception is that what we teach children about grammar is something still foreign to them. Do we have to do that in the second grade?

Dr. Steiner: It depends upon how you do it. You do not always need to teach them the terminology, nouns and verbs, but use them only for yourself to form an objective polarity. A child of seven and a half can certainly differentiate between an activity and a thing. You do not need to emphasize the terminology. You could begin with stories and make the difference between a thing and an activity clear. That is something a child at that age can grasp. They should be able to grasp the difference between running or jumping and a human being or something of that sort. We do not need to follow the form of a pedantic grammar. In particular, with children in the lower grades, you should completely avoid using definitions.

There are further reports.

Dr. Steiner: (Laughingly, to a teacher who was happy about a positive remark made by the school inspector) Yes, you will certainly need to improve there.

The subject teachers report also.

Dr. Steiner: He will come to handwork class only with some old lady.

It is clear that this sort of inspection is an example of something that could never lead to an understanding of what actually happens in a school. When you think of the goodwill this man could have brought to understand at least a little about the Waldorf School, you will see that he had none whatsoever. He simply tried to determine to what extent the children meet the requirements of a regular school. He would need to know that he could learn something about what is actually going on only if he asks himself questions. He would have needed to ask himself how to question the children about what he wanted to know. His primary task should have been to find out from the children what they have learned, and the children would have needed to provide him with the possibility of asking the proper questions.

No one can learn very much if they simply ask the teachers questions, listen to the answers, but lack a firm foundation for forming a judgment about them. I make no assumption about that. There are a large number of psychological reasons why children answer their own teacher well or not. You need only recall how it is at the university for people who do their major examinations with the same professor they had for their seminars. It is easy for them. For the students who have not worked with the same professor, it is more difficult. Those who know the professor have an easy time. Having simply heard the professor’s lectures is not sufficient, since you could not discover his method of asking questions.

It is quite important to make the public aware of the things we consciously had to forego. We should use the space available to us in the “Threefold Social Organism” to present such things to the public. The different anthroposophical organizations here should work together, otherwise everything will dissipate. Everything is already falling apart, becoming unglued. We must work together. We need to publish articles, but of course, we should not obviously direct them at this particular point. That would be quite false. Nevertheless, the official inspection of the school could play a role. We should publish an article presenting, from various perspectives, how important it is for a child to learn to read only around the age of eight or nine. We could give examples like Goethe, who could not read and write until the age of nine, or Helmholtz, who learned to read and write only much later. We could, in contrast, give examples of people who learned to read and write at the age of four or five, then became complete idiots.

This is what we must do. If we do this properly, so that when we see ourselves in danger, and people everywhere are talking about these things, then we will have an effect. Then people could also not say that our intent is aimed at a very limited group. In this way, we can bring many of the weird judgments of the present into line. The actions of a person like the school inspector are simply an extract of the general perspective. If you turn to the entire civilized world using someone like that as an example, what you do will be good. The school inspection shows us what should not be done. Now we can turn to the world and try to make clear what should have been done.

A teacher: I have written an article for “Die Drei.”

Dr. Steiner: Make it short and sweet, don’t write ten pages about it. There is nothing to prevent something that appears in “Die Drei” from also appearing in “The Threefold.”

We’ve already talked about these things. A careful presentation of the impossibility of determining what a school is like by using such inspection methods could be one topic for discussion. Then we would have to defend against all the objections to teaching according to historical periods. When the inspector made his judgment, he said something very characteristic of our times, namely, that life requires people to do arithmetic quickly, and, therefore, we should teach that to the children.

Nearly everything you have said today offers wonderful examples of the way things should not be and how we can improve them. For instance, flunking children. The fact that he referred to the children as bright and dumb in front of the children is absolutely impossible.

He will probably also do what bad teachers always do. He will ask questions that require an exact answer and ignore everything else. He will have no sense of the way children express things. It is really very nice to receive a response from the children in their own way. It would be interesting to know what part of the poem he misunderstood.

You reported his remark that our method of teaching foreign language leads to a mechanical understanding.

These are the things we need to put out in public: Learning to read and write at a not-to-early age; a defense of teaching foreign language at an early age; flunking children; the manner of asking children questions; and, assuming that children will answer in exactly the way you expect them to. We should also mention superficial questions, senseless questions.

This is all connected to modern culture. These methods are decades old, and modern people have developed a spirituality, an attitude within their souls, that shows how they were mistreated as children. Today, only those who are more or less healthy, who have a counterforce within them, can hold up against that. The physical and psychological condition of modern people is often quite sad. That comes from such incorrect forming of questions. You can even see that in the physical body, that is, whether the forces of the soul have become incoherent. Many people take leave of their senses later. Many who still have their senses notice through their heart or lungs that they were mistreated by such things.

We need to be clear that if we did things to satisfy the education authorities, we would have to close. We could then simply put the children in any other school. They see the Waldorf School as an attack.

It is not so important to develop the letters the way they historically developed, since they developed differently in different regions. What is important is a renewal of the artistic path of work. We do not need to use historical forms. We must make that point very clear. From such events, we should learn what we must make clear.

A teacher: I asked the children in my seventh-grade class why they went along and behaved so well. They replied that they did not want to get me into trouble.

Dr. Steiner: That is wonderful behavior on the part of the children.

We should make notes of all of this so we can publicize it. There is so much interesting material that we could fill our publications with it. External activities and specific questions. We need to see that people pay more attention to us and learn more about our way of thinking if we want the Waldorf School movement to spread.

During the course I gave in Berlin, there was something that could also have been published. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) You remember you had said some things and then someone with an education background said that you had overemphasized the dark side. We should have stepped in then. We should have shown that you were not too extreme, that, in reality, things are very much worse. Experimental pedagogy is reasonable only in its basic ideas, but regarding other things, it is quite unreasonable. It is something only for professors who have to do as many experiments as possible.

The situation in Berlin was impossible. A discussion of barely an hour. There was sufficient time for many people to say really dumb things, but not enough time to defend yourself. In such cases, it would be better not even to speak. We should not leave our people out on a limb. It would be best not to give such presentations. We cannot allow only our opponents to be heard. The situation there was the best possible for those who want to hurt anthroposophy.

Our outside activities are, of course, connected with the outside, but they also belong here in the faculty.

A teacher asks whether they should start teaching Greek and Latin at the same time.

Dr. Steiner: The best, the ideal, would be to begin Greek earlier and then begin Latin after two years. However, that is difficult to do in practice. Then, we would have to drop something else for Greek, and that would be difficult. Our plans are designed to correspond to the individual and to development, so that doesn’t work out. Latin is required for external reasons. It is helpful to do things the way I described in my lecture in Berlin in order to slowly understand the language.

I based the entire development of language upon an imagination, but K. spoke of inspiration and intuition. People today have no sensibility for exact listening, and we need to take such things into account. The things I discussed need to be felt. That is something that can be taught through Greek. Latin is not as important because it does not teach feeling in the same way as Greek.

A teacher: How can we determine which children should attend that class?

Dr. Steiner: As long as we are only a single school, we cannot do much. Only when there are more schools could we make a decision of that sort according to their characteristics, that is, when we can influence the further course of the child’s life. That we have thirty percent who participate in this class is still too few to justify changing our plans for them. We need everything we have.

A teacher requests help with students in the upper grades, N.G. and F.S.

Dr. Steiner: With such difficult cases as N.G., we can approach him with understanding if he still has some belief in a person who can be completely objective about the life he has experienced. He grew up as an extremely lively little spirit from the very beginning. He gave many insightful answers. Now he is growing up with a mother who is the personification of a lie. She is one of those people who falls down with a heart attack, but on the soft carpet, not next to it. She is completely untrue. She is a woman who always wanted to bring Anthroposophy to her husband, a very superficial and trivial person. The children knew about this at an early age. This is one of the comedies in life that have such a tragic effect upon children that they lose all trust in life.

Now, the boy knows all this. He needs only the fulfillment he so much desires. He needs to be able to believe in a person. That is an opportunity he should have, namely to have people in his surroundings who are interested in telling the truth about even the most mundane of things.

A teacher: He says that he smells anthroposophy everywhere.

Dr. Steiner: In such cases, you can help him form a sound judgment if you take everything into account. The beliefs of such boys as N.G. are based upon the idea that everyone lies, but that can be cured. It could be difficult for him because he knows he was forced into the Waldorf School. For that reason, he now asks what is right. That is one thing.

Now that he is here in the Waldorf School, he must be able to find something that he can believe in anthroposophy. This is a truly Herculean task. It would have been quite normal for him to attend a school where life approached him from outside. The worst thing for such a boy is to place him in the Waldorf School. A child does not have to be in the Waldorf School. A school that pleases the school board could be a good school in which to spend your time from the age of six until fourteen. The Waldorf School is not necessarily the right school for everyone, but one day, there he was.

I am not sure it is pedagogically proper that F.S. is here. In 1908 I held a course about the Apocalypse. He occupied himself by digging deep holes in the garden soil. If you came close to him, he stood up and kicked you in the stomach. He never gave an answer. Once, an older lady wanted to do something nice for him, but he took some sand and threw it in her eyes. He broke nearly all of the coffee cups. He called himself “you” because people told him, “You did it.” If he is still behaving the same way, but at a higher level, then things have not improved. Now he would call himself, “I,” but for a different reason.

Somehow, we will have to come to grips with F.S. and N.G. Someone who has never been involved with his situation and in whom he can trust, will need to take over N.G. In the case of “you,” only someone who impresses him can help. He never knew his father very well. He needs someone who would impress him. (Speaking to a teacher) Can’t you do that? You have impressed many people. You certainly gave X.Y. the idea that you are impressive.

While I was in Berlin, someone approached me and told me about this boy. From that, I had an impression that the real reason for these things lies in his living conditions. We should try to avoid having anyone lodge there. X. does not like the Waldorf School. I promised the woman to ask you if he could live with one of you. He posed some questions concerning Schopenhauer, and that is quite positive. He also greets me very warmly.

A teacher asks about a child with curvature of the spine.

Dr. Steiner: He should be in the remedial class for a time. Let him do only what he wants, and discover what he does not want to do.

A language teacher complains about difficulties in the 7b English class.

Dr. Steiner: That is not at all surprising when you consider how their class teacher keeps them under control. That certainly calls forth a comparison. He knows what he wants. If she did not have him, but someone else instead, then (speaking to the language teacher) it would be much easier for you. You have a rather uncertain nature, and your own thoughts sit within the form of the children’s thoughts. These are things that would not occur to such an extent if you had a colleague more like yourself. The class teacher impresses the entire class because he is so much a part of things. You will have to break your terrible, vaguely lyrical, sentimental attitude when you go into the class.

The language teacher says something about boxing children’s ears.

Dr. Steiner: If you give them a slap, you should do it the way Dr. Schubert does.

Dr. Schubert: Did somebody complain?

Dr. Steiner: No, you are always slapping them.

Dr. Schubert: When did I do that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I mean astral slapping. There are physical slaps and astral slaps. It doesn’t matter which one you give, but you cannot slap a child sentimentally.

The class reflects our thoughts. You need to be firmer in your own thoughts. If I were in your class, I would do the same. I would certainly behave terribly. I wouldn’t understand what is happening. I wouldn’t know what you want. You must be firmer in your thinking. The battle of a whole class against the teacher is not actually real, it is not something you can touch. We can talk about individual children, but not about a whole class. Look at the things Baravalle has written. Keep them until Whitsun. We cannot hold some lyrical discourses about a class. You seem to me today to be like one of those books from Husserl. Break your habit of thinking like that. It is a picture of your own inner nature.

We have to strongly integrate the art of teaching with the subject, but at the same time selflessly integrate it with the subject. Those are not common characteristics.

The 7a class has become quite good, and you can work well with them. The effectiveness of teaching depends upon the overall impression the teacher makes upon the children and not upon some small misdeeds or acts against authority. It is easy for a teacher to become laughable through some piece of clothing, but that will recede after a time. Perhaps you have a hole in your boot, but that is not very important. You cannot change those things. What is important is the humanity of the teacher.

The context of the following is unclear.

Dr. Steiner: They had the audience in their control. In the Vienna hall, Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was presented in 1887. I attended a concert by Schalk. That was the first performance of Bruckner’s symphony.

A question is asked about four students in the 7a class.

Dr. Steiner: Will the children go into an apprenticeship? They are all nearly the same type. I would hope that things would become better if, with these children, you were to introduce a reading of a speech by Buddha objectively and formally, with all the repetitions, and then had them memorize short passages. You could also use The Bhagavad Gita. You could do that with the whole class. Go through it with the whole class and have those children copy it, then do it a second time and they should be able to present it. You should particularly aim at those children. This could also be done in teaching history and language. You could do that every day.

A teacher asks about a girl whose parents do not want her to participate in eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Convince the parents. She should not interrupt the eurythmy lessons.

A teacher asks about P.R., a student with a crippled hand.

Dr. Steiner: We should think about what profession we should direct him toward. He is not very dexterous with that hand. He writes poorly. He should become something like a bookkeeper, or some other job where that is not important. He certainly cannot become an actor. The best would be if we could bring such children so far along that they could then participate in the normal morning instruction, and then have some continuation of their education following elementary school. We need to try to bring him along so that he overcomes his self-consciousness and participates in handwork. He should certainly learn bookkeeping. We need to find a teacher for him.

A teacher: The elementary schools here have more periods of handwork.

Dr. Steiner: So much handwork is unnecessary.

A teacher: R.L. in the fourth grade is not coming to school.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot force the children if parents don’t want it.

We need to work practically with the things you mentioned today. There is no doubt that we have to take over a greater responsibility toward extending the movement so that the movement is not torn apart by some small thing one day. The whole world is looking at the Waldorf School, the whole civilized world. We must do a number of things well in the school that the movement is not doing very well in other areas. The main thing is that everyone in Stuttgart work together, that all the different groups connected with the movement, that is, really connected, find some way of working with one another.

When you are active in the anthroposophical movement on a broader scale, you will find that elsewhere people do not know how to relate to Stuttgart and what is happening here. It is important that the Waldorf School movement keep its promises. In particular, even though we may fail in other areas, the cultural areas need to be particularly strong in the world. The Waldorf School and its faculty need to always be careful to spread an understanding of themselves. Lectures like those given by Schwebsch, Stein, and Heydebrand are particularly effective. Answers to specific questions are often misunderstood.

The Waldorf teachers should not slide into that mistaken behavior so common today, that is, to write articles like the one X. wrote about the article from S.G. We will slowly die if we engage in normal journalism and a non-objective treatment of our work. It, the lecture from S.G., was certainly unbelievable, wasn’t it? I like S.G. quite a lot, but he needs to gradually learn what is important. For now, he is simply in his baby shoes. It makes our movement laughable. It is a hymn sung out of tune with the worst journalistic attitude. I would prefer to have said that when X. was here. It is a sad day, a very sad experience. We must remain above all that. There is not one uplifting thought in the entire article aside from those dealing with declamation and recitation. If we do such things that show so little goodwill to remain with the subject, if such habits enter our work, we will soon have a complete demise.

Concerning the education conference.

Dr. Steiner: It should be in a broader context that would enable us to work not from compromises, but toward the real perspective of our pedagogy. We do not want to do what was done at previous conferences and simply talk about things. We should discuss things in such a way that people genuinely understand them. We must create a feeling that our people already know what others want to say. Our people should not simply stand there while someone else says something we do not know. We must know which of the questions could arise in the conference. We cannot allow people to say we are poking our noses into everything, but when experts come along, you can see how little we know. We need to arrange things so that someone cannot come along and say something and there not be enough time for us to reply.

That must not happen. It was a real problem in Berlin since people went away thinking that we spoke about Einstein, but knew nothing about him. Aside from that, the discussion leader thought that idiot was right. The others who put on the symposium also thought the same thing. In any event, it happened—something that had a detrimental effect upon the whole scientific mood from the very beginning. The first problem was that Rittelmeyer came along and said we had done poorly. Such things simply must not happen. If that were to happen here with pedagogy, it would be terrible. The listeners should perceive that our work and each speaker is of a high level.

We have put enormous effort into setting something up. The conferences have had an enormous success, but no one lets the results of the conferences be truly effective. If we could only find a way to let what we accomplish have a practical effect. What you have to say does not actually affect people. Afterward, no one actually knows what you have to say. Our work needs to be used more. We need to affect opinions. However, I am convinced that this thing with X. will be forgotten. For example, we have long had the problem that we have an economic movement, but we cannot get any economists to speak about it. The economic perspective is important. Leinhas’s lecture was good, and people will not forget it. The same is true for Dr. Unger’s essay about valuation. That is the beginning of something we should further develop in economics. Now, however, we must talk about the existence of three pillars that should in some way be comprehensive.

Everywhere I went in my long series of lectures, I mentioned the lectures given by you, Dr. von Heydebrand, and Leinhas. I spoke of them everywhere. We must create opinion. Our work must speak to people. Pedagogy needs an opinion connected with the substance of our movement. We can ignore negative opinions. We must do what is good.

That is something that is painful for me, but I want you to know it because the Waldorf School has developed that good spirit. This does not need to be said to the Waldorf School itself. The Waldorf School has a great task because there is no leadership in other areas. The school is moving along well, but it has a responsibility to take up some things that have an even larger responsibility associated with them. When something negative occurs now, with the increasing number of followers, then it is a negative event that is actually gigantic. That would, of course, not happen with the Waldorf School. Such things can tear a spiritual or cultural movement apart. For that reason, those working in the Waldorf School need to be the primary support for the whole movement. That is how things are today. The Waldorf School has a broad basis because it has kept all its promises. It can, therefore, be the primary support for the entire anthroposophical movement. We need such a support today. Your responsibility is quickly growing. That is something each of you needs to take to heart. We haven’t the least reason to be happy when the number of followers increases. We should be aware that every increase in interest is also an increase in our own responsibility.

A teacher asks about a pedagogical conference in Kaiserslautern.

Dr. Steiner: We have already decided against the proposal for Bremen. I looked at the big picture. We cannot accomplish much by systematically discussing pedagogy before there is any possibility of seeing some movement in regard to pedagogical questions in modern times. The seventy or so people who would come there would come only out of politeness. They would not know what is needed. We would first have to tell them that something is happening in the world. We would first have to hold a cultural and historical lecture on pedagogy. That would be necessary. Giving a three-day course for people whom you cannot help any further would mean too much wasted strength.

We saw that here. The teachers were the least interested. They all said they could not attend. I am uncertain if that has gotten better, but what else could happen?

We must awaken people’s awareness of what needs to be done. I’m afraid people believe we should begin the threefold. I think that if two or three of you want to give a lecture there on the return trip from Holland, that would be good. People need to be aware. God, there was a conference in Stuttgart and then one in Berlin. Now things need to be made more well known, otherwise we will be running to every village giving lectures. It is enough when we do that in some of the central areas. It is not efficient if we are running everywhere. We must improve the efficiency of our work.

A teacher: Is there something concrete we could do in Berlin?

Dr. Steiner: Quite a lot. We could discuss a large number of questions there and essentially nowhere else in the world today, but theology is too strong there. There were a large number of questions that could be treated nowhere else in the world. We need to make the lectures more well known. The question is, how? Steffen printed the “Christmas Conference” in Das Goetheanum in such a way that I would almost prefer to print his report than my lectures. He did a wonderful job there.

When such dry reports are published, the kind people are used to seeing in academic journals, then people have difficulty getting through them. Not just my own lectures, but also those of others, were written in an indescribably pedantic way. In that case, I can only say there is not much goodwill behind them. R. could do it better. When he gives a lecture, it is really very good, but when he writes something, it would drive you up the walls. Here, we see no goodwill. Such things wash the ground away from under our feet.

Yesterday we indicated that it was now necessary to answer the question: What really happened to that Being whom we designate as Christ Jesus from the Baptism by John in Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha? To answer this question as far as possible, we must recall briefly what we know from former lectures concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who in his thirtieth year became the bearer of the Christ. The essential points are given in my recently published book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

We know that in Palestine, at the time which concerns us, not one but two Jesus-children were born, one of them from the Solomon line of the House of David. This is the Jesus child of whom the Matthew Gospel speaks. The peculiar contradiction between the beginnings of the Matthew and the Luke Gospels derives from the fact that the writer of the Matthew Gospel was concerned with one of the Jesus-children, the one born from the Solomon line. Then, at almost but not quite the same time, another Jesus-child was born, from the Nathan line of the House of David.

The important thing is to understand clearly what kind of beings these two children were. Occult investigation shows that the individuality who was in the Solomon Jesus-child was none other than Zarathustra. After Zarathustra's most important mission, of which we have spoken in connection with the ancient Persian civilisation, he had been incarnated again and again; lastly during the Babylonian-Chaldaic civilisation, and now as the Solomon Jesus-child. This Zarathustra individuality, with all the great and powerful inner forces which in the nature of things he had brought over from earlier incarnations, had to incarnate in a body descended from the Solomon side of the House of David; a body adapted for working up and further developing the great faculties of Zarathustra, in the way that human faculties, when they are already at a very high level, can be brought further on, in so far as they belong to the being who is going from incarnation to incarnation. We are concerned therefore with a human body which did not wait until later years to work on these faculties, but could do so in a youthful, child-like and yet powerful organism. Hence we see the Zarathustra-individuality growing up in such a way that the faculties of the child developed comparatively early. The child soon showed an extent of knowledge which would normally have been impossible at his age.

One fact, however, we must keep firmly in mind: the Solomon Jesus-child, although the incarnation of so lofty an individuality, was only a highly developed man. Hence he was encumbered—as even the most highly developed man must be—with certain liabilities to error and moral difficulties, though not exactly vices or sins. Then we know that in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra, by an occult process known to everyone who has made himself conversant with such facts, forsook the body of the Solomon Jesus-child and went over into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. Now the body of this Nathan Jesus-child—or, better, his three-fold bodily organisation physical body, etheric body, astral body—was formed in a quite special manner. In fact, this body was such that the child showed capacities exactly contrary to those of the Solomon Jesus-child. Whereas the latter was remarkable because of his great gifts in relation to things one can learn externally, it might almost be said that in this respect the Nathan Jesus-child was untalented. You will understand that saying this implies not the slightest deprecation. The Nathan Jesus-child was not in a position to familiarise himself with the products of human culture on earth. By contrast, the remarkable fact is that he could speak as soon as he was born. A faculty which belongs more to the physical body was thus present in him from his birth. But—according to a good tradition which can be occultly confirmed—the language he spoke could be understood by his Mother only. The child's most strongly marked characteristics were qualities of the heart. He had an immense capacity for love and a disposition capable of immense self-sacrifice. And the remarkable thing is that from the first days of his life his mere presence, or his touch, had beneficent effects—magnetic effects, one might perhaps call them nowadays. Thus all the qualities of heart were manifest in this child, enhanced to such a degree that they could have a beneficent magnetic influence on his environment.

We know also that active in the astral body of this child were the forces which had once been acquired by that Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha. We know indeed—and in this respect the oriental tradition is absolutely correct, for it can be confirmed by occult science—that the Bodhisattva, who on becoming Buddha five centuries before our era no longer needed to incarnate further on earth, worked from the spiritual world upon all those who devoted themselves to his teachings. It is characteristic of such an individuality, who rises to heights from which he need no longer incarnate in a body of flesh, that he can then take part in the affairs and destiny of our earth existence from out of the spiritual worlds. This can happen in the most manifold ways. In fact, the Bodhisattva who went through his last incarnation on the earth as Gautama Buddha has taken an essential part in the further evolution of humanity. Our human spiritual world stands continually in connection with all the rest of the spiritual world. The human being not only eats and drinks and so takes into himself the substance of the physical earth; he continually receives soul-spiritual nourishment from the spiritual world. In the most varied ways forces continually flow into physical earthly-existence from out of the spiritual world. Such an in-flow of the forces which Buddha had gained for himself came into the wider stream of humanity through the fact that the Buddha forces permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child. We know, too, from earlier lectures that the words we still have today as a Christmas message—‘The Divine reveals itself from the heights, and on earth peace will spread in the hearts of men of good will!’—originate in essence from the influence which flowed down into human evolution through the immersion of the Buddha powers in the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child.

Thus we see the Buddha forces working further in the stream of earth-existence which took its start from the Events of Palestine. And it is interesting that precisely the researches made by western occultism in quite recent years have led to the recognition of a very important connection between European civilisation and the Buddha forces. For a long time these Buddha forces have been working from the spiritual worlds, particularly upon everything in Western civilisation which is unthinkable without the specific influence of Christianity. All those philosophical streams which have developed during recent centuries up to the nineteenth century, in so far as they are Western spiritual currents, are permeated by the Christ-Impulse, but the Buddha has always been working into them from out of the spiritual worlds. Hence the most important thing that European humanity can receive from Buddha today does not depend on the handing down of the teaching that Buddha gave to men about 500 years before the Christian era, but on what he has become since that time. For he has not remained at a standstill; he has progressed; and it is through this progress, as a spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, that he has in the highest sense been able to take part in the further evolution of Western civilisation. The outcome of our own occult investigation harmonises in a wonderful way with much that had been known previously, before this important influence could be investigated again. For we know that the same individuality who appeared as Gautama Buddha in the East had previously worked in the West, and that certain legends and traditions connected with the name of Buddha or Wotan have to do with this same individuality, just as Buddhism has with Gautama Buddha in the East; hence the same field of action in human evolution which had been prepared earlier by the same individuality has again been occupied in a certain sense. Thus are interlaced the ways taken by the spiritual currents within the evolution of humanity.

Today the most important thing for us is to establish that in the astral body of the Jesus-child described by Luke we have the Buddha forces at work. And when this Nathan Jesus-child was twelve years old, the Zarathustra individuality passed over into his three-fold being.

Why is it, then, that this Jesus-child had the remarkable qualities we have just characterised? It was because he was not a human individuality like every other, but in a certain respect quite different, and in order to understand him we must go back to the ancient Lemurian time in which, strictly speaking, the Earth-evolution of man took its start. We must clearly understand that everything before the Lemurian time was really only a repetition of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods. Only in the Lemurian time was the first germ-condition laid down in man as a potentiality, so that during the Earth-evolution he could receive the fourth member of his being, the Ego. We can say the extension of mankind over the Earth—a subject dealt with more precisely in the Outline of Occult Science—is to be traced to certain human ancestors in the Lemurian period, the period with which our present Earth took its start.

It is only after a certain point of time in this Lemurian period that we can speak correctly, in a modern sense, of the human race. Before this, those Egos who have since continued to incarnate were not present in men on Earth. They were not yet separate from the substance of that Hierarchy which had first brought the human Ego into being: the Hierarchy of the Spirits of Form. We can now picture to ourselves—occult research shows this—that part of the substance of the Spirits of Form entered into the incarnations of men for the building up of the human Ego. But when in due time man was given over to his physical incarnations on the Earth, something was held back. A certain Ego substance was not brought into the stream of physical incarnations. If we were to represent the stream of physical human incarnations, beginning with him whom the Bible calls ‘Adam’, the progenitor of the human race, we should have to draw a genealogical tree with wide-spreading branches. Instead, let us simply imagine that the substance poured down from the Spirits of Form now flows onward, but that something was held back: an Ego that was now protected from entering into physical incarnations. Instead, this Ego preserved the form, the substantiality, which man had had before proceeding to his first earthly incarnation. This Ego lived on collaterally with the rest of humanity, and at the time of which we are now speaking, when the Event of Palestine was to take place, it was still in the same condition, if we wish to speak according to the Bible, as was the Ego of Adam before his first embodiment in flesh.

In examining what occult science knows about this Ego—which naturally for modern man is something extremely foolish—we see that this Ego, which was, as it were, held back ‘in reserve’, was given into the care of the Holy Mysteries through Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. It was preserved in an important Mystery centre, as in a tabernacle, and because of this it had quite special characteristics; it was untouched by everything that a human Ego could have learnt on Earth. It was therefore untouched by any Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it was indeed something we can think of, in contrast to other human Egos, as an empty sphere, still completely virginal with regard to all earth experiences—a nothing, a negative, in this respect. Hence it seemed as though the Nathan-child, described in the Luke Gospel, really had no Ego; as though he consisted only of physical, etheric and astral body. And it is quite adequate if at first we say that an Ego, developed as Egos had developed in Atlantean and post-Atlantean times, was not there at all in the Luke Jesus-child.

We speak in the true sense of the words when we say that in the Matthew Jesus-child we have to do with a completely human being; whereas in the Nathan Jesus-child of the Luke Gospel we have to do with a physical, an etheric and an astral body which are interrelated in the harmonious unity that belonged to man when he emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Hence this Jesus-child, as the Akashic Record tells us, was untalented for all that human culture had developed. He could not receive it because he had never been among it. External abilities and adaptations to existence are the outcome of certain experiences in earlier incarnations. Anyone who had never shared in such experiences would show himself without talent for all that men have accomplished during the earth-evolution. If the Nathan Jesus-child had been born in our time, he would have been totally ungifted for learning to write, since in Adamic times writing was unknown. By contrast, the Luke Jesus-child revealed in a high degree the qualities he had brought with him—qualities that had not fallen into decadence through the Luciferic influence. Even more interesting is the remarkable language he spoke.

Here we must bring to mind something I mentioned in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind: that the languages which are now spread over the earth took their rise comparatively late in evolution: they were preceded by what can truly be called a primal human language. It is the disuniting spirits of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic world who have made many languages out of the primal language. The primal language is lost, and can be spoken today by nobody with an Ego which in the course of earth-evolution has passed from incarnation to incarnation. This Jesus-child, who had not gone through human incarnations, acquired from the starting-point of human evolution the faculty of speaking, not this or that language, but a language of which we can rightly say that it was not comprehensible to those around him. But, because of the inner qualities of heart that lived in it, it was understood by his Mother's heart. This points to a phenomenon of immense significance in the case of the Luke Jesus-child.

We have seen that when this Luke Jesus-child was born, he was provided with everything that had not been influenced by the Lucifer-Ahrimanic forces. He did not possess an Ego that had been through a series of incarnations; therefore nothing had to be discarded when, in his twelfth year, the individuality of Zarathustra passed over from the Solomon Jesus-child into the Nathan Jesus-child. I have already said that the human element which had remained behind, and up to this time had developed in the Mysteries by the side of the rest of humanity, was born for the first time in the Palestine period as the Nathan Jesus-child. There was a transference from a Mystery centre in Western Asia, where this human kernel had been preserved, into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. This child grew on, and in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra passed into him. We know also that this passing over is intimated in the scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple. It was quite natural that the parents of the Nathan Jesus-child, who were accustomed to regard him in the light we have described, should find a remarkable change when they discovered him in the Temple after he had been lost. For that was the moment when Zarathustra passed over into this twelve-year-old child. From the twelfth to the thirtieth year, therefore, we have to do with the individuality of Zarathustra in the Luke Jesus-child.

Now in the Luke Gospel we have a remarkable expression which indicates something that can be made clear only by occult investigation. You know that in the Luke Gospel, after the description of the scene with the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, there is a passage: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’. (Luke II:52). In truth this passage stands as follows when we restore the text of the Gospels from the Akashic record: The twelve-year-old child increased in everything wherein an astral body can increase, i.e., in wisdom; in everything wherein an etheric body can increase, i.e. in all the qualities of kindliness, goodness, etc; and in everything wherein a physical body can increase, i.e., in all that pours itself into external beauty of form. In this passage, therefore, a special indication is given that the Jesus-child, not having gone from incarnation to incarnation, had up to his twelfth year remained untouched, and could not be touched in his individuality, by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. The Luke Gospel intimates this again by tracing the sequence of generations back through Adam to God, thus indicating that the substance in question was uninfluenced by all that had taken place in human evolution.

So this Jesus-child lived on, increasing in all that was possible for a three-fold organism not touched by the contamination which has affected the three-fold bodies of other men. And this enabled the individuality of Zarathustra, from the twelfth to the thirtieth year of life, to pour into this three-fold human being all that could come from the heights to which he himself had previously attained. Hence we form a correct idea of Jesus of Nazareth, up to the thirtieth year of his life, when we think of him as a lofty human individuality, for whose coming into existence the greatest possible preparations had been made.

But we must now be clear about one thing if we want to understand how the fruits of a development we go through in our bodies are of benefit to the individuality. Our bodies enable our individuality to absorb the fruits of our life for its future evolution. When in death we forsake our bodies, we do not usually leave in them what we have achieved and gained for ourselves as individuals. Later on we shall see under what special conditions something may remain in the bodies; but it is not the rule that the individuality should leave behind in his bodies whatever he has won for himself. When Zarathustra forsook the threefold bodily being of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year, he left behind the three bodies, physical, etheric, and astral. But all that he had been able to gain through these instruments went into the individuality of Zarathustra and lived on further with him, to his benefit. Something however, was gained by the three-fold bodily organism of Jesus of Nazareth. His human nature, still free, as it always had been, from Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, was conjoined for a period with the individuality who had unequalled insight into the spirituality of the cosmos.

Think what this Zarathustra had experienced! While he was founding the ancient Persian civilisation and looking up to the great Sun Spirit, he was even then gazing out into the cosmic realms of the spiritual. Through successive incarnations his development went on. When the innermost part of human nature, together with the most intensive powers of sympathy and love, had become manifest through the unsullied human substance which had been preserved until the birth of the Nathan Jesus, and when the astral body had permeated itself with the forces of Gautama Buddha, there was present in this child what we may call the most intimate inwardness of man. And then into this bodily nature there entered the individuality who above all others had seen most clearly and deeply into the spirituality of the Macrocosm. By this means the bodily instrument, the entire organism, of the Nathan Jesus was so transformed that it could be the vehicle capable of receiving into itself the Christ-extract of the Macrocosm. If this bodily nature had not been permeated by the Zarathustra-individuality up to the thirtieth year, the eyes would not have been able to endure the substance of the Christ from the thirtieth year up to the Mystery of Golgotha; the hands would not have been capable of being permeated with the substance of the Christ in the thirtieth year. To be able to receive the Christ, this bodily nature had to be prepared, expanded, through the individuality of Zarathustra. Thus in Jesus of Nazareth, as he was at the moment when Zarathustra took leave of him and the Christ-Individuality entered into him, we have to do neither with an adept, nor with anything like a higher human being. For an adept is an adept because he has a highly developed individuality, and it was just this that had passed out of the threefold bodily nature of Jesus of Nazareth. We have simply the bodily nature so prepared through the indwelling of Zarathustra that it could take into itself the Christ-Individuality. But now, through the union of the Christ-Individuality with this bodily nature, by necessity the following consequence came about.

During these three years, from the Baptism by John in Jordan onwards to the Mystery of Golgotha, the development of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body was quite different from the bodily development of other human beings. Since the Nathan Jesus had received no influence from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, the possibility was given that, from the Baptism in Jordan onwards—now that there was in Jesus of Nazareth no human Ego, but solely the Christ Individuality—everything which is normally at work in a human organism was not developed.

We said yesterday that the human Phantom, the primal form which draws into itself the material elements that fill out the physical body and are laid aside at death, had degenerated in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the beginning of human evolution it was intended that the Phantom should remain untouched by the material elements that man takes for his nutrition from the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But it did not remain untouched. For the Luciferic influence brought about a close connection between the Phantom and the forces which man absorbs through his earthly evolution; a connection particularly with the ashy constituents. The result was that the Phantom, while continuing to accompany man during his further evolution, was strongly drawn to these ashy constituents, and instead of adhering to the etheric body, it attached itself to these products of disintegration. But where the Luciferic influences had been kept away, as they were from the Nathan Jesus, no force of attraction arose between the Phantom and the material elements that had been taken into the bodily organism. Throughout the three years from the Baptism up to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Phantom remained untouched by these elements.

In occult terms we can say: The human Phantom, according to its intended development through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, should not have been attracted to the ashy constituents but only to the dissolving salt constituents, so that it would have taken the path of volatilisation in so far as the salt constituents dissolved. In an occult sense one can say that it would have dissolved and passed over, not into the earth but into the volatile constituents. The remarkable fact is that with the Baptism in Jordan and the entry of the Christ Individuality into the body of the Nathan Jesus, all connection of the Phantom with the ashy constituents was wiped out; only the connection with the salt constituents remained.

This is alluded to in the passage where Christ Jesus wishes to explain to his first-chosen disciples: ‘Through the way in which you feel yourselves united with the Christ Being, a certain possibility for the future evolution of humanity will come about. It will be possible for the one body risen from the grave—the spiritual body—to pass over into men’. That is what Christ wished to say when he used the phrase, ‘You are the salt of the earth’. All these words we find in the Gospels, reminding us of the terminology and craft language of the later alchemists, the later occultism, have the deepest imaginable significance. And in fact this significance was well known to the mediaeval and later alchemists—not to the charlatans mentioned in the history books—and not one of them spoke of these connections without feeling in his heart a connection with Christ.

Thus it followed that when Christ Jesus was crucified, when his body was nailed to the Cross—you will notice that here I use the exact words of the Gospel, for they are con-firmed by true occult research—when this body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the Cross, the Phantom was perfectly intact; it existed in a spiritual bodily form, visible only to super-sensible sight, and was much more loosely connected with the body's material content of earth-elements than has ever happened with any other human being. In every other human being a connection of the Phantom with these elements has occurred, and it is this that holds them together. In the case of Christ Jesus it was quite different. The ordinary law of inertia sees to it that certain material portions of a human body hold together after death in the form man has given them, until after some time they crumble away, so that hardly anything of them is visible. So it was with the material portions of the body of Christ Jesus. When the body was taken down from the Cross, the parts were still coherent, but they had no connection with the Phantom; the Phantom was completely free of them. When the body became permeated with certain substances, which in this case worked quite differently from the way in which they affect any other body that is embalmed, it came to pass that after the burial the material parts quickly volatilised and passed over into the elements. Hence the disciples who looked into the grave found the linen cloths in which the body had been wrapped, but the Phantom, on which the evolution of the Ego depends, had risen from the grave. It is not surprising that Mary of Magdala, who had known only the earlier Phantom when it was permeated by earthly elements, did not recognise the same form in the Phantom, now freed from terrestrial gravity, when she saw it clairvoyantly. It seemed to her different.

Moreover we must clearly understand that it was only through the power of the companionship of the disciples with the Christ that all the disciples, and all those persons of whom the same is told, could see the Risen One, for He appeared to them in the spiritual body, the body of which Paul says that it increases as a grain of seed and passes over into all people. Paul himself is convinced that it was not a body permeated by the earthly elements which had appeared to the other apostles, but that the same which had appeared to him had also appeared to them, as he says in the following passage:

For I have delivered unto you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (I Corinthians XV:3–8.)

But what was it that convinced Paul? In a certain sense Paul was an Initiate before the Event of Damascus. His Initiation had combined the ancient Hebrew principle and the Greek principle. He knew that an Initiate became, in his etheric body, independent of the physical body, and could appear in the purest form of his etheric body to those who were capable of seeing it. If Paul had had the vision of a pure etheric body, independent of a physical body, he would have spoken differently. He would have said that he had seen someone who had been initiated and would be living on further in the course of earth-evolution, independently of the physical body. He would not have found this particularly surprising. What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus could not have been that. He had experienced something which he knew could be experienced only when the Scriptures were fulfilled; when a perfect human Phantom, a human body risen from the grave in a super-sensible form, would appear in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. And that is what he saw! That is what appeared to him on the road to Damascus and left him with the conviction: ‘He was there—He is risen! For what is there could come only from Him: it is the Phantom which can be seen by all human individualities who seek to relate themselves to the Christ.’ This is what convinced him that Christ was already there; that he would not come first in the future, but was actually present there in a physical body, and that this physical body had rescued the primal form of the human physical body for the salvation of all men.

That this deed could be accomplished only through the greatest unfolding of divine love, and in what sense it was an act of love, and then in what sense the word ‘salvation’ is to be understood in the further evolution of humanity—this will be our subject tomorrow.

The rulership of Michael in its cosmic, spiritual aspect shows us, as you will have gathered from what I have already told you, that he occupies a special position among those spiritual Beings whom we call the Archangeloi. And precisely because of its bearing upon the central theme of these lectures, we shall appreciate the significance of the fact that in the centuries preceding the founding of Christianity, Michael sent his impulses—his ‘cosmopolitan’ impulses—from the Sun to the Earth. As time went on, these cosmopolitan impulses disappeared: the Cosmic Intelligence fell away from Michael and by the eighth century A.D. had arrived on Earth. In earthly evolution we then find men whose thoughts were produced out of themselves, who are, as it were, ‘self-made’ thinkers. This personal, self-engendered thinking was then cultivated in preparation for the next reign of Michael. As we have seen, the wise Masters of the School of Chartres worked in unison towards this end with those souls who had been connected with the previous reign of Michael and who were predestined to develop the once cosmic but now earthly Intelligence. They were predestined to carry their work on into the nineteenth century when—at first in the spiritual world—it became possible, through the Imaginative Cult I have described to you, to prepare for what the Anthroposophical Movement was intended to achieve.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century we have been living in the initial stage of the new reign of Michael; throughout this time, and above all in our own day, preparation has to be made for what must come to pass in the twentieth century. For before the end of this present century a considerable number of human beings who have unfolded real understanding of Anthroposophy will have passed through a briefer period between death and rebirth than is usual and will again be united on the Earth under the leadership of those who were the Masters of Chartres and with those who have remained in direct connection with the sovereignty of Michael. This will take place in order that under the spiritual guidance of these two groups of beings the final, hallowed impulse may be given for the development of the spiritual life on Earth.

Anthroposophy can only be of real significance for those who want to ally themselves with it, when with a certain inner, reverent fervour they become conscious that they may indeed have their place within a sphere of happenings like those described yesterday. This realisation will not only kindle inner enthusiasm but also be a source of strength, giving us the knowledge that it is our task to be the continuers of what was once alive in the ancient Mysteries.

But this consciousness must be, and indeed can be, deepened in every direction. For in the light of what was said yesterday, we look back to the time when, united with a host of super-earthly Beings in the spiritual realm of the Sun, Michael sent down upon Earth those impulses and signs which inspired the deeds of Alexander on the one side and the Aristotelian philosophy on the other. Out of these impulses arose the last phase of the inspired Intelligence on Earth. Then, together with human souls who on his behalf carried out this work on Earth, together with his spiritual hosts and the hosts of human souls around these leading spirits, Michael witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from his abode on the Sun. Truly our souls may be stirred by picturing that moment when Michael, together with a host of Angeloi, Archangeloi and human souls, witnessed the Christ departing from the Sun in order to enter the bodily sheaths of a man and, through what He could experience in a human body on Earth, to unite Himself with the further evolution of humanity. But for Michael himself this was at the same time the sign that henceforward he must allow the heavenly Intelligence, hitherto in his keeping, to stream down like holy rain upon the Earth, to fall away gradually from the Sun. And when the ninth century of the Christian era had come, those around Michael perceived: The content of what had been guarded hitherto under Michael, is now down below, upon the Earth.

What mattered now was that in complete harmony with the sovereignty of Michael there should arise all that came into the world through the Masters of Chartres and also through certain chosen souls in the Order of the Dominicans. In short, there came about the phase of evolution which from the beginning of the fifteenth century inaugurated the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—it is the phase of evolution in which we ourselves are living. Approximately in the first third of the preceding epoch, that is to say during the first third of the epoch of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, as an outcome of Alexandrianism, the super-earthly Intelligence had spread in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. Following upon this, came the time when Michael, the foremost Archangel-Spirit of the Sun, knew that the Cosmic Intelligence was passing away from this realm, away from his administration: the conditions were now established for the development of the Intelligence on the Earth. A further phase of development on Earth began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era, when Gabriel became the administrator—as I explained in my previous lecture—while Michael was free from his earlier obligations in the Cosmos.

Michael was now in an unusual position. In other circumstances, when an Archangelos is not himself the ruling Spirit in the affairs of Earth, he lets his impulses pour, nevertheless, into what the other Archangeloi are bringing to pass. The impulses from all the seven consecutive Archangelic rulerships flow in continually—it is simply that one rulership predominates in a particular age. When, for example, in earlier epochs of evolution, Gabriel was the leading Spirit, it was paramountly those impulses of which he was the actual ruler that flowed into earthly evolution; but the other Archangeloi were also at work. Now, however, when Gabriel was exercising his dominion, Michael was in the unusual position of being unable to participate from the Sun in the affairs of the Earth. Truly it is a strange position for a ruling Archangelos to perceive that the activity he has been wielding through long ages has, for the time being, come to an end. And so it was that Michael said to those who belonged to him: For the time during which we cannot send impulses to the Earth (it is the period which ended about the year 1879) we must set about a special task, a task within the realm of the Sun. It was to be possible for those souls who have been led by their karma into the Anthroposophical Movement, to behold in the realm of the Sun the deeds performed by Michael and his hosts while Gabriel was holding sway upon the Earth.

This was detached from the otherwise regular sequence of deeds taking place between gods and men. The souls connected with Michael—the leading souls of Alexander's time, the leading Dominicans with those of less eminence who had gathered around them, and a large number of aspiring human souls in association with the leading spirits—these souls felt torn away from the age-long connection with the spiritual world. There, in super-sensible worlds, those human souls predestined to become Anthroposophists experienced something never previously experienced by human souls between death and rebirth in the super-earthly realm. In earlier times during the period between death and a new birth, the karma for the future earthly existence had been elaborated by human souls in connection with leading spiritual Beings. But no karma had ever previously been elaborated in the same way as was the karma of those predestined to become Anthroposophists. Never before in the realm of the Sun between death and rebirth had there been accomplished such work as was possible under the leadership of Michael when, as was now the case, he was free of the concerns of the Earth.

Something came to pass in the super-sensible worlds. It was something that lies implanted deep down in the hearts of the majority of Anthroposophists to-day, although in the unconscious, wrapt in sleep or dream. And the Anthroposophist speaks truly when he says to himself: Within my heart there lies a secret although I am yet unconscious of it. It is a secret mystery wherein are reflected the deeds of Michael in realms beyond the Earth when, before my present incarnation, I was serving him. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michael, being free of his wonted tasks, was enabled to work in a special way, and I was working under him.

Michael gathered his hosts, he gathered from the realms of the Angeloi and the Archangeloi the super-sensible Beings who belonged to him, but he gathered, too, human souls who in one way or another had been connected with him. And thus there arose a kind of School—a great and ever-widening super-sensible School. In the same way that a kind of heavenly Conference had taken place at the beginning of the thirteenth century between those who worked together as Platonists and Aristotelians, a super-sensible tuition now took place, from the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries, under the direct leadership of Michael—a super-sensible schooling in which the great Teacher, ordained by cosmic decree, was Michael himself. Thus, before the super-sensible cult that took its course during the first half of the nineteenth century in mighty Imaginations, as I have told you, numbers of human souls had already received a super-sensible schooling whose results they now carry subconsciously within them. These results come to expression in the urge felt by such people to come to Anthroposophy. The urge that brings them to Anthroposophy is indeed the outcome of this schooling. And it can truly be said: At the end of the fifteenth century, Michael gathered his hosts of gods and of human souls in the realm of the Sun and gave them teaching which extended over long periods of time. This teaching was to somewhat the following effect.—

Since the human race has peopled the Earth in human form, Mysteries have existed upon the Earth: Sun Mysteries, Mercury Mysteries, Venus Mysteries, Mars Mysteries, Jupiter Mysteries, Saturn Mysteries. Into these Mysteries the gods poured their secrets; in these Mysteries men were initiated when they were fit for Initiation. Thus it has been possible for the human being on the Earth to know what proceeds on Saturn, on Jupiter, on Mars and so forth, to know, too, how happenings in these spheres work into the evolution of mankind on Earth. Always there have been Initiates who, in the Mysteries, communed with the Gods. With an old, instinctive clairvoyance, these Initiates received the impulses coming to them in the Mysteries. But even meagre traditions (thus spoke Michael to those who belonged to him) even meagre traditions of this have almost vanished from the Earth. The impulses can no longer stream into the Earth. It is only in the lowest-lying region—that of physical procreation—it is there and there alone that Gabriel still has the power to let the Moon-influences flow into the evolution of humanity. The ancient traditions have almost disappeared from the Earth and therewith the possibility to nurture and cultivate the impulses streaming into the subconscious life and into the differently constituted bodily natures of men. We, however, turn our gaze back to all that once was brought in the Mysteries as a gift of the Heavens to men; we survey this wonderful tableau. And also we look downwards across the flow of the ages. And there we find the places of the Mysteries, we see how the heavenly wisdom streamed into these Mysteries, how men were initiated, how from our hallowed realm in the Sun the Cosmic Intelligence poured down to men in such a way that the great Teachers of humanity received truly spiritual ideas, thoughts, concepts. These ideas and thoughts were inspired into them from our hallowed realm in the Sun. These inspirations have vanished from the Earth. We see them only when we look back into epochs of antiquity ... stage by stage we see them disappearing from earthly evolution during the time of Alexander and its aftermath—and down there below we see the Intelligence that has now become earthly, spreading gradually among men. But the vista has remained with us. We yet behold the secrets that were once divulged to the Initiates of the Mysteries. Let us bring this fully into our consciousness! Let us bring it to the consciousness of those spiritual Beings who are around me, those Beings who never appear in earthly bodies but have their existence only in an etheric form. But let us bring it, too, to those souls who have often lived on Earth in physical bodies, those who are actually there now, and who belong to the Michael community—let us bring it to the consciousness of these human souls. We will image forth the great Initiation-teaching which once streamed down in the ancient fashion, through the Mysteries, to the Earth. We will present this to the souls of those who in their life of Intelligence were linked with Michael.—

And then—if I may use an earthly, and in such a context an almost trivial expression—then the ancient Initiation-Wisdom was “worked through.” In a great and comprehensive heavenly School, Michael taught the contents of what he was now no longer able to administer himself. It was an overwhelming deed—something that in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries and on into the eighteenth, caused such profound disquiet and alarm to the Ahrimanic demons on Earth that a remarkable thing happened. Between heavenly deeds and earthly deeds at this time polaric contrast was established. In the heights, in the spiritual world, there was this sublime School, gathering together the old Initiate-Wisdom in a new form, calling up into the Intelligence-filled consciousness, into the Consciousness Soul of predestined human beings between death and rebirth, what in earlier times had been man's treasury of wisdom in the Intellectual Soul, the Sentient Soul, and so forth. In inner words, seeming stern in many respects when they were uttered, Michael placed before those who belonged to him the picture of cosmic relationships, the anthroposophical relationships. These souls received teaching which unveiled the secrets of worlds. Below, on the Earth, the Ahrimanic spirits were at work.—And here it is necessary to point without reserve to a secret. Outwardly regarded it will seem unacceptable in face of modern culture, but it is nevertheless a divine secret and one of which Anthroposophists must be cognisant in order to be able to lead civilisation in the right way to the end of the twentieth century.

While Michael above was teaching his hosts, there was founded in the realm lying immediately below the surface of the Earth, a kind of sub-earthly, Ahrimanic school. The Michael School was in the super-earthly world; in the region beneath our feet—for the spiritual is actively at work in the sub-earthly region also—the opposing Ahrimanic school was founded. And in that particular period, when no impulses were streaming down from Michael bringing heavenly inspiration to the Intelligence, when the Intelligence on the Earth was, for the time being, left to itself, the Ahrimanic hosts strove all the harder to send their impulses up from below into the development of the Intelligence in mankind. It is a truly overwhelming picture. The Earth's surface—Michael above, teaching his hosts, revealing to them in mighty, cosmic language the ancient Initiate-Wisdom, and below, the Ahrimanic school in the sub-strata of the Earth. Upon the Earth, the Intelligence that has fallen from the Heavens is unfolding. For the time being, Michael holds his School in heavenly isolation from the earthly world—no impulses stream down from above—and there below are the Ahrimanic powers, sending up their impulses with all the greater strength.

There have always been souls incarnated on the Earth who were aware of this sinister situation. Anyone conversant with the spiritual history of this epoch, especially the spiritual history of Europe, will everywhere find evidence of the fact that there were individuals here and there—often quite simple men—who had an inkling of this sinister situation: abandonment of humanity by the Michael rulership, and impulses rising from below like demonic vapours, striving to conquer the Intelligence.

It is remarkable how closely the revelations of wisdom are bound up with the human being, if all that springs from such revelations is to be beneficial. This is the secret which must here be touched upon.—A human being whose task it is to proclaim the Michael wisdom feels that in a certain respect he is following the right course when he tries to put into words, when he wrestles to find the terminology to express, what is, in very truth, the wisdom of Michael. Such a one feels, too, that he is further justified when with his own hand he writes down this wisdom; for then the flow of the spiritual is directly connected with him and streams, as it were, into the forms of what he is writing, into what he is doing. Thus he willingly communicates this wisdom to others in the form of reading material when it is written down by him in his own hand. But when through mechanical means, through the medium of the printed book, he sees his work duplicated, he has a feeling of uneasiness. This has to be endured, for the method is in keeping with our age. Nevertheless, the feeling of uneasiness is never absent from one who stands within the life of the Spirit together with what he has to proclaim.

In connection with the lecture yesterday, somebody has asked me whether, as Swedenborg has hinted, the letter (Buchstabe) is not, after all, the ‘last outflow’ of the spiritual life. That indeed is so! It is the last outflow of the spiritual life so long as it flows through a man in a continuous stream from the Spirit. But when it is fixed by mechanical means as it were from the other pole, when it comes before the eyes of men as printed letters, it becomes an Ahrimanic spiritual power. For, strange to say, it is that Ahrimanic school which worked in opposition to the School of Michael in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it is that Ahrimanic school which brought the art of printing, with all its consequences, to Europe. Printing can be the soil from which demonic powers, well adapted to combat the rulership of Michael, may spring.

An Anthroposophist must be able to perceive the significance and meaning of realities in life; he must recognise that printing is a spiritual power but precisely that spiritual power which Ahriman has placed in opposition to Michael. Therefore to those who in his School at that time were being taught by him, Michael constantly gave this warning: When you descend again to the Earth in order to give effect to what has here been prepared, gather men around you, make known the essentials by word of mouth, and do not regard the ‘literary’ effects produced in the world through the printed book as of foremost importance.—Hence the more intimate method of working from man to man is more truly in accord with Michael's way. If, instead of working merely through books, we meet together with one another, letting the impulses flow into us in the sphere of the human and the personal, and only then using the books as aids to memory, shall we be able to inaugurate the stream that—imponderably at first—is destined to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. It is inevitable that we should make use of books for we must also become masters of this art of Ahriman's—otherwise we should be delivered into his hands. We must be able to reckon truly with the Ahrimanic spirit of the times, otherwise tremendous power would be given to him. Thus it is not a matter of merely ousting the printed book but of bringing it into relationship with what works in a directly human way. So it would not be right, as a result of what I have just put before you, to say: ‘Away with all the anthroposophical books!’ Thereby we should be delivering up the art of printing to the most powerful enemies of the Michael wisdom; we should be making it impossible for our anthroposophical work to thrive, as thrive it must, until the end of the century is reached. What we must do is to ennoble the art of printing through our reverence for the Michael wisdom. For what is it that by way of the art of printing Ahriman is intent upon achieving in opposition to Michael? Ahriman is intent upon conquest of the Intelligence. There is evidence of it everywhere to-day. Conquest of the Intelligence, which asserts itself wherever conditions are favourable. And when do we find the Ahrimanic spirits most potent in their attacks against the coming age of Michael? We find them at those times when a diminution or lowering of the consciousness takes place in human beings. These Ahrimanic spirits then take possession of human consciousness, they entrench themselves within it. For instance, in the year 1914, many individuals in a lowered state of consciousness became entangled in events which led to the outbreak of the terrible World War. And within the lowered consciousness of such men the hosts of Ahriman promoted the World War—promoted it by way of human beings. The real causes of that War will never be brought to light by documents contained in archives. No, one must rather look deeply into history and perceive that there, at some particular point, stood an influential personality, at this point another, and there again another—and these men were in a lowered state of consciousness. That was the opportunity for Ahriman to take possession of them. And if you want to realise how easy it is in our age for men to be possessed by Ahriman, you need think only of this example.

What happened, when, with the printed volumes they had brought with them, the Europeans arrived in North America in times when Indians were still to be found in the eastern part of the land? When the Indians saw these volumes with their strange characters of script they took the letters to be little demons. They had the right perception for these things. They were terribly frightened when they looked at all these little demonic entities—a, b, and the rest, as they appear in print. For these letters, reproduced in such a different way, do contain something that fascinates, something that casts a spell over the modern mind; and only the good outlook of Michael, with eyes open to the human element in the proclamation of wisdom, can lead men beyond the danger of this lure. But evil things may happen in this domain.

At this point let me say the following.—There are certain secrets connected with the vision of world-existence which cannot be penetrated before a somewhat advanced age in life. Each particular period of life enables one who possesses Initiation-science to behold the individual secrets of existence. Thus between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life—not before—such a man is able to gaze into the Sun-existence; between the forty-second and forty-ninth years into the Mars secrets; between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years into the Jupiter secrets. But to behold the secrets of worlds in their interconnections, one must have passed the age of sixty-three.¹ Therefore before I myself was in this position, I should not have been able to speak of certain things of which I now speak without any reserve. Before the vision can penetrate into anything related to the Michael Mysteries, to the influences working from the spiritual realm of the Sun, one must look upwards from the Earth through the Saturn existence into the secrets of worlds. One must be able to experience, to live within that twilight of the spiritual world which proceeds from the ruler of Saturn, from Oriphiel, who was the leading Archangelos at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and who will again assume the leadership when the Michael Age has run its course.

To such vision, however, shattering, overwhelming truths connected with the present age are revealed. As we have seen, the art of printing spread over the Earth through the Ahrimanic school working in opposition to the School of Michael, and because of this, ‘authorship’ on a wide scale has arisen on the Earth. Who, then, were ‘authors’ in earlier times, before printing was in existence? They were men whose writings could be known only in the narrowest circles, in circles, moreover, that were properly prepared. Into how many hands did a book find its way before printing was in use? Think of the following, and you will be able to judge how things were. A kind of substitute for the later art of printing was already in existence in ancient Chinese civilisation and had reached a high level of perfection. A kind of printing art had been established there—also in an Age when Michael was ruling above; and when below there was an Ahrimanic anti-rulership. But nothing very much came of it. In those times the power of Ahriman was not yet so powerful and he was still unable to make really effective attempts to wrest from Michael the rulership of the Intelligence. The attempt was renewed in the time of Alexander but then again was unsuccessful.

Ahriman's influence in the printing art of the modern age, however, has assumed deep significance. Authorship has, so to speak, been popularised. And something has become possible, something that is as great in a wonderful, brilliant, dazzling way as, on the other hand, the necessity is great to receive it in absolute equableness of soul and to estimate it according to its true significance. First attempts have been made, attempts which from Michael's realm may be characterised by saying: Ahriman has appeared as an author. For Michael and his circle, this is a deeply significant happening to-day. Ahriman as an author! Not only have men been possessed by him as I indicated in the case of the outbreak of the War, but in that he manifested on Earth through human souls, he himself appeared as an author. That he is a most brilliant author need be no cause for astonishment; for Ahriman is a mighty, all-embracing spirit. True, he is not by nature fitted to promote the evolution of mankind on the Earth according to the intentions of the good gods; he opposes it. Nevertheless in his own sphere he is not only a thoroughly useful but a beneficent power—for beings who on one level of world-happenings are benefactors are exceedingly harmful on another. It need not be assumed, therefore, that in characterising the works of Ahriman they must come in for unqualified rebuke. Provided one is conscious of what they are, one can even admire them. But the Ahrimanic character must be recognised!

Michael teaches how recognition can be made to-day if men are willing to listen to him. For the Michael schooling has worked on and still to-day it is possible for men to draw near it. Then it teaches how Ahriman himself as an author has made attempts—first attempts of a deeply shattering, deeply tragic character—working, of course, through a human being. Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, his Ecce Homo, his autobiography, and the annotations in The Will to Power—those most brilliant chapters of modern authorship with their often devilish content—Ahriman was their writer, exercising his sovereignty over that which in letters on the Earth can be made subject to his dominion through the art of printing! Ahriman has already begun to appear as an author and his work will continue. On Earth in the future alertness will be necessary in order that not all the productions of authorship shall be deemed of the same calibre. Works written by men will appear, but some individuals at least must be aware that a Being is training himself to become one of the most brilliant authors in the immediate future: that Being is Ahriman! Human hands will write the works, but Ahriman will be the author. As once the Evangelists of old were inspired by super-sensible Beings and wrote down their works through this inspiration, so will the works of Ahriman be penned by men.

The further history of the evolution of humanity will present itself in two aspects. Endeavours must be made to propagate in the earthly realm—to the greatest extent possible—what was once taught by Michael in super-sensible Schools to souls predestined to receive it; endeavours must be made in the Anthroposophical Society to be reverently mindful of this knowledge and to impart it to those who will be incarnated in the coming times, until the end of the century has arrived. And then, many of those who for the first time are learning of these things to-day will come down to the Earth again. The time will be short. But meanwhile on Earth much that has been written by Ahriman will appear.

One task of Anthroposophists is this: steadfastly to cultivate the Michael Wisdom, to bring courageous hearts to this Michael Wisdom, and to realise that the first penetration of the earthly Intelligence by the spiritual sword of Michael consists in this sword being wielded by those into whose hearts the Michael wisdom has found its way. And so the picture of Michael in a new form may inspire each single Anthroposophist—Michael standing there within the hearts of men, beneath his feet the production of Ahrimanic authorship. Such a picture need not be painted in that external form in which during the time of the Dominicans the image was often fixed—above, the Dominican Schoolmen with their books, below, crushed under their feet, the heathen wisdom as represented by Averröes, Avicenna and the rest. Wherever it was a matter of portraying the battle waged by Christian Scholasticism against heathendom, these pictures are to be found. But in the spirit there must be this other picture: Devotion to Michael as he enters into the world, laying hold of the Intelligence upon Earth; and—in order that one may not be bedazzled—alertness with regard to the brilliant work of Ahriman as an author through the whole of the twentieth century. Ahriman will write his works in the strangest places—but they will be there indeed—and he is preparing pupils for his purposes. Even in our day, much in the subconscious is being schooled in such a way that souls will be able to incarnate again quickly and become instruments for Ahriman as an author. He will write in all domains: in philosophy, in poetry, in the sphere of the drama and the epic; in medicine, law, sociology. Ahriman will write in all these domains!

This will be the situation into which mankind will be led when the end of the century is reached. And those who are still young to-day will witness many samples of how Ahriman appears as an author. In every sphere watchfulness will be needed—and reverent enthusiasm for the Michael Wisdom.

If we can permeate ourselves with these things, if we can feel ourselves standing within the spiritual life in the sense of the indications here given, then, my dear friends, we shall place ourselves as true Anthroposophists into the civilisation of the present time. Then, maybe, we shall realise more and more deeply that a new Impulse is going out from the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum, that in truth only now are there being presented to the Anthroposophical Society things whereby this Society can see itself as it were in a great cosmic mirror—in which the individual, too, together with the karma which leads him into the Anthroposophical Society, can see himself reflected.

That is what I wanted to lay on your hearts in these lectures. For it is to hearts that the words are chiefly spoken. The hearts of men must become the helpers of Michael in the conquering of the Intelligence that has fallen to the Earth. Just as once the old Serpent was destined to be crushed by Michael, so must the Intelligence that has now become the Serpent be conquered by Michael, be spiritualised by Michael. And whenever the Serpent appears in its unspiritualised state, made Ahrimanic, it must be recognised through the vigilance, the alertness which belongs to the anthroposophical spirit and is developed through the Michael-like tenor of soul.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Lecture 6. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)